Stimulated Avatars of Abandon

With evidence mounting that abstinence education helps prevent all of the maladies that government and school officials claim that they want to protect us from, these worthies are doing their utmost to give us…even more of the same policies that produced those outcomes in the first place. “Finally, why is it that public school students, who know so much more about sex than those dunces in the parochial schools, are precisely the ones walking around with the highest rates of illegitimacy, abortion and herpes?” Bill Donahue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, asks.

It’s a good question. He might find part of the answer in the stimulus bill. “The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), a division of the National Institutes of Health, is giving Dr. Lynn Fiellin, an assistant professor at the Yale School of Medicine, $3.9 million over five years to develop a video game to teach ‘sex, drug and alcohol negotiation and refusal skills’ to children 9-14 years of age” Terence P. Jeffrey, editor-in-chief of the Cybercast News Service reported on February 5, 2010. “The game will feature ‘virtual characters or avatars’ that are guided by the children playing the game to make decisions about whether to engage in behaviors that put them at risk of being infected with HIV.”

“The game’s effectiveness in training children to avoid HIV-transmitting behaviors will be tested by having children as young as 9 play the game two days a week for a month—either after school or on weekends—at a New Haven, Conn., community center.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.