Your Tax Dollars At Work, Sex Ed Edition

When we said Washington was filled with a bunch of clowns, we weren’t kidding. The latest to feed at the abstinence-only gravy train is Derek Dye, “comedic juggler” who’s also a “certified abstinence educator,” which turns out to be as bogus as “life coaching.” (With all due respect to the life coaches out there, I just don’t get what you people do ...)

Thanks to George W. Bush and a complicit Congress, we currently spend $1.5 billion a year to fund abstinence-only until marriage sex education in our public schools. And yes, that money goes to people like Derek Dye, as he is employed by the Elizabeth New Life Center that received a $800,000 CBAE grant in 2007 to promote abstinence until marriage. His qualifications? A “Bachelor of Fun Arts” from Barnum Bailey Clown College, and an abstinence educator certification that can be purchased for $50.

ThinkProgress has a YouTube clip of Dye’s act. His basic message seems to be, if you have sex before you’re married, smoke, drink or use drugs, your life will be ruined. And balancing a ladder on his chin and juggling machetes is supposed to illustrate that somehow.

I don’t get it. This message is supposed to be stronger than raging teenage hormones? Get real, people.

Grand Old Tradition

More things I did not know.

According to this article on “tearoom trysts,” men have sought out anonymous homosexual sex in bathrooms for decades:

ST. LOUIS — Back in the 1960s, long before a U.S. senator got busted for lewd behavior in an airport bathroom, it was called "the tearoom trade."

But social researchers knew almost nothing about it.

So a young graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis started digging. He spent months hanging out in the public restrooms of St. Louis' Forest Park. He wanted to observe the tearoom trade in action: men who met for brief, anonymous homosexual trysts in public. He wanted to discover what compelled them.

The interesting thing is that many of the men participating in this activity are not, in fact, gay. In fact, it seems there’s something else going on here:

Humphreys found that 54 percent of the men were married and living with their wives. He found 38 percent considered themselves neither bisexual nor homosexual. The men wanted a sexual release that was quick and would not endanger their standing with their family or society. Just 14 percent of the men identified themselves as living-in-the-open homosexuals.
....
Humphreys coined the term "breastplate of righteousness" to describe men who used the cloak of social and political conservatism to conceal their deviant behavior.

This is very interesting. I had no idea that research into this behavior goes back to the 1960s, or that the research suggests there really is a connection between conservatism and the compulsion to act out in this way.

Any guys out there want to weigh in on this one? Have you seen anything like this? How common is it to get approached in public bathrooms, anyway?