By Linda Lutton
The Pure Love Alliance is one of a growing number of abstinence groups that package traditional values in presentations oozing with pop culture. In April, Project Reality, an abstinence-only education group based in the northern suburbs, held its annual rally at the UIC Pavilion. Ten thousand middle and high school students watched skits, heard testimony from sports heroes and a former Miss Black California, and jammed to hip-hop music that all said the same thing: wait for the wedding bells.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Jenny Knauss, executive director of the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, thinks curricula like PLA’s, which are growing rapidly as political support grows for abstinence-only education, will have grave consequences. “What they’re saying is that you shouldn’t even talk about condoms. If kids are going to be abstinent, that’s great. But if they stop being abstinent they need to know how to protect themselves. Young people need to learn both things. After being in abstinence-only education and no comprehensive health education for a couple of years, when kids finally decide to have sex they don’t know how to use a condom properly. It’s a very big policy issue.”
Knauss says the Pure Love Alliance curriculum–which the PLA calls CLUE 2000, for “Creating Love and Uplifting Esteem”–is “the worst of its kind.” She says it not only provides information that’s medically inaccurate but also portrays single parents negatively, teaches kids to accept rigid gender roles within the family, encourages unquestioning obedience to authority, and discourages critical thinking.
“It’s basically about fear and shame,” says Laura McAlpine, policy director of the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health. “It’s fear, which is all that misleading medical information, and then it’s shame–it’s all this very heavy moral preaching about how you’re failing society, you’re failing your family, and you shouldn’t be doing this.”
The Pure Love Alliance didn’t pull its curriculum out of a hat. It follows, at times nearly verbatim, an eight-point abstinence-only-until-marriage provision tucked into the 1996 federal welfare reform bill. The legislation allocated $50 million a year for five years to groups teaching “abstinence education,” which it defined as educational or motivational programs that taught, among other things, “that a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity,” that “sexual behavior outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects,” and that “bearing children out of wedlock is likely to have harmful consequences for the child, the child’s parent and society.” Congress must reauthorize the bill in 2002; the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health, along with groups such as Planned Parenthood, is organizing to oppose reauthorization.
Chicago’s public schools adopted a comprehensive sex education program in the mid-60s–it was one of the country’s first big-city school districts to do so. Kids in the seventh and eighth grades are taught what condoms are; high school students get demonstrations on how to use them. Yet throughout the 70s and 80s the teen pregnancy rate and the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases continued to rise. The pregnancy rate, both locally and nationally, has been going down since 1991, but the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases is still rising. And while the percentage of sexually active Chicago students dropped some in the mid-90s, it did increase slightly last year.
