October 28, 2010 09:54 PM UTC

Why won't our Republican AG prevent our Republican Board of Education from breaking the law?

• 4 Comments
• by: DaftPunk

Susan Greene, opinion/lifestyle columnist in The Major Metro Daily has a column today which breaks an important story which is going unreported anywhere else.

The state’s Republican majority Board of Education has applied for an “abstinence only” sex education grant from the federal government.  HB1292 passed in 2007

Requires school districts, family resource centers, and teen pregnancy prevention programs that offer instruction regarding human sexuality to adopt science-based content standards for such instruction.

The Board of Ed received approval for their application from Republican Attorney General John Suthers after the government questioned the board’s authority to make the application instead of the Executive branch.

Critics of Governor Bill Ritter on issues of women’s reproductive freedom should know that he has been a proponent of comprehensive sex education as a method to reduce the state’s teen pregnancy rate.  His election helped Colorado step into the national controversy around the teaching of “abstinence only” sex education.  With elections of Democratic majorities in the General Assembly, and Ritter’s assumption of the Governor’s office in the election of 2006, HB 1292 was passed in 2007 forbidding “abstinence only” sex education in Colorado with the exception of one district which was grandfathered in.

The Abstinence Only movement gained a foothold in the 1996 Welfare Reform package signed by Bill Clinton.  It required that any Sex Ed which received federal funding must only discuss abstinence for prevention of pregnancy.  Contraception could be discussed only if provoked by a student inquiry, and then, only to discuss its failure rates.  It contained such controversial tenets as:

A mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity

Sexual activity outside the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects

During the Bush administration 1.5 Billion dollars were spent on abstinence only programs, which multiple studies have shown to be ineffective.

One of the missions of the “reality based” community on human sexuality was to promote sex ed policies which empowered youth with full information, instead of religiously motivated fear.  In Colorado this took the form of HB1292 which required that any instruction in Sex Ed be science based.  It should be noted that comprehensive sex ed still teaches that the only certain way to prevent pregnancy or STDs is abstinence, but it also instructs students who are sexually active in methods which can reduce those risks.

With the Election of president Obama and Democratic majorities in both houses, the death of abstinence only education was at hand.  In an attempt to compromise with Republicans, a small stream of Abstinence Only money was put in the Health Care Reform package.

Greene, who was a news reporter prior to taking Diane Carmen’s chair as the front page metro columnist, is the only one reporting this assault on HB1292 by the Board of Ed.  WAIT, a religious abstince organization linked to anti-gay activists took the liberty of filling out an application for the state.  When the federal government questioned the board’s ability to make the request, it was approved by Attorney General John Suthers.

What’s not clear if he was making a constitutional call on whether only the executive branch has the authority to make application on behalf of the state’s schools, or if he was evaluating the legality of such instruction vis a vis HB1292.  He’s certainly aiding and abetting the state Board of Ed. in breaking Colorado statute.

Will we see follow-up pieces from Greene, or reporting by the paper’s news department, or other outlets?

This seems to be an assault on our republican form of government.