Sex and the scientist (Roger Ebert discusses Kinsey and attacks social conservatives)

Alfred Kinsey has been dead for 48 years, and he still makes people mad. "Kinsey," a movie inspired by the life of the sex researcher, hasn't even opened, and here is an AP story about "indignant conservative groups" who think it is propaganda for the sexual revolution.

Kinsey is partly responsible for her generation "being forced to deal face to face with the devastating consequences of sexually transmitted diseases, pornography and abortion," Brandi Swindell, head of Generation Life, told the Associated Press. And here is Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women of America's Culture & Family Institute: "Instead of being lionized, Kinsey's proper place is with Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele or your average Hollywood horror flick mad scientist."

Strong words about a man who never advocated anything and specialized in research that simply attempted to discover what people actually do in their sex lives. Before Kinsey, it was generally believed that hardly anyone was homosexual, that masturbation could cause madness, that American married couples seldom strayed from the missionary position and rarely had sex before or outside of marriage. Kinsey found that most people masturbated, that a third of men reported at least one homosexual experience, and that oral sex and extramarital sex were commonplace.

Those who don't want to believe those findings, or think they shouldn't have been revealed even if true, find Kinsey's statistics devastating, and blame them on Kinsey, as if he made them up.

"The forces of prudery come back in waves every other generation or so," Liam Neeson thinks. He plays Kinsey in the movie, which opens Friday. "In Kinsey's time, America was confused sexually, and it's still confused. We have a situation where millions of people bemoan the fact that a wonderful show like 'Sex and the City' goes off the air; it's about four women talking about sex in a very indelicate fashion, to put it very mildly. And yet images of two gays kissing after they get married provoke outrage."

Neeson's performance, which seems likely to win an Oscar nomination, shows Kinsey as a scientist obsessed by his work. Before he began cataloging human sexual behavior, he collected and studied a million gall wasps, and in both cases he observed, recorded, and reported what he found. Nobody got mad about the wasps.

"He had an extraordinary manner when he conducted interviews," Neeson told me. This was one night in October, when we had dinner after he introduced "Kinsey" at the Chicago International Film Festival. "He devised his questions over two or three years, and it took his research assistants a year to learn them; there was a minimum of 288 questions and a maximum of 800, and they had to memorize them all.

"I gather he could be brusque and cold, but in his interviews, he exuded warmth, and he was absolutely non-judgmental when asking people the most personal questions about sexuality. Apparently people came out of the room feeling charged in some way, having gone through some extraordinary spiritual process by being honest about themselves. Kinsey did nearly 8,000 interviews, and the whole team did 18,000 over a period of 18 to 20 years."

For Neeson, "Kinsey" was a chance to play another character like his famous Michael Collins or Oskar Schindler: "I love people with so much energy and commitment that sleep gets in the way of their destiny."

The fascinating thing about Kinsey, he said, was that "he asked people the most intimate, probing questions without any sense he might be offending or even bothering them. That actually allowed some of his subjects to relax, because he seemed so dispassionate."

He was bullheaded, Neeson said, and he upset people: "They were looking for a way to shut him down. The McCarthy era was starting, and after they finished with the communists, of course they went for Kinsey."

In the movie, Kinsey is so focused as to seem monomaniacal. He got into trouble with congressional critics and lost his funding from the Rockefeller Foundation because he bluntly said what he believed without the slightest regard for public relations.

"Kinsey was intent on separating science from morality," Bill Condon told me during the same dinner. He wrote and directed the film, his first since directing "Gods and Monsters" (1998) and writing "Chicago" (2002). "You have to do that when you study sex, because it's so connected to religion, culture and people's idea of morality. If you look around today, whether it's sex education or the stem cell debate, people are trying to impose an agenda on something that should be entirely scientific."

Condon said he gets unhappy when people say that Kinsey "believed" or "thought" something: "He drew his conclusions from actual research. It wasn't an opinion."

Although Kinsey's critics blame him for changes in the sexual climate, "he would have been horrified by the gay movement or the women's movement. These were movements that in some ways he created, but he didn't believe in people defining themselves simply by sexual activity."

He felt sexual definitions were "pretty fluid, anyway," Condon said, with most people falling somewhere along Kinsey's famous 0-to-6 scale from straight to gay.

The AP story quotes Tom Neven of Focus on the Family, a Colorado ministry: "To say that [the movie] is rank propaganda for the sexual revolution and the homosexual agenda would be beyond stating the obvious."

