ABSTRACT
The campaign advertisement was a distortion of a 2003 Illinois legislature bill that was backed by then senator President Barack Obama, as it featured age-appropriate discussions in the classroom around topics of sex. Throughout the course of his first election cycle, Obama announced strong support for the addition of federal funding for comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) as a replacement for the existing funding stream of abstinence-only (AO) programming. Although the Obama administration seemed to have pushed federal support behind CSE through funding and public acknowledgment, the divide between conservative rhetoric and support for comprehensive programming remains wide, with little give on either side. For the first time, sexuality education, under new funding policies of Obama that defunded AO education, saw its first set of national standards. The standards were developed to address an identified inconsistency of sexuality education and limited time allotted in public schools to health and sexuality education.
