I felt we needed a comic break.  Or course, good satire often hits close to home.

I also felt that I should take a break from mocking Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Marriage Education.

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Salon.com News | Third columnist caught with hand in the Bush till

Jan 27, 2005 … Salon has confirmed that Michael McManus, a marriage advocate whose syndicated … to help promote Bush’s No Child Left Behind program to minority audiences. … help push proposals, according to a report Thursday in USA Today. … hired by HHS to implement the Community Healthy Marriage Initiative, …
www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/01/27/mcmanus/print.html

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You should also read THIS site to better understand WHY HHS “just happens” to be so happily forcing happily ever after or else down our throats.   And we are paying for it, too! 

http://old.mediatransparency.org/personprofile.php?personID=89

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 WELL, OK, here’s part of that 4th site:

. . . Gallagher received an additional $20,000 from the Bush administration in 2002 and 2003 for writing a report, titled “Can Government Strengthen Marriage?”, for a private organization called the National Fatherhood Initiative. That report, published last year, was funded by a Justice Department grant, said NFI spokesman Vincent DiCaro. Gallagher said she was “aware vaguely” that her work was federally funded.   {{?? ???}}  {{Kind of like  being “vaguely aware” of who the father of one’s baby might be?}}In columns, television appearances and interviews with such newspapers as The Washington Post, Gallagher last year defended Bush’s proposal for a constitutional amendment barring same-sex marriage.

And these same folks are still up and running strong.  Did I mention that Wade Horn, as I THINK, I recall, is among those highly involved in the origins of the AFCC?

Wade Horn, HHS assistant secretary for children and families, said his division hired Gallagher as “a well-known national expert,” along with other specialists in the field, to help devise the president’s healthy marriage initiative. “It’s not unusual in the federal government to do that,” he said.

The essay Gallagher drafted appeared under Horn’s byline — with the headline “Closing the Marriage Gap” — and ran in Crisis magazine, which promotes humanism rooted in Catholic Church teachings. Horn said most of the brochures written by Gallagher — such as “The Top Ten Reasons Marriage Matters” — were not used as the program evolved.

“I don’t see any comparison between what has been alleged with Armstrong Williams and what we did with Maggie Gallagher,” said Horn, .who founded the National Fatherhood Initiative before entering government.

Although this is a fast “intro,” some of this info shows the IN-BREEDING involved in these programs and who promotes them.  In other words, those sites are worth studying in more depth.  What we probably need nationally is a few more Wynona Wards to work on the abuse of — power — and money — in these matters.  Or, a lot more Erin Brockoviches. 

But enough of that on Marriage, Fatherhood, etc.. . . . It’s getting “old.” 

Accordingly this post is going after “Abstinence Education” instead. 

The whole concept of continuous funding on almost ANYTHING pertaining to marriage, sex, fatherhood (motherhood), let alone how to balance a checkbook —  from a federal government which has Congressional members like “Hot Mike Duvall,” and a country whose governors include both former Presidents AND Governors who can’t keep their pants zipped or their own marriages together.  I mean, where does one start?  Bill Clinton?  John F. Kennedy?  FDR? 

And so what if they could?  Are they moral in other areas of life also? 

That said, I think that we should expect of our leaders TOTAL ethics in these two primary categories:  Money and Sex.  In their personal lives. 

The government has NO business in my pocketbook except for the most nominal of functions of government, and it absoLUTEly should stay out of my pants, or skirts, and of my kids’, too.  Good grief.

Again, let me go “religious” on this one (before quoting the next site, which is going to do its own take on religious conservatives) and quote the Bible, Romans, and all that. 

Note:  If I have inadvertently missed offending a particular group in this post, I will try to catch up next one.   The “PC” gene is crawling up the back of my brain here. 

Also please maintain a healthy perspective and realize that 2,000 years, gender, religion and culture separate me from this quote!  On the other hand, I think it nails the hypocrisy thing just fine…

Romans 2: (the hyperlinks are to which Greek word it comes from….)

17 Behold thou art called a Jew {{See Below at **}} and restest in the law and makest thy boast of God {{**}} 18 And knowest his will and approvest the things that are more excellent being instructed out of the law 19 And art confident that thou thyself art a guide of the blind a light of them which are in darkness 20 An instructor of the foolish a teacher of babes which hast the form of knowledge and of the truth in the law 21 Thou therefore which teachest another teachest thou not thyself thou that preachest a man should not steal dost thou steal 22 Thou that sayest a man should not commit adultery dost thou commit adultery thou that abhorrest idols dost thou commit sacrilege 23 Thou that makest thy boast of the law through breaking the law dishonourest thou God 24 For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles through you as it is written

{{**case in point, where this reads “Jew,” we might as well read, here, “mental health expert”  or “licensed marriage and family therapist” or almost any other functional description which carries with it the ATTITUDE that adults who can’t get along are somehow now children that need to be taught.

