Incidentally

So our Miss Julie Sunday, just posted an amazing piece on pregnancy rates in Austin and Texas and the abysmal record of sex education throughout the state. She's right on all counts. Things are terrible.

I'm a parent of two children, both under high school age. I'm filled with trepidation as they approach puberty. Not because I have any fear of talking to them about their bodies, or dealing with the myriad emotions and issues that puberty brings, but because I know they are going to get shit tons of misinformation through the schools and through their peers.

In short, the attitude around kids and sexuality is completely god awful. And so where Miss Sunday will post facts? I will post a rant.

Case in point, when my oldest was first in kindergarten, I got a call from the principal's office. She let me know she was calling to discuss "an incident" that had occurred on the playground. The incident was a simple age appropriate moment between three kids, one of them mine, discussing their body parts and taking a quick peek.

I laughed the laugh of a woman raised in the 70's, quite familiar with "Doctor" and expected a chuckle on the other end of the phone. Surely, the call would end with a warm moment between adults, with the concluding remarks of something like, "I'll have a talk with him tonight." She didn't respond with a chuckle. "I have to mark it that I've reported it to you. If it happens again, it will have to be considered a sexual incident."

The what?

Kids talking about their body parts and having a look was a sexual incident? Even playing full on doctor is widely considered absolutely normal for kids of 5 years. The kids don't know what "sexual" means. They just know they have funny looking parts. The correct way to handle it is with calm and understanding, not shaming them and scaring the parents.

I figure that the administrators are terrified themselves. Scared of lawsuits, scared of bad press, scared of having to deal with the all too real incidents that are actually "incidents". There are zero tolerance policies for contact/touching/hugging all over the nation, Texas is no exception.

I think what it does though, instead of letting kids grow up with a normalized sense of how their bodies work and develop, is create an environment where their body is the enemy. Where their natural inclination for curiosity is suspect and where parents are faced with trying to promote healthy sexuality and healthy boundaries which may actually be considered far too liberal by the schools.

Then again, what is healthy? If you are reading this blog, I bet you are biased towards the open and communicative, towards the rights for LGBT individuals and towards a "no harm no foul" approach to sexuality. So am I. And I want my kids to grow up knowing their bodies are their own and that they need to respect their bodies as well as others. They can only do that if they have the room to learn in a safe and comprehensive way.

I fear that if Kindergarten in Texas was any indication, the teen years are gonna be a doozy.

Abstinence FAIL: 375 Girls Pregnant in Austin Schools

Teens in AISD have definitely still got it. Graph from the Onion.



In February I was invited to attend "Continued Conversation with Dr. Carstarphen: The State of Student Health in AISD," a meeting of school officials and community partners to tackle one of Superintendent Carstarphen's "Big, Hairy Audacious Goals"-- decreasing teen pregnancy. Pregnancy among teen girls, along with childhood obesity, is the biggest contributor to poor attendance and dropout rates among students in AISD.


Nearly 400 girls in AISD are receiving pregnancy case management services from Student Health Services*, which means that more girls could be pregnant and are choosing to have their pregnancy managed elsewhere or terminating their pregnancy before the district has time to count them as pregnant. The good news is that there are only 26 pregnant middle school girls; the bad news is that in the high schools, there are 349 girls who are currently pregnant, a 7.76% increase over the past year and a nearly 50% increase over the 2005-06 school year. The pregnancies are broken up by school as follows:

• Akins: 140
• Anderson: 10
• Austin: 9
• Bowie: 2
• Crockett: 34
• Eastside Memorial: 10
• International: 3
• LBJ: 12
• Lanier: 10
• McCallum: 16
• Reagan: 40
• Travis: 63

AISD's policy on sex education mirrors that of the state, which is to say it mostly prohibits any discussion of actual methods of preventing pregnancy and STIs. It explicitly prohibits the demonstration or distribution of contraceptive methods, including condoms, and it also prohibits outside agencies--from Planned Parenthood to Austin LifeGuard--from coming into the schools to do sex education programs. The only thing schools can do is make pamphlets about contraception available at the back of the classroom and hope they make it into the hands of students who need them. (Spoiler: they usually don't.)