Condon's opinion: "I think it's nice to remind people that Kinsey was first and foremost a scientist. He's become such a hot-button figure and a demon for some. Certain groups think if they can somehow discredit the man, the science will be discredited, and therefore everything that's come as a result of that science will be undone. That's a fool's errand."

The Sex Positive Agenda (of which the Homosexual Agenda is just a battering ram against society's laws and morals) must be exposed and understood by everyone.

Check the links/text here (preserved for posterity):

www.allaboutsex.org

The All About Sex website is sad to announce that the site is now closed and the page you are looking for is no longer on this web server.
We apologize for any inconvenience or disappointment and are listing a number of excellent resources for teens and parents about sex and sexuality at the bottom of this page. This was a difficult decision reached after months of contemplation and we realize that many people will be unhappy about it. Many sites shut down across the Internet every day, usually due to poor response or not being able to turn a profit, but this is not the case with All About Sex. On the contrary, the success and popularity of this site since 1997 has been nothing short of phenomenal and we appreciate all the positive sentiment - it should be clear to any sex educator or parent familiar with this site that kids want and need open, honest and non-judgmental answers to their sex and sexuality-related questions, and that if such a forum is provided to them, they will flourish with it and ask questions they wouldn't be comfortable asking anywhere else. Rather than the days when talking about sex was only done in whispers and biology class, today's kids have so many more options for exploring the subject of sex, and, frankly, their own sexual interests. When AAS started, there was only one other site that had anything positive to say to kids about sex, but now there are many, many sites with excellent, open and honest information about sex.
However, being so successful has a negative side as well, and keeping up with the popularity of the site and the work involved in maintaining the site and providing regular, fresh content, has become more than we can handle along with our obligations to our own families and employers. Expense has been another factor, although our host, Advances.com, has always worked with us to bring bandwidth expenses down, and this site has never been a profit-making site, and has never even taken donations. So, for a combinations of reasons, we are closing the site and hope everyone will understand. It has been a fantastic 7 years and we have been touched by so many of the fantastic regulars and kids who have poured out their hearts and souls talking about their sexual dilemmas, their happy and exciting first experiences, and their traumas and disappointments. Judging by the comments we frequently get, it seems that we've touched a few people's lives and been a positive force in general, and for that we are thankful. Some additional factors for those interested... (see comments about Tom DeLay below...)
Below are links to many other excellent resources for parents and for teens.
Very Sincerely, The owners and volunteers of All About Sex.org

