Huckabee, Sex Ed., and High Energy Particle Physics

What’s the connection? Huckabee is for real. He probably won’t win the nomination (here I agree with David Brooks otherwise risible defense of Huckabee as the candidate with the right values for a revived conservatism), but he’s in witha chance.

He is also a scientifically illiterate defender of stupid ideas known to be false. Lots of them, but for now, let’s look at one that has profound consequences for people who buy his brand of snake oil. Abstinence “education” instead of real information about sex, human biology, and contraception. He’s for it: quoted in a usually reliable source of revealed “wisdom,” the CBN’s Brody File, he said:

“Abstinence education provides a valuable counterweight to peer pressure and the message young people get from the popular culture encouraging casual relationships and separating sex from love, commitment and marriage. I do not believe in teaching about sex or contraception in public schools. That is the responsibility of parents. “

(Empahsis in the original).

I’ll not mention that most of us would think that lessons about sexual choices — i.e. abstinence is in fact the responsibility of the parents, and not a nanny state. (Funny how “conservatives” are all in favor of an intrusive state in defense of bad causes, isn’t it? Surveillance, unchecked detention, invasion of your bedroom, but not any where else. I know – an old point.) Instead, just consider the basic point.

Huckabee says abstinence “education” is valuable — and he’s right. It’s valuable to the modern Marjoe hucksters who make a good living off telling teenagers not to screw. It’s valuable to the Christianist welfare kings and queens who have learned that there is good money to be made fleecing the government and misleading kids. According the Washington Post, the federal government spends 176 million a year on abstinence “education,” including but not limited to the Title V grants reauthorized in the last minute budget deal passed just before the new year.

What’s the problem with all this? Most of you will have guessed this already: abstinence “education” is a fraud. It doesn’t work. Kids still have sex. (This comes as a great surprise, of course to everyone who was ever a teenager, or the parent of one.) From the fact sheet on the HHS report released last spring:

Findings indicate that youth who were assigned to the Title V abstinence education “program group” were no more likely than youth who were assigned to the “services as usual” control group to have abstained from sex. Those who reported having sex had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age. (Link to the complete study here.)

Reported unprotected sex was the same for both groups, for which we may be grateful. See the San Francisco Chronicle’s marvelous Violet Blue’s Open Source Sex column (from whom the inspiration for this rant derived) for more gory details. Worst of all: official US government agencies spread lies about condom use and its public health significance.

Each of these assertions turns up in federally funded abstinence-only sex education programs: Condoms fail to prevent HIV infection 31 percent of the time during heterosexual sex. The chances of getting pregnant while using a condom are 1 in 6. And condoms break or slip off nearly 15 percent of the time.

And each of them is wrong, says John S. Santelli, a pediatrician and a professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health.

Bottom line: GOP “values” politicians, as a group seemingly more sexually incontinent than bunnies in a hutch, use the terror of children having sex to funnel cash to favored folks, who then achieve nothing of any public purpose.

But we all knew that, right? So what’s the connection to high energy physics.

Well, the same budget deals that saved tens of millions for GOP buddy welfare, essentially killed research funding for new high energy physics research in this country, just as the most important HEP experiment in years is about to turn on at the Large Hadron Collider. Here’s hoping we see something like this:

The federal budget as passed in the last grim days of 2007 cut 90 million dollars from high energy physics, including 52 million dollars from Fermilab. 200 layoffs, unpaid furloughs and all the usual pain will follow. Two new American experiments are scrubbed, at least for now, and the ability to take advantage of whatever the LHC comes up with will be degraded for years to come, if not permanently.

So: there you have it: the current victor on the Republican side of the fence supports spending millions on a “feel-good” (for some) program that serves the interests only of Christianist fat cats, while no money is available to advance American research in a field we used to — but no longer dominate.

There is a separate argument to be had about the best way to spend research dollars, choices between, for example, particle physics and cosmology; physical chemistry or neurobiology and so on. We could, and should, point out that the budget shenanigans above required the acquiesence, at least, of Democrats in Congress who should know better.

But the point is that a frighteningly prominent segment of the right side of the political spectrum is absolutely committed to spending millions of dollars in defense of stupid, failed ideas, and not one cent for good science.

Back in the day, Cato used to end each speech with the tag line “Carthago delanda est” — Carthage must be destroyed. Let me update: this kind of nonesense must be destroyed. Huckabee is presented in coverage today as a kind of outlier in the Republican party. He’s not. He stands for what a large segment of that party believes to be true. If we want a smart, safe, secure society, 2008 becomes ever more important. These guys cannot have another run in power.

Images: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, “A Young Girl Defending Herself Against Eros,” 1880. Source: Wikipedia Commons

A diagram of one possible way in which the LHC may observe a Higgs Boson. Used under a GNU Free Documentation licence.

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