ABSTRACT
Under the guise of protection from the “life-threatening” consequences of desire and sexuality, conservative and Christian Right movements in the United States have successfully set a national “abstinence-only-untilmarriage” agenda under which school-based comprehensive sex education programs are evaporating while abstinence-only programs flourish. Unprecedented funding by the Bush administration (up 3000 per cent since 1996-the year federal funding for all comprehensive sex education ceased) currently supports over 700 abstinence programs that preach the “sex can wait” gospel across all fifty U.S. states, and more than a third of U.S. high schools teach abstinence until marriage (Dailard 2000; Corinna and Blank 1997/2003; Rosenberg 2002). Each of these programs must adhere to a strict eight-point definition that requires teaching that “sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects” and “bearing children out of wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child’s parents and society.”1