One further note is that we would like to say a big thank you to the people who host this site, Advances.com. They have done so much to support this site and worked with us many times over the years to deal with increasing costs as we consumed more and more bandwidth. They are very socially conscious and have always been our biggest fans, and we could not have been so successful without them. Anyone looking for a place to host a site would do well to consider them. Click the logo below to visit Advances.Com now.
RESOURCES FOR TEENS AND PARENTS :
Advocates For Youth - Calls for politicians to "Respect Young People's Right To Be Responsible". Excellent site that has a section focusing on responsible sexual rights of adolescents, with excellent reading material about sex education elsewhere in the world and how it compares to the U.S.
gURL.com - A truly fantastic website created for girls that has an extensive area on sex and sexuality. They give honest, factual answers to girl's questions without pushing any ideology. They also have an excellent set of books for adolescent girls called the "Deal With It" series.
PFLAG Talk - Parents & Friends of Lesbian And Gay Youth - One of the most well-known and solid organizations available to gay, lesbian and bisexual youth - http://www.critpath.org/pflag-talk/
Being Girl.com - A really cool website created by the Tampax Corporation that talks about many sex-related issues (and has a sex-positive attitude), with a focus, of course, on the female body.
SexPedia - From the Discovery Channel's website, in the section focusing on sexual health, comes a 'encyclopedia' of sorts of sexual facts, from A to Z
The Coalition For Positive Sexuality ~ This site was the ONLY other site when we started that promoted a POSITIVE approach to adolescents and sex, and they helped make the AAS website so popular by being the first site to link to us! They have excellent instructions on condoms and other safe sex practices.
Ask Alice! - Now one of the most established and well-known resources available to people of all ages dealing with health, in general, and more specifically, sexuality and sexual health. It is run by Columbia University in New York and is very well done.
Like It Is! - The Brits Do Exactly That... They Truly Tell It Like It Really Is! No Political Agenda, No Religious Dogma, Just Honest And Open Conversation About Teen Sexuality, Discussed The Way It SHOULD Be In America (but isn't)
The Joys Of Teen Sex - Obviously, This Website Is Not In America... But It Is No Parody... It Is A Non-Politicized View On Teen Sex In The U.K., Where Adolescent Sexuality Is Considered... NORMAL (gasp!)
Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Condoms!! - A Fantastic Resource From The People At CONDOMANIA!
SIECUS - The Sexuality Information Education Council of the United States - A resource geared toward sex educators and parents.
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SOME ADDITIONAL FACTORS...
To be perfectly honest, there are other factors in our decision to shut down, and although those factors are a little embarrassing to admit, they are important enough that others need to know about them. Speaking now just for myself as the creator of this site and primary owner, I have had other things to consider in keeping AAS open the last year or so including the fact that I now have a wife to consider and a family of my own to start, and negative opinions about this site (even though we rarely hear any) no longer affect me alone. Also, sadly, the political climate in America has changed so dramatically since the Bush Administration and the Tom Delay Congress came to power that people no longer feel that they can speak out freely on controversial issues - especially if one is daring to disagree with the current political forces. Free Speech in America has been chilled by the Bush Administration in ways I did not think was possible in this country.
Obviously I am not a fan of President Bush - no secret there - but my dislike is not based on anything personal; it is based on the sweeping policy changes related to sex education and reproduction issues in area after area of our government. In order to push their religion-based idea that there should be no sexual activity outside of marriage (between a male and female only) they have issued Executive Orders and quietly issued new policies to department after department in the U.S. Government, and most recently has begun targeting for investigation organizations and websites speaking out against their "abstinence-only" programs and ideology. As much as I hate to admit it, this is very intimidating, especially for a couple of individuals who could be ruined, financially, just attempting to defend themselves against such an investigation, even if no wrong-doing is ever found. Below is a clip from a Salon.com article :

"Only a few weeks after No New Money went live last August, 24 House Republicans, led by Joseph Pitts, R-Pa., jotted off a letter to HHS Secretary Thompson asking that both SIECUS and Advocates for Youth (which was listed on the site along with more than a hundred other 'supporting organizations') be investigated."