The map below shows the schools with pregnancies this school year:

The verdict is in on abstinence education, and it doesn't work any better in Texas than it does anywhere else--but AISD's hands are tied by the state's policy despite the district's embarassingly high teen pregnancy rate**--31.06 per 1000 girls. That's higher even than Texas' state rate for girls of the same age, which is 25.9 per 1000 for 2005.

Furthermore, according to the same report issued at the AISD meeting, "an emerging Travis County community health issue related to teen pregnancy is the prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among adolescents." The rates are:

• Chlamydia: boys: 253.4/100,000; girls: 1826.4/100,000
• Gonorrhea: boys: 109.1/100,000; girls: 435.2/100,000

The overall Texas rate for Chlamydia: 365/100,000; overall Travis County rate: 526/100,000. Ouch, AISD.

With the evidence of high teen pregnancy rates and sky-high Chlamydia/gonorrhea incidence, Austin has its work cut out for itself in trying to somehow find wiggle room in the archaic state policy to provide essential information to its students. Perhaps more prescient, considering AISD's ongoing budget crisis, is the fact that nearly 400 girls are getting case management services provided by the county at a cost that surely exceeds what it would cost to provide actual health information and condoms to students who are very clearly already having sex. I think it's time for AISD to make some changes. Let's hope Dr. Carstarphen has the will to get the job done.

*"Children's/AISD Student Health Services School Year 2009-2010 Report. PRS [pregnancy resource services] Services." Provided by AISD staff at the Conversation With Dr. Carstarphen--February 9th, 2010. Interestingly, there is no mention on the AISD website about these services.

**These data, which come from AISD's report, include only girls ages 13-17 which is why the rate is so much lower than the overall Texas rate of 88 pregnancies per 1000 girls ages 15-19.

Please Allow Me To Introduce Myself

Hi there, I'm Ms. Goose and I'll be a contributing writer here at How to Have Sex in Texas.

I'm over 40, bisexual with polyamorous leanings, quite kink friendly, a parent who is extremely interested in the abysmal state of sex education in our fair state, and a Texan by birth and by choice.

I was lucky enough to meet Miss Sunday about six months ago, and I knew when I saw the spark in her eyes, that she was solid gold. And she is. I'm glad to be working with her and I hope you'll enjoy my posts.

I'll be writing about comprehensive sex ed issues, alternative relationships styles, political issues pertaining to all of the above, as well as some general opinion pieces, all with a sharp focus on Texas, of course.

Until next time...

UT System Elects First Woman Chair: Better Warn Her About Hook-Up Culture

Memo to McHugh: College Girls Are Going WILD!

From the Statesman: the University of Texas System Board of Regents unanimously elected a woman, Colleen McHugh, to be its leader this week. This continues the terrifying trend in higher education of women dominating everything.

At the University of Texas, a staggering 51.5% of undergraduates are female. Texas A & M is keeping its 48% of female undergradutes in their place. Gig 'em! Texas Tech is leading the pack with a safe 44% female student body. Guns Up, indeed.

Everyone knows that when women outnumber men in an institution, the "price" of sex declines and "hooking up," or the practice of, ahem, watching the preview before committing to buy the DVD, becomes the primary way in which men and women relate to eachother. And the documentary video footage of the Girls Gone Wild franchise proves that college girls are not only going wild, they are veritably SEX STARVED! Look out!

Thankfully for McHugh, everyone from the Heritage Foundation to the Independent Women's Forum to your surrogate spinster aunt Laura Sessions Stepp is eager to protect young women by shouting that hooking up is a roll of the dice! What are your chances of perfect sixes every time?!? It's not clear what they think coeds want by way of a pair of "perfect sixes" (not a college education, apparently) but they are convinced girls aren't getting it.

