I am from Rice Lake, Wisconsin. I was born into a comfortable, middle class, liberal family with a banker father and a nurse mother. Ever since moving to Minneapolis, I maintain a close relationship with Wisconsin politics. The latest bill being pushed through legislation by Scott Walker, Wisconsin’s newest governor is the proposal to replace comprehensive sexual education in public schools with an abstinence only program. This program would prove to be contradictive to the other goals of the state, and putting a topic such as this one up to a public vote will draw in voters who vote for many different reasons, decided mostly by the environment they exist in.
Abstinence is the best way to prevent pregnancy. It also is a religiously rooted and supported practice. Many common social ideals that fuel abstinence are purity of the body, definitively chastity. In an article written by Catholic News Agency, they compare premarital sex to “If I go into a grocery store and want to choose a good apple I can pick it up and I can look at it. I would be pretty upset if the person in front of me starting taking bites out of apples and putting them back in order to see if they taste good. Having sex before marriage is taking a bite out of the apple before committing to it (buying it). Often it means leaving it for the next person. When I have sex with someone before marriage, it is quite likely I am having sex with someone else's future wife.”*
Because Catholicism is so prevalent in American society this ideal gets stirred in with the political goals of the state (and often, the country). This means that many people will be voting for the education of abstinence based on and influences mostly by their religious values and those they believe the state should share.
Comprehensive education, contrastively, is the complete biological mapping of sex between two people, the diseases and infections that can be created and spread, as well as the very real facts about how chromosomes form to create children as well as how to physically prevent the biological production of a child. Many of the people who vote in favor of comprehensive education are those who feel the biological facts will be enough to keep our teens safe, based on perhaps a different environment.
Contradiction comes into play in the outcomes of abstinence education. States that teach abstinence only in high school settings result in the highest levels of teenage pregnancy and STDs as reflected by an article in Fox News, using North Carolina as an example. “According to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, more than 20,000 girls between 10 and 19 years of age became pregnant in the state in 2007. That number has been climbing steadily and has sparked alarm among lawmakers and health officials who think the abstinence-only approach is naïve.”* With pregnancy in teenagers come two outcomes: a higher need for abortions and a higher need for welfare support, requiring more bills to be passed and more money to be given out. Both welfare increase and abortion services are very much not supported by Scott Walker.
My proposal is that people view both sides of the vote based on their environment as outlined by Robin; the differences in age, race, socioeconomic status, location, and family structure are just a few things that could cause people to vote a different way.
The issue is that we must pick a side, as a citizen it is my duty to vote. Do I follow a religious standpoint and vote for the abstinence to maintain our country’s purity and try to regain a sense of chastity; or do I follow a scientific aspect in that humans were created to procreate and it will biologically happen with a wedding band-adorned finger or not? This borderline of science and religion is indeed causing a canyon between the people of Wisconsin.
Either way, there will be a next generation; there will be new children, marriages, adoption, and a continued change in typical family structure. The question lies: should we educate our children on biological bases or produce religious structures to carry on the next generation?
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