And that is just one small example of what the political climate has become... SIECUS is now under further vicious attack by Republicans in Congress and a score of Religious Right groups. Keep in mind that SIECUS has been writing the sex education curricula for public and private schools in America since 1964 and is hardly a "controversial" group. To get a better idea of exactly what is going on, you can read the complete last article posted on the AAS site in December 2003. You can also visit the SIECUS website for the latest news.
On the up-side, All About Sex has never taken grant money to operate and there was nothing illegal on this site. However, neither of these organizations are anywhere close to being as controversial as some of the content on this website and we cannot afford the high-powered attorneys they can in defending themselves.
In past rulings about Free Speech by the United States Supreme Court they have talked about situations like what the Congress and Bush Administration is doing and said that such intimidation and censorship "chills" the air for those speaking out against government policies. This is what our elected officials are doing - and will keep doing until the American public decide's they've had enough. Well, the way I see it, when it comes to talking honestly and openly about teens and sexuality in North America, it has gotten downright freezing, and is likely to remain that way until a new, less conservative Administration is voted in. And American children will be the ones paying the price for years to come.
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Below is the full text of the final news article posted on the AAS site. We believe it to be important enough to keep in circulation despite closing the site.
Oct. 28, 2003
Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, condoms: George W. Bush has a lot of enemies.
And the question is finally starting to be asked, just what steps is his administration willing to take in order to silence them? Network anchormen and coffee-break pundits alike were abuzz over the did-they-or-didn't-they CIA leak scandal. But the outing of Valerie Plame isn't the only instance where the federal government has been suspected of using its resources in direct, if somewhat sneaky, retaliation against its political opponents. Ruining the lives of CIA agents may make for dynamic headlines, but recent evidence shows that the Bush administration also has much smaller fish to fry.
Take Advocates for Youth, a national nonprofit organization that provides teens with accurate and informative sex education. In 18 years as a federal grantee, it has never been subjected to a government financial audit. That is, until it was suddenly hit with three in less than a year (one by the Centers for Disease Control back in October 2002, a second by the General Accounting Office in early 2003, and the third just two months ago, by a different arm of the CDC). The organization is crying conspiracy -- saying that it's being unfairly targeted because of its negative views toward the administration's abstinence-only education policies -- and the claims appear to be more than just paranoia.
In July 2001 the Washington Post published a leaked memo from the Department of Health and Human Services in which Advocates for Youth was described as "ardent critics of the Bush administration." This charge apparently came as the result of several Advocates for Youth press releases that railed against the president's backing of the "global gag rule" that prohibited any funding to foreign agencies that performed or facilitated abortions. In the leaked memo, it was also suggested that the Advocates for Youth programs did not go over well with the HHS because "the secretary [Tommy Thompson] is a devout Roman Catholic."
While Advocates for Youth may be near the top of Tommy Thompson's Most Wanted list, it is certainly not alone. After a group of activists booed Thompson at an international AIDS conference in Barcelona last year, a cadre of congressional Republicans called for investigations of the hecklers' various organizations. The CDC has conducted three reviews in the past 10 months of San Francisco's STOP AIDS program in an effort to make sure that none of its federal grant dollars have gone toward funding workshops that may promote sexual activity. And the New York-based Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) has been audited twice this year (its first audits ever, despite a decade of receiving federal grants), evidently because it created No New Money for Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs, a Web site designed to educate the public about the possible dangers of abstinence-only education and to call for grassroots campaigns against the continued funding of these programs.
So far, Advocates for Youth, STOP AIDS and SIECUS have come through all of their audits with flying colors. But last year, as it turns out, a number of federal grantees were found guilty of misusing their government money. They were faith-based organizations.
Louisiana, a number of sex-education programs funded by Gov. Mike Foster's Program on Abstinence were found guilty in a federal court of openly violating the constitutional tenet of separation of church and state. The American Civil Liberties Union sued the governor's program after discovering numerous violations, including the use of grant money to teach abstinence through scripture, to perform skits with Christ as a character, to purchase Bibles, and to fund prayer vigils at abortion clinics. Though those Louisiana nonprofits are now required to turn in regular reports to the governor about their activities, none, to date, have been put before an HHS audit.
"Our complaint is not with getting audited," says Advocates' president James Wagoner. "Our complaint is with the selective and political nature of these audits. Ideology is invading -- if not subverting -- science within the Department of Health and Human Services [which houses the CDC], and we ended up on the audit table because we are one of the organizations pointing that out."
Advocates for Youth has continually stood behind its time-tested, research-backed policy of comprehensive sex education and HIV prevention, as opposed to adopting the Bush-backed method of abstinence-only education. Through its varied and numerous programs -- ranging from peer counseling and educator training to the creation of lesson plans and instructional videos -- Advocates for Youth has worked nationally and internationally to, as their mission statement reads, "help young people make informed and responsible decisions about their sexual and reproductive health." This includes providing them with information about contraceptives as well as abstinence and brings with it a sensitivity toward all forms of sexuality.
