Abstinence only education in Texas, more unhinged homophobia and ways to bond with your father other than promising him your hymen. Also interviews with researcher Elizabeth Miller about partner violence and coercing pregnancy.

Links in this episode:
Jill Sobule does Halloween
God doesn't hate fags
Congress authorizes abstinence-only spending
Texas is #1!
Family Violence Prevention Fund
The Education of Shelby Knox
Purity balls are so fun?
Max Blumenthal takes on Values Voters
AIDS and African-American women

Transcript:

This week, I'll be talking about abstinence-only education and my home state of Texas, more unhinged homophobia, and other ways to bond with your father other than promising him your hymen. Also, an interview with researcher Elizabeth Miller about partner violence and coercing pregnancy.

Okay, Halloween was a couple of weeks ago, I know, but I'm still really amused by both the trend of women wearing slutty costumes and the trend of people wringing their hands about it. Also, I heard this song by Jill Sobule that I should say is the final word on the matter.

*insert slut-o-ween*

Ours is a strange time. More and more opportunities for women to get naked in public, but increasing restrictions to make it hard to do so in private.

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The hypocrites are flying down the tube so fast now it's hard to keep up with them. Another conservative politician, this time state representative Richard Curtis, who has voted for anti-gay legislation, was outed for paying male prostitutes for their services. Dan Abrams of MSNBC had an interview with one of the prostitutes, Cody Castagna.

This story is funnier than most, and it has nothing to do with the stockings or the stethoscope, as you'll see from the interview.

*insert interview Richard curtis*

I had a friend who worked for the police department once and she told me their favorite calls were people who'd call in and complain that someone stole their weed. I am reminded of that now.

In other news on the unhinged homophobia front, it looks like the extreme hate-mongerer Fred Phelps, who has a so-called religious website called God Hates Fags, has finally come into some consequences for his hateful behavior. It's kind of a convulted story, but the basic idea is this: Phelps is singularly obsessed with homosexuality and teaches in his church that America is evil because we have gay men within our borders. In order to spread the word about how evil both gay men and America is, Phelps has taken to picketing the funerals of dead soldiers with signs suggesting that these soldiers were killed by god to punish the country for having gay people in it. No, I'm not kidding. He's a truly terrible man, and I'm amazed he has followers, though I shouldn't be.

Anyway, Albert Snyder of York, Pennsylvania sued and won $11 million against Phelps and his church after they picketed the funeral of Matthew Snyder, who died in Iraq. CNN's Rick Sanchez tried to talk to Phelps after the verdict. As you can imagine, it went poorly.

*insert phelps interview*

If Sanchez seems hot under the collar, it's because the signs say things like the soldiers are burning in hell and that god gets pleasure out of killing to punish homosexuality. Let's hope that this settlement deprives Phelps and his church of so much money that they can't afford to drive around spreading their hate any longer.

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Seriously bad news last week—Congress authorized the abstinence-only boondoggle that President Bush wanted, even though they know that it's sexist drivel that puts kids in very real danger. Around the same time, in a darkly funny coincidence, the news came out that not only does the state of Texas lead the nation in teenage births, we also lead the nation in repeat teenage births. That is, one out of four teenage mothers in our state will have at least two children before she comes out of her teen years.

We're number 1!

*insert yee-haw*

What is this a fortuitous coincidence? Well, it just so happens that Texas is basically the ground zero of this abstinence-only nonsense. Not just the "just say no" philosophy, since that's been around and failing forever. But the whole boondoggle came out of Texas along with our former governor George W. Bush.

To be fair, Texans have always had a serious problem with sex. I went to high school at what you might call our most progressive time in recent history. Our then-governor Ann Richards was, after all, the mother of the now-president of Planned Parenthood. And the AIDS crisis had really come home to privileged straight people, so it seemed more important than ever to push the message about using condoms. But despite all this, my sex ed was pretty weak. We had a couple of weeks in the 7^th grade where we mostly talked about periods and what intercourse was, but the most I remember about contraception was my teacher telling us that if you are on the pill, you have to take it every day and not just when you're going to have sex. In high school health, we had a section on how to brush your teeth, as if 10^th graders don't know, but nothing about sex. One teacher of mine, in desperation, took some time out of her completely unrelated course to show us a video on HIV that had explicit instructions on how to use a condom. I suspect she had information that AIDS had come to our town and was scared for the young people she saw every day.