In our country, legally, adulthood is at age 18 or 21.  For some women, this is suddenly reversed when marrying the wrong person.  For BOTH divorcing parents who weren’t smart and savvy enough to work it out apart from this system entirely, (in which case wouldn’t they have been smart and savvy enough to stay together), suddenly they are become as little kids needing instruction from Der Vaterland….}}

This quote from Romans 2, written by the apostle Paul (“Saul”) is already volatile enough — other portions of his writings have been used (AB-used?) to justify plenty of violence towards women, and Romans 1 would of course offend anyone in favor of same-sex, well, sex. 

Anyhow, I’m not this author, who was beheaded in a Roman Prison about 2000 years ago; he paid for insulting the wrong people in power already. 

I’m just me.  I’m female, Christian, a domestic violence SURVIVOR, and have enough respect that have finally figured out to steer clear of church buildings and those who frequent them.  Except for a good concert or so, when I’m able or in the mood.  

The best of us on a good day have some hypocrisy, and are not thoroughly honest.  However, is it REALLY necessary to take — forcibly, through the IRS — wages from employees, funnel them through the Feds, and then force-feed back, focusing on LOW-income populations who can’t get around this (gee, how’d they become so low-income to start with?  Possibly through this system?), things like parental education, how NOT to leave a marriage, how to have a double standard of behavior based on gender, and how, when, and with whom to have sex —  when the people preaching this aren’t UNIFORMLY systematically faithful to their smart, typically intelligent if not trophy, and such wives that helped them get elected, gave them children, and so forth? ???  

I mean, if there weren’t all this preaching, it’d be one thing.  But when there is, then I’d rather see a sermon than hear one.  ANYHOW, back to this:

“Abstinence Education /

George Bush”

Abstinence-only education is founded upon the assumption that giving teenagers complete and accurate information about sex is dangerous. This foundation of George W. Bush’s abstinence agenda goes a long way in explaining the Republican animosity towards education in general. In abstinence-only education we see that Bush and his Republican supporters believe that knowledge is dangerous, and should be kept from people as much as possible.

What George W. Bush never mentions is that the alternative to abstinence-only education is not some kind of hippy free love seminar in public schools. The medical community and responsible educational organizations promote an alternative called abstinence-plus. You won’t hear conservatives talking about this approach because it makes a lot of sense, and it’s easier for conservatives to sell abstinence-only programs when they’re able to keep parents frightened about unrestrained adolescent promiscuity.

Abstinence-plus includes a strong component of information about the reasons that abstaining from sex can be an extremely wise choice for teenagers. The difference is that abstinence-plus does more than just tell teenagers not to have sex. Abstinence-plus programs also provide access to full and accurate information about sex, so that students can make intelligent decisions about having sex instead of remaining in the dark until it’s too late. It’s essential for public schools to provide students with complete sex education because if students don’t get their education at school, they’ll search for accurate information elsewhere.

In a shocking display of naivete, George W. Bush and his Republican supporters suggest that teenagers would have sex less if only public schools did not let them know that sex exists. They ignore the fact that almost all American teenagers are skilled users of the Internet, which has plenty of information, both accurate and inaccurate. It’s the job of public schools to cut through the clutter of publicly available information, and provide an accurate presentation of it for their students. When George W. Bush insists that American public schools only be allowed to teach students about the reasons people should not have sex, he is performing a monumentally perverse act of academic censorship. That not only fails teenagers’ need for serious honesty about sex, it fails their need for an example of democratic principles in action.

All other points aside, George W. Bush’s anti-education agenda is a dangerous idea because research shows that abstinence-only education just doesn’t work. Not too surprisingly, researchers have found that when teenagers sign pledge forms in front of their parents, promising not to have sex, they’re not really very likely to follow through. In fact, students who sign pledge forms as a part of sexual abstinence training are just as likely to have premarital sex as other students! The same is true of the students in abstinence-only programs in general. Full sexual education, on the other hand, has been shown not to act as an encouragement for students to have sex, and is shown to provide students protection from pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases better than abstinence-only education does. The Bush Administration knows that abstinence-only education does not work at decreasing adolescent sexual behaviors, and actually increases students’ risk of sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancy.

That’s why George W. Bush ordered that all behavioral standards for evaluating the success of abstinence-only educational programs be eliminated. He didn’t want to the government to gather information that he knew would show abstinence-only education to be a complete failure.

The ultimate irony is that George W. Bush is pushing abstinence-only education at the same time that he is pushing for governmental programs to be performed by religious organizations.

Talk about total confusion!  I’ve looked at the grant system, and Catholic Charities is prominent in many of these programs.

 So, Bush’s plan includes promotion of taxpayer funding of abstinence-only programs by, among other groups, the Catholic Church. Given the scandal in the Catholic Church about long term and pervasive sexual assault of children by priests, this plan seems not only doomed to failure, but actually quite dangerous. After all, the Catholic Church, like other major religious institutions, appears to have been unable to convince its own leaders to stop having sex with children.

 How, then, are we supposed to believe that the Catholic Church is deserving of government grants in order to teach teenagers not to have sex with each other?

Easy:   We are to “Take it on Faith.” . . . . . .

Well, on to more worthy endeavors, I was just having some fun here.