Comprehensive sex education has, for years, had the backing of the scientific community as an excellent preventive measure against teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Its proponents -- the American Medical Association, the National Institutes of Health, and the American Academy of Pediatrics among them -- will point to studies in publications such as the American Journal of Public Health, the Journal of Adolescent Health and the Journal of School Health, to back up their claims.
Support for the other side comes mostly from non-science sources, like Robert Rector of the conservative Heritage Foundation. In a much quoted April 2002 diatribe against comprehensive sex education, Rector cited a study from the Journal of the American Medical Association to back up his claims that abstinence-only programs work. He pointed out that the results of this study showed that teens who take "virginity pledges" exhibited a delay in their initiation of sexual activity. He failed to include, however, information from that same study that also reported that virginity pledges did not work for children under 14 or over 17; that they didn't work in communities where more than 30 percent of the teens took the pledge; and that teens who broke their pledges were far less likely to use contraception.
There is a clear lack of scientific data to back up the efficacy of abstinence-only programs, yet they have the full and complete support of the federal government. Hence James Wagoner's fears about ideology interfering with public health.
Wagoner is not the first one to charge the CDC with manipulating science for ideological purposes. In 1992, the CDC posted a page on its Web site listing sex-education "Programs That Work" from around the country that had curricula proven to be effective. All of the cited programs were comprehensive and included information about both abstinence and contraception; none were abstinence-only programs. Despite repeated outcries from proponents of abstinence-only, the list remained intact. That is, until George W. Bush came into office.
That Web page has vanished from the CDC's site, as have positive statements about condom use. Research results showing that abortions have no definitive link to breast cancer were taken off the National Cancer Institute's Web site, which is part of HHS. And now with these suspiciously motivated audits, it appears that HHS has graduated from simply hiding scientific information that offends the religious right, to retaliating against groups that disseminate that information.
There are three streams of revenue from which the federal government has chosen to award grant money to abstinence-only education programs: the Adolescent Family Life Act, started by President Reagan in 1981; the Welfare Reform Act of 1996; and the newly developed Special Programs of Regional and National Significance, which puts federal money directly into the hands of community-based organizations. All of these initiatives share a strictly delineated eight-point definition of "abstinence-only" that any program must meet to receive funding. Basically, this amounts to teens being taught that the only way to avoid pregnancy or STDs is to abstain from any and all sexual activity until marriage. For a program to comply with the eight-point definition, it must teach students that "a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of sexual activity." Teachers in these programs are not allowed to endorse the use of condoms or other forms of contraception. However, they are apparently allowed to use instructional texts containing lines such as, "Is it fair to make a baby die because of a bad decision his or her parents made?" and "What if a girl came to school in a crop top, just barely covering her bra, and shorts starting three inches below her navel? What 'game' would she be playing?"
The abstinence-only drive was labeled a priority for HHS almost immediately after George W. Bush stepped into office. Starting in 2002, Congress has granted more than $100 million each year to organizations that sponsor abstinence-only programs; the average spending on these programs during the Clinton administration was about $60 million a year. Currently the only avenue through which organizations supporting comprehensive sex education can acquire federal grants is the Department of Adolescent Sexual Health, a division of the CDC that offers money strictly for HIV/AIDS prevention and gives out approximately $10 million a year divided among more than 40 organizations.
SIECUS' No New Money Web site urges people to contact their representatives and demand that funding to abstinence-only programs be stopped. That call to arms is what provided all the fodder the right wing needed to begin its retribution.
Only a few weeks after No New Money went live last August, 24 House Republicans, led by Joseph Pitts, R-Pa., jotted off a letter to HHS Secretary Thompson asking that both SIECUS and Advocates for Youth (which was listed on the site along with more than a hundred other "supporting organizations") be investigated. The letter pointed out that current law forbids the use of grant money for lobbying and explained that this group of congressional representatives just wanted to be absolutely sure no government dollars had gone into the construction or maintenance of No New Money. "I requested the audit of Advocates for Youth because I was concerned that the group was using taxpayer money to engage in political activities, not to help people," Pitts said in an e-mail to Salon. "And I intend to continue keeping an eye on how taxpayer money is spent, both here in Washington and by private groups."
Pitts has eagerly taken on a crusade against what he has called the "waste of taxpayer money." In a statement last month on his official Web site, he even called for an investigation into the spending practices of the NIH, suggesting that funding should perhaps be pulled from the venerable institution if it could not "provide a clear accounting and explanation for how it spends taxpayer money." He voiced his fears about "government agencies engaged in clearly useless activities" and illustrated this with examples from the NIH, such as research on female sexual arousal, gays and lesbians in the Native American community, and methods for better promotion of the morning-after pill. He insists that he is "not criticizing the objectives of these studies" but is "questioning the wisdom of using taxpayer resources to engage in research that has, at best, spurious benefits to our nation."
It isn't difficult to find a pattern in the type of programs that Pitts has targeted for possible defunding: The two specific Advocates for Youth programs that are funded by federal grant money -- and that are therefore at risk of being shut down by the findings of these audits -- are HIV prevention for young women of color and HIV prevention for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender youth.