But that was it. After that, an even more conservative era came in and took hold, and with it came abstinence-only education. The results of all this ignorance and unwillingness to communicate are pretty hard to look away from, but look away Congress did and helped spread the Texas scourge across the U.S.

The best ever take on the problems in Texas is the movie "The Education of Shelby Knox". It's a documentary about a teenage girl in Lubbock, TX who takes on the abstinence establishment and pushes for comprehensive sex ed, because she's too smart to ignore the obvious, which is Lubbock's high STD and teenage pregnancy rates.

What I liked about the movie is it really captures the way things are in Texas, where you're getting pious messages about keeping your legs shut in school and in church, but the kids are openly and rather unashamedly behaving differently.

*insert Lubbock sex*

Lubbock is a place where appearances are everything, though. It's a dry county, for instance, but right outside the county line there's a row of ginormous liquor stores. Basically, everyone drinks, but there's this official glaze of denial and smug self-satisfaction that doesn't do anything to help anyone. With sex, it's even more insane to be like this, because sex is basic to the human condition in a way that even alcohol isn't.

It's a great movie and really shows how the abstinence-only curricula is a violation of the separation of church and state, because it's all crafted by religious organizations pushing their dogma. In some places, they put a gloss on this to get it by school boards, but in places like Lubbock, the fundamentalists are bold and have run of the place. The movie follows one, pastor Ed Ainsworth, and his misanthropy is on full display. For instance, this is what he thinks of you and basically all people who have a sexuality, which is most everyone.

*insert ed dogs*

Of course, the dog is a noble and kind creature, and I'd far rather look up to a dog as a role model than some Bible-thumping homophobic misogynist any day.

*****************

*insert interview*

***************

Purity balls are getting some positive press. The wingnut line to sell them is that it's a great way for dads and daughters to bond, and everyone is all for it. On the Tyra Banks show about purity balls, you had women praising purity balls as a great way to get daddy to care about you.

*insert tyra purity good*

And from a local NBC affiliate did a positive take on it.

*insert purity good connection*

Sounds all great, right, except there's the EW part, which this woman on Tyra Banks' show gets at even though she's still trying to be all nice and open-minded about it.

*insert father tyra sex life*

Exactly! If you and your dad can't find non-sex-related ways to bond, there's a deeply serious problem there. The entire argument for the purity balls is based around the notion that women only have sex before marriage not because they want to—remember, wingnuts tend to be skeptical that women like sex really—but because daddy didn't love them enough. And so if you can lure daddy's attention with a promise to keep your virginity *for him*, the idea goes, then he'll pay enough attention to his daughter to keep her from going out and losing her virginity. Which belongs to him. Until he gives it away to her husband.

Creeped out yet?

But everyone likes the idea of dads and daughters getting close. But surely there's ways for fathers and daughters to bond over things besides the intimate details of your sex life and the state of your hymen. With that in mind, as a public service, Reality Cast will now present 5 ways to bond with your father without baiting him with your hymen.

Number one: Start wearing a large obnoxious costume around the house. Think: Big Bird. When your dad asks you what you're doing, make him guess. See, you're already having more fun than you would if you were promising daddy your hymen.

Number two: Everyone loves video games, including your dad, even if he doesn't know it yet. What's really great is that if you and your dad need to go slow with the bonding thing, you have that opportunity with video games. You can play online together in separate rooms. You don't even have to use your real names.

Number three: If you need to feel protected by your dad, there's ways to do it without the creepy language about how he's covering you so that other men don't get in with their pokey bits. Join a flag football team with your dad. He can play defense and you can be the quarterback. Problem solved.

Number four: If that doesn't make you feel close enough, I have three magic words for you: Three-legged race.

Number five: If, for some bizarre reason, you need discussion of naughty bits while bonding with your dad, then you need to go to some pro-choice rallies together. Dads who really care about their daughters want those daughters to have full lives and real rights. How better to show that than hit the streets in a real defense of women and their lives?

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Now for the Wisdom of Wingnuts. Max Blumenthal also covered the Values Voters Summit, and as usual with his videos, he is unbelievably funny. So I recommend watching the whole video. But I especially liked Star Parker's little rant. She's talking less like someone making a point and more like someone reading off a bunch of unrelated slogans off a wingnut magic 8 ball.

*insert star parker*

She's lying, of course. The number one killer of African-American women ages 25-34 is AIDS. But of course, she'll never admit that, because then it would follow that if you really want to save the lives of black women, you'd support comprehensive sex education and free condoms for everyone.