With few people noticing, in many countries around the world, traditional concepts of marriage and parenthood are quickly vanishing. Here in the U.S., women’s rights advocates at Harvard Law School charge that the discussion of the positive value of sex and childbearing within marriage in abstinence education programs “stigmatizes” African-American and Latino youth, “who are more likely to come from single-parent homes and to become single parents themselves” and especially African-American youth who live in “communities (where) marriage rates are significantly lower than in Caucasian and Hispanic communities.” This is a curious position since the decline in marriage has contributed to the feminization of poverty and leads to millions of children growing up poor.

The same theme that discussing marriage “stigmatizes” urban youth cropped up in a meeting on November 3, 2006 with the staff of Governor Jon Corzine at the Statehouse in Trenton, New Jersey to find out why the Governor was rejecting $4.5 million in funding over a five-year period for after-school programs that encouraged young people to delay sexual involvement. Speaking in defense of the programs being defunded was a professor from Montclair State University, Dr. Joseph Donnelly, who had conducted the independent evaluation of Title V programs. He reported that five years of evaluations in New Jersey had shown that these programs had strong, significant impact on the attitudes and intentions of 6th, 7th and 8th graders.

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Chapter 17

Janellen Duffy, Policy Advisor to Governor Corzine, explained that the Governor objected to the discussion of marriage, since it showed “insensitivity towards children of single parents.”  Needless to say, the Governor’s rejection of federal funding for programs that discussed these topics was in conflict with the state’s own Core Curriculum Content Standards, which required discussions of committed, lifelong relationships such as marriage, just as the Los Angeles Unified School District violated its own guidelines when it banned Karen Knopf. The second meeting also made no mention of the nationwide ACLU/Planned Parenthood/SIECUS campaign to persuade Governors to reject federal funding. Lucille Davy, Commissioner of Education, expressed her view that with all the sex in the media it wasn’t worth the effort to teach abstinence in the classroom. This from the Commissioner of Education!!!