Silver Rings don't work

The January issue of Pediatrics, a US medical journal,has a report telling us what we’ve always known. The $176 million pumped by the Bush administration into godbothering ‘abstinence only’ sex education was wasted.
The ‘Silver Ring Thing’ pisses public funds down the drain, and that’s official.
"Taking a pledge doesn't seem to make any difference at all in any sexual behavior," said the report’s author, Janet E. Rosenbaum of the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. "But it does seem to make a difference in condom use and other forms of birth control that is quite striking."
In fact, only 24% of kids who undergo such evangelical brainwashing will then go on to use condoms, compared to 34% of kids who never suffer the courses.
Rosenbaum, in effect, says that problem is down to the misinformation silver ringers get.
"There's been a lot of work that has found that teenagers who take part in abstinence-only education have more negative views about condoms," she said. "They tend not to give accurate information about condoms and birth control."
She also found 82% of those who took the pledge dropped out, and there was no significant difference in the proportion of students in both groups who had engaged in any type of sexual activity, including giving or receiving oral sex, vaginal intercourse, the age at which they first had sex, or their number of sexual partners. More than half of both groups engaged in various types of sexual activity anyway.
You can find a good outline of the report at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/28/AR2008122801588.html?hpid=topnews
Predictably, godbotherers tried to diss the findings, intimating the difference is down to a different kind of youth being attracted to the Silver Ring idea.
So thick people go to church, fuck around behind each other's backs then get more unplanned kids and STDs. What else is new?
Now let’s see some research into the other diversions of US public money into church propagandising. Drug and alcohol ‘education’, probation services, childcare, homelessness…..the list of offences and offenders is endless.Time to get the facts into the open.
We’re starting to see the problems caused by this nonsense in the UK and Isle of Man. It is time to nip it in the bud before more people die and more kids grow up in the misery caused by religious bigotry.