Pitts happens to be an ardent supporter of providing federal funding to faith-based charities. ("Rather than preempt these organizations with a government program that would never be as effective, we want to partner with them," he said in a September press release.) It shouldn't be too hard to see why groups like Advocates are feeling singled out.
The letter about No New Money that Pitts and his colleagues sent to HHS was cited to both Advocates for Youth and SIECUS as the impetus for all of their audits thus far. Strangely, CDC itself seems somewhat confused about exactly what they've been doing to these nonprofits, both of which were given the disclaimer that the investigations they went through in September were not audits. "In this case, CDC does not have official audit authority," explained CDC spokesperson Kathryn Harben. "So what we're doing is referred to as a 'business and financial review evaluation.'"
However, Enrique Tessada, president of Tessada & Associates, the independent firm contracted by the CDC to perform its most recent "business and financial reviews," wrote in his company's Spring 2003 newsletter that his staff was "auditing community-based organizations... [that] receive grants to conduct HIV/AIDS prevention and training nationwide."
Semantics aside, no one can disguise the fact that, regardless of results, these audits can have a punitive effect on nonprofits. "Each one of these rounds costs our organization enormous amounts of time and money," says Wagoner. "In many ways it can grind you to a halt if you have to go back through every book, pull every piece of paper, and so on."
When asked why Advocates and SIECUS were being subjected to so many reviews in such a short period of time, Harben said she thinks "it was really more poor planning [on the government's part] than anything else." When asked if every grantee organization was equally subject to CDC review, Harben said that "the history of that is probably not consistent." She also indicated that the reviews "could take anywhere from a couple of days to four or five days," but the groups under investigation report a lengthier time commitment. Preparation included, Advocates for Youth says it lost almost four weeks to its last audit, and SIECUS about two weeks.
"If they can't bury our heads in the sand about abstinence-only," says Wagoner, "they're going to try to bury our organization in audits."
Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., fearing an abuse of federal audit power, has emerged as Advocates for Youth's greatest defender in this struggle. He and a contingent of 11 other congressional Democrats have voiced their concerns about the motivation behind these audits in letters to Tommy Thompson. In those letters they ask that HHS provide information about its auditing criteria in order "to determine whether there is sound scientific foundation for HHS' actions." Waxman's first letter received a response that was both delayed and abbreviated and left most of his questions unanswered. His follow-up letter, sent on Aug. 14 and requesting answers by Aug. 29, has yet to receive any response.
While attempting to get a response out of Tommy Thompson has become a Sisyphean task for Henry Waxman, it appears that all Joseph Pitts needs to do is mutter something under his breath and HHS will jump into action. On Oct. 2, Pitts and his Republican posse presented a list of 150 scientists whose work is funded by NIH grants, including some of those whose projects he questioned on his Web site. The NIH has already begun calling these blacklisted researchers, some of whom have contacted Waxman to tell him that they fear the loss of their funding. Waxman has picked up his pen once again, and on Monday demanded that Thompson take a stand and denounce this "scientific McCarthyism."
The true danger is, as Waxman says, "that some organizations will stop offering comprehensive education programs as a result of these audits, causing public health to suffer." That is also the biggest fear of Advocates for Youth. "This is not about the left vs. the right," says Deb Mauser, Advocates' vice president. "It's about what works at keeping young people safe and healthy. It's a human right to have effective science-based strategies available to young people who are facing an [AIDS] epidemic. Ultimately, Advocates [which receives only a third of its total funding from government grants] will survive. Whether young people will get the service they deserve is questionable."
"On one level, we feel vindicated by the audit process," says Wagoner, "but on another, we can not deny the impact of this kind of tool being used on nonprofits, and not just the intimidation on a group like ours -- we're going to wake up in the morning, come to the office, do the work we're always going to do -- but there's the residual intimidation of other organizations in this field. There are lots of them that get government money, that don't have diversified funds. And they may look at Advocates and say, 'There but for the grace of God go I. And if it's because Advocates is raising concerns about the subverting of science and research, if it's because they're raising their heads up a little too high, well, that tells us we'd better keep ours down real low.'
"You cannot convince me that this campaign isn't aimed at making an example out of us for the rest of this field," he continues. "My only hope is that it backfires, that those who have committed their lives to this field and to young people or to any other group that needs good quality public health -- we will not take it lying down. We will go back to work. We will do what's right."

About the writer
Christopher Healy's writing has appeared in the Washington Post, Teen People, and "Out of the Ordinary: Essays on Growing Up With Gay, Lesbian and Transgender Parents."

NOTE: This article was reprinted here after being submitted to us by James Waggoner of Advocates For Youth.

They are against abstinence, because much as the homosexuals claim, to deny sexual desires is "unhealthy". They want children to be sexually active in whatever way they wish to express themselves (including ALL manner of activity).

The Sex Positive Agenda makes no moral decisions, whether the question is homosexuality, incest, persons below the age of consent (with others their age, younger/older, even "adult"), beastiality. Only rape (non-consensual sex) seems to get their attention as something "bad" although rape fantasies are okay by them.

There is no "age appropriate" activity. If they try it, it is appropriate. Much as the ALA's stance is on anything in the library (including items that stores could only legally sell to adults).

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