We're Number One!

This years Kids Count study by the Annie E. Casey foundation names Texas as having the highest teen birthrate in the nation. This despite the 1995 state law requiring schools to emphasize abstinence in sex education. State Board of Education president Don McLeroy took time out from removing science from Biology textbooks to comment, “The idea that just giving them a lot of information is going to solve it, I think, is kind of naïve, certainly it’s more of a societal problem than it is a school problem.”

Refreshing thought there, that the schools shouldn’t be burdening students by giving them a lot of information.

I would suggest that we wouldn’t have had 40 million legal abortions in the last four decades had we seen to it that young people were equipped with fact based (as opposed to faith based) sex education and birth control services.

I got that 40 million number from Tom DeLay, who addressed the College Republicans (or Killer Sheep) convention at the Moonie owned Sheraton National Hotel in Alexandria Virginia. “Virginia Tom” explained that the reason businesses need to hire illegal workers is because we’ve lost those 40 million souls to legal abortions.

I somehow doubt that had all those people existed, they’d be clamoring to be housekeepers, dishwashers, farm laborers, meatpackers, and cannon fodder for neo con empire building. Some, born to poverty and broken homes, would no doubt take their place filling beds in our booming prison industry. Others, exercising their second amendment rights, would swell the ranks of the average of 10 children ages 0-19 killed each day by gunfire.

But enough of that has been, preaching what if, to the wing nuts. We’ve got real lost generations warehoused in schools and prisons today. How we treat the least among our brethren will show us if we’ll ever top of the list of any but negative indicators.