Pork for prudes: how conservatives score, while teaching kids not to.

• Author: Larson, Christina

ON HIS FIRST PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN stop in South Carolina, in June 1999, George W. Bush paid a visit to an abstinence-until-marriage workshop run by Heritage Community Services, a Charleston-based nonprofit that sponsors classroom presentations in over 40 local schools to teach teenagers that "waiting on sex until marriage is the expected standard in our culture" A longtime advocate for such programs, Bush told the crowd, "The contraceptive message sends a contradictory message. It tends to undermine the message of abstinence" If elected, he vowed to support the efforts of groups like Heritage with a boost in federal funding.

After the workshop, Bush met with Heritage president Anne Badgley, who began teaching abstinence after a decade running a pro-life counseling and adoption referral center. A politically connected GOP activist, Badgley organized a meeting for Bush with local conservative leaders and put her Roladex at his disposal. "I could see he was very sincere, and I worked hard to get him elected," she recalls.

And with good reason: Delivering spectacularly on his campaign pledge, the president's 2003 budget calls for hiking federal funding for abstinence education by a third, to $135 million. Bush wants to expand the same federal abstinence programs that have awarded more than $8 million to Badgley's organization since 1997.

Heritage is just one of hundreds of abstinence-until-marriage programs now funded by the federal government, courtesy of a little-noticed provision of the 1996 welfare reform law that allocated $250 million over five years for states to promote abstinence education. Written largely by the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector and championed by former Sen. Lauch Faircloth (R-N.C.), the statutes bar grant recipients from discussing contraceptions except to note condom failure rates, and require them to teach that "sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects"

Bush's support for abstinence-until-marriage has outraged liberals, who question whether such programs can actually reduce teen sex--and who, consequently, boycott the grants. But the effectiveness debate has largely obscured one underlying reason for the Bush administration's support: politics. Funding abstinence-until-marriage programs allows the White House to reward conservative groups by putting them on the federal gravy train.

For 30 years, sex education has been at the center of the culture wars, with liberals struggling to safeguard services that teach teens about contraception against conservatives' efforts to eliminate federal support for them. But since 1996, conservatives have adopted a new strategy: Instead of simply attacking initiatives they oppose (which, incidentally, are often administered by liberals), they have begun winning federal funding for their own alternative programs. With the administration's blessing, conservatives are breeding a new kind of federal pork geared entirely to their kindred spirits. Though it flies in the face of small-government ideology, nourishing the nascent abstinence movement with federal funds marks an important shift in GOP strategy to court its restless social-conservative base.

Defying Condom Sense

Washington first entered the national debate over sex education in the 1960s. Wilbur Cohen, Lyndon Johnson's undersecretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, raised the issue in a 1965 report, "Family Planning: A Freedom to Choose," and the following year awarded a grant to a private, left-leaning organization called the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) to design the first teacher-training manual for sexuality education. Aside from developing curricula, however, Washington did not mandate or directly fund sex education in schools. It did, however, under Johnson begin to pour federal dollars into local health clinics that provided contraceptive services and counseling to adults--and later to teens referred to the clinics by school nurses.

In 1970, with the support of the Nixon administration, which believed informed access to contraception would limit global population growth (one of Nixon's pet concerns), Congress passed Title X of the Public Health Services Act, the primary federal program for the provision of family planning services. Title X funded the expansion of a national network of public and private clinics, which provided information and contraception on a sliding scale based on income. Todays state and local health departments run about 60 percent of these clinics, while the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, the largest private provider of family planning services, administers another 14 percent.

These federally supported family planning clinics became deeply controversial after 1976, when the Republican National Committee, in the wake of Roe v. Wade, adopted its first pro-life platform. Though Title X money never directly funded abortions, pro-life groups complained that, by supporting family planning clinics, it effectively liberalized public attitudes toward sex and abortion. Conservatives also suspected that family planning organizations were the force behind immoral sex education in the schools. Groups like the National Right to Life Committee and their allies in Congress began a yearly campaign to slash federal funding. Under Ronald Reagan, the first president with a political commitment to the pro-life movement, Title X was cut by nearly a quarter during his first year in office--though congressional Democrats later restored some of the money.

During the 1980s and 1990s, attacks on Title X and legalized abortion riled pro-choice liberals and family...