For those women who have been taken in by the hookup culture, Dr. Miriam Grossman (formerly a physician at UCLA's student health center who has myseriously been relocated [read: fired] to the conservative chattersphere) is here to scold you and tell you that you better stop hooking up and start trying to get married, because your fertility is a window of opportunity that will close; the rectum is an exit, not an entrance; because of chemicals in the brain, when you hook up with a guy he's all you can think about (right?), he can't even remember your name; because you're drunk you can't tell how ugly the guy is anyway; and really, you should be saving it for marriage. By which she means trying to get married. Right now.

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Girls were Going Wild when I was in college 10 years ago (!) but I managed to come out alive. I wish Ms. McHugh the best of luck surviving the UT System with her dignity (and cervix) intact. Because these sex starved college coeds will stop at nothing to get what they want! Are you ready to give it to 'em?

Four More Years of Guv'na GoodHair: Time to Break the Abstinence Industrial Complex

This comes verbatim from Pam Stenzel's "Sex Still Has a Price Tag," used in Texas public schools

Now that Governor Goodhair has won the primary we in Texas can look forward to 4 more years of the same old funneling of state and federal money to abstinence pushers who are team players in the great conservative quest to punish women for having sex. If you haven't been paying attention to abstinence education in Texas for the past 10 or so years, now is a great time to start. Here's a to-do list:

• Watch "The Education of Shelby Knox"
• Read the Texas Freedom Network's "Just Say Don't Know" report
• Dig around the Kaiser Family Foundation's State Health Facts Texas section and see how bad things really are* in Texas
• Read the SIECUS Texas state profile about Texas's abstinence industrial complex**
  

Once you've done that, you'll be good and fired up to attend a training in April put on by the Texas Freedom Network, Planned Parenthood of North Texas, and a host of other partners that will teach attenders how to advocate for better sex education as allies for LGBTQ youth specifically.

Abstinence education is bad for everyone but it is especially harmful for LGBTQ youth who are, at best, entirely ignored by the programs and, at worst, taught religious extremist anti-gay views. In public schools. Since gay marriage is illegal in Texas (though not, apparently, gay divorce), programs that teach that sex is only acceptable in the context of marriage deliberately exclude anyone who isn't straight--or willing to pretend they're straight and, you know, be gay with a meth-head male hooker on the side.

Here's the training description:

Come learn how abstinence-only programs fail and ignore LGBTQ youth and what you can do to advocate effectively for responsible sex ed policies that help all young people. This training is for youth ages 15-24.
We will also provide specific training opportunities for adult allies and youth ministers.

Sounds good.


*# 4 in new AIDS cases; #15 in abortions; STD testing nor emergency contraception covered by Medicaid; #4 in teen pregnancy (for now); etc.
**like the military industrial complex, the abstinence education complex demonstrates the cozy relationships between political conservatives and faith-based "organizations" (read: businesses) that put together abstinence curricula and programs. the states that have received the most federal abstinence funding (Georgia, Texas, and Illinois) also happen to be the states with the biggest producers of program materials.

Battle in Amarillo: The War on Straight's Rights

Seriously? Yup.

A blockbuster of a story came out last week in the Texas Observer about a radical Christian terrorist group, Repent Amarillo, that has successfully shut down a swinger's club and is on the warpath to do more damage to anyone not considered a member of God's "Special Forces."

