Law Commons^™

Abstinence-Only Sex Education On Trial, Kendall W. Orton

Brigham Young University Prelaw Review

Title V abstinence-only sex education funds are used to fund programs that do not reduce sexual activity, STDs, or pregnancy in high school students, contrary to the purported goals of public school sexual education. This paper outlines the history and legal and social research regarding sexual education. It also argues that comprehensive sex education does not violate the Establishment clause or Free Exercise clause by applying the Lemon doctrine. This paper advocates that the United States government should only fund comprehensive sexual education models that have shown positive results and promote healthy attitudes about sex.

Sexuality Education, Eva Goldfarb, Norman A. Constantine

Department of Public Health Scholarship and Creative Works

Sexuality education comprises the lifelong intentional processes by which people learn about themselves and others as sexual, gendered beings from biological, psychological, and sociocultural perspectives. It takes place through a potentially wide range of programs and activities in schools, community settings, religious centers, as well as informally within families, among peers, and through electronic and other media. Sexuality education for adolescents occurs in the context of the biological, cognitive, and social-emotional developmental progressions and issues of adolescence. Formal sexuality education falls into two main categories: behavior change approaches, which are represented by abstinence-only and abstinence-plus models, and healthy sexual development …

Teaching Values, Teaching Stereotypes: Sex Ed And Indoctrination In Public Schools, Jennifer S. Hendricks

College of Law Faculty Scholarship

Many sex education curricula currently used in public schools indoctrinate students in gender stereotypes. As expressed in the title of one article: “If You Don’t Aim to Please, Don’t Dress to Tease,” and Other Public School Sex Education Lessons Subsidized by You, the Federal Taxpayer (Jennifer L. Greenblatt, 14 TEX. J. ON C.L. & C.R. 1 (2008)). Other lessons pertain not only to responsibility for sexual activity but to lifelong approaches to family life and individual achievement. One lesson, for example, instructs students that, in marriage, men need sex from their wives and women need financial support from their husbands. …

Beyond The Sex- Ed Wars: Addressing Disadvantaged Single Women’S Search For Community, Helen M. Alvare

helen m alvare

Abstract: Beyond the Sex-Ed Wars

By Helen M. Alvaré

There is bi-partisan alarm over recent reports that our nation’s nonmarital birth rate has reached nearly 40%. Policymakers worry not only about fiscal effects, but also about the welfare of children reared in single-parent households and the fact that marriage and childbearing patterns are beginning to diverge sharply on the basis of race and socioeconomic status. Yet there is little new in recent proposals to address the phenomenon. Supporters of abstinence-only sex education, and of “comprehensive” sex-education, continue to trade accusations. Federal and state agencies promise to work harder but intend …

Teaching Values, Teaching Stereotypes: Sex Ed And Indoctrination In Public Schools, Jennifer S. Hendricks

Jennifer S. Hendricks

Many sex education curricula currently used in public schools indoctrinate students in gender stereotypes. As expressed in the title of one article: “If You Don’t Aim to Please, Don’t Dress to Tease,” and Other Public School Sex Education Lessons Subsidized by You, the Federal Taxpayer (Jennifer L. Greenblatt, 14 TEX. J. ON C.L. & C.R. 1 (2008)). Other lessons pertain not only to responsibility for sexual activity but to lifelong approaches to family life and individual achievement. One lesson, for example, instructs students that, in marriage, men need sex from their wives and women need financial support from their husbands. …

Red Families V. Blue Families, Naomi R. Cahn, June Carbone

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The "culture wars," as they play out in high profile Supreme Court decisions and legislative fights over abortion and same-sex marriage, are first and foremost about family values. Central to these differences - and the focus of the article - is the fact that different families in different parts of the country are leading different lives. The one clear, organizing principle that distinguishes the two systems: age of family formation. The defining characteristic of what we term the "new middle class morality" is delay in family formation until the late twenties or early thirties. This new morality, which correlates more …

Abstinence-Only Adolescent Education: Ineffective, Unpopular And Unconstitutional, James J. Mcgrath

ExpressO

This article examines the recent changes in the funding of “abstinence only” educational programs that attempt to reduce the incidence of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Although funding for these programs was previously ruled to be facially constitutional, this is no longer the case as their lack of efficacy for their stated purpose has been exposed. Newer programs are in direct violation of unconstitutional conditions doctrine, and none of these programs address a significant segment of the student population, lesbian and gay students. My article addresses this oversight as dangerous public health policy as well as a potential constitutional …

The Sexual Regulation Dimension Of Contemporary Welfare Law: A Fifty State Overview, Anna Marie Smith

Michigan Journal of Gender & Law

In this article, Smith will attempt to demonstrate that welfare policy has become a prominent site of sexual regulation; that the rights of poor single mothers are at stake in this respect; and that given the precise structure of contemporary American welfare reform, we must pay especially close attention to the laws and regulations adopted at the state level. First, Smith will place contemporary sexual regulation-oriented welfare law in an historical context by considering its precedents in English and American public policy traditions (Part I). Using original qualitative analyses of the states' statutory codes and administrative regulations, Smith will then …