New Hampshire badly needs sex education, beginning with three members of the Executive Council who are having trouble grasping the facts of life and who may also benefit from remedial reading instruction, extra practice in memory skills and a quick course in logic.
As the New Hampshire Bulletin news site reported earlier this month, three members of the council — all Republicans and all males — continue to hold up $682,000 in funding for an after-school sex education program for at-risk youth in Manchester and in Sullivan County, which have the highest teen birth rates in the state.
The Get Real program is typically taught outside of school hours and aims to reduce teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, the Department of Health and Human Services reports. It covers abstinence, the reproductive process, sexually transmitted diseases and contraception, according to a spokeswoman, who added that parental permission is required to participate and that the program encourages on-going parental involvement.
This is somehow objectionable to councilors Joe Kenney, David Wheeler and Ted Gatsas, despite the fact that they have previously approved funding for the program. Kenney and Wheeler are pleading selective amnesia on that count, claiming they just don’t remember what they did.
For his part, Wheeler wants to read the high school and middle school curriculum before he votes on it. “So you’ve voted for this contract in this curriculum before and you want to read it now, years later?” asked a nonplussed Gov. Chris Sununu. The charitable interpretation is that Wheeler did read it in prior years but no longer remembers that he did. The alternative explanation is that he was too lazy to perform his duties until now.
Kenney’s reservations center on parental rights, which is a hot-button issue in right-wing circles at present. He apparently thinks that parents who give their permission are not capable of making an informed decision.
Asked how he would determine if parents were on board with the program’s content, he answered that, “You look at material and say to yourself, ‘Is this something parents want their children being exposed to, or is this something parents themselves should be doing?’ ”
We infer that the “you” in the previous sentence actually is “I.” That is, Kenney proposes to substitute his judgment about what is appropriate content for the judgment of the parents whose children actually participate in the program. In Kenney-world, parental rights extend to those who object to something being taught, but not to those who embrace something he finds threatening or obnoxious.
At the same time, Kenney, Wheeler and Gatsas, who are staunchly anti-abortion, have repeatedly blocked family-planning contracts to three organizations. This money would have funded cancer screenings, testing for sexually transmitted diseases, contraception and an array of routine health care services for an estimated 16,000 low-income women in New Hampshire. Despite repeated assurances by the Attorney General’s Office and other state officials that none of the family-planning money is used by those organizations to fund abortions, the just-say-no trio continues to ignore the facts.
And now for the facts of life. Councilor Janet Stevens, another Republican, has joined her three colleagues in rejecting the family-planning contracts, but not in tabling the sex-education contract. She apparently understands what the male triplets do not: You cannot genuinely claim to be anti-abortion if you are in favor of denying young people access to accurate information about sex and reproduction that helps them avoid unwanted pregnancy. It is simply a contradiction that cannot be explained away. The same holds true for denying low-income residents access to contraception if reducing abortion is your overriding concern.
The damage is already evident. Stephanie Slayton, director of TLC Family Resource Center in Claremont, which administers the program in Sullivan County, reports that uncertainty about funding has already forced her agency to cancel fall classes. Without it, she said, the center won’t be able to continue its program for 75 adolescents over the next two years. Since TLC began offering the program in 2012, Sullivan County has seen its teen birth rate drop from 20.27 per 1,000 teens to 11.86 in 2021, she said, significant progress even if the rate is still twice the state average.
The willful ignorance of three ideologues threatens to consign some of those 75 teenagers to the life-altering consequences of unwanted pregnancy, as well as to saddle taxpayers with the resulting societal costs. It is cruel, but unfortunately not unusual, punishment in 2022, in New Hampshire and elsewhere where sex education is under right-wing attack.