The group's website looks an awful lot like GoArmy.com and is clearly trying to hook in disaffected, bored young men who need something "manly" to do in their spare time. This sounds an awful lot like Taliban recruitment, to me, and their mission statement about being "warriors" couldn't be more clear:

Repent Amarillo is comprised of two groups blended together, working together, to compliment and support one another for the purpose of spiritual warfare. They are;

1. Intercessory prayer group...
2. The Soldier group. The soldier group will consist of warriors dedicated to witnessing to groups of unbelievers or one-on-one witnessing. This group will be more visible to the public and will be comprised of bold believers willing to confront the world. This group will be schooled in the “Way of the Master” method of witnessing to the lost. This group will be the ones who plant God’s seeds in the ground that has been prepared by the intercessory prayer group. Believers who participate in this group will have to be bold but loving. Confrontational but composed. The individual members of these two groups are allowed and highly encouraged to move between the two groups based on the individual’s calling and the unique mission involved. In other words, no one is stuck to only one group. Soldiers can pray and intercessory members can witness.

It was members of this "soldier" group that confronted, harassed, and smeared members of the Amarillo swinger's club, employing such apparently "Christian" tactics as posting names, employers, and license plate numbers of club attenders online, resulting in lost jobs and social ostracism--which, I guess, was the point--for several members.

The swinger's club has been shut down, but Repent Amarillo won't stop there--their website has a map featuring their local targets.


Repent Amarillo's "Prayer Map" of objectionable churches, parks, and businesses

Repent also gives a preview of the kinds of events they find objectionable and predict they will show up to and "witness":

1. Gay pride events.
2. Earth worship events such as “Earth Day”
3. Pro-abortion events or places such as Planned Parenthood
4. Breast cancer events such as “Race for the Cure” to illuminate the link between abortion and breast cancer.
5. Opening day of public schools to reach out to students.
6. Spring break events.
7. Demonically based concerts.
8. Halloween events.
9. Other events that may arise that the ministry feels called to confront.

and:

1. Sexually oriented businesses such as pornography shops, strip joints, and XXX-rated theaters.
2. Idolatry locations such as palm readers, false religions, and witchcraft. Many of the smaller missions listed above may be just prayer oriented missions for tearing down demonic strongholds or they may involve more aggressive use of soldiers and prayer warriors.

That doesn't leave much to do in Amarillo except for...church. But not St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, which is described thusly on their "warfare map":

Referred to on OUTstanding Amarillo's ( Homosexual activists) website as a "gay friendly" church. In other words, they do not tell homosexuals who attend this church that they must repent of the sin of homosexuality. This a serious violation of scripture.

And not First Church of Christ, Scientist, the Unitarian Church, the First Church of Practical Christianity, the Metropolitan Community Church, or the Islamic Center of Amarillo. They don't even like the Masons.

Live in Texas? Want to stand up for your right to not be chased around by a bunch of Christian terrorists? Join the Facebook group. But don't try to go to the Route 66 Swinger's Club in Amarillo, because it's been shut down. Their website now carries the message below.

The Texas Primaries: All Roads Lead to Douchetown

The Texas Primaries: Queerer than a... ROT $3 bill?

The Austin-American Statesman reported Sunday that both major Republican candidates for guv'na in Texas, epic asshat Rick Perry and "I am pro-life, I de-clayire!" Kay Bailey Hutchison, attended a fundraiser for the Prestonwood [crisis] Pregnancy Center in Dallas yesterday honoring the decade's finest Texas douchebag, George W. Bush.

According to an outline of his remarks provided before the benefit, Perry said, "I feel like I am in the garrison of an army that has devoted itself to the defense of the unborn."

His remarks also thanked Bush. "There is no way to tell how many lives were protected by your fearless pro-life efforts," Perry's speech said.

Hmm...is that army also prepared to, I dunno, secede from the United States, Governor Perry? And equal time for Hutchison, who went to services yesterday at Lakewood with my secret church crush Joel Osteen:

Hutchison has voiced support for Roe v. Wade, but she has sought to find common ground with its opponents in other ways.

In a mailing she sent to some voters, Hutchison touted her high lifetime rating from National Right to Life and votes against federal funding of abortion and against the late-term procedure known as partial-birth abortion.

The primary is officially tomorrow (Texas Independence Day!) so it's your last chance to vote for KBH and ruin Perry's chances of further fucking up Texas.