CALIFORNIA REP. HENRY WAXMAN'S REPORT last month on abstinence-only programs, in which his researchers found some curriculum errors, gave him an opportunity to (again) slam alleged weaknesses in President Bush's sex-education policy. Some in the mainstream media willingly played along.
Had journalists applied careful scrutiny to the source of the study, and some of the flawed assumptions in the study itself, they would have discovered the liberal Waxman's record of relentless partisanship on the issue over the last four years.
Yes, Waxman's workers discovered errors in some abstinence-only sex education textbooks. For example, one curriculum stated that 24 chromosomes each from the mother and father create a new human being. (The correct number is 23 for each.) Another curriculum falsely claimed that HIV can be spread among humans through sweat and tears, which is nearly impossible.
But abstinence education texts are hardly the only student sources rife with mistakes. Was Waxman equally indignant about the science book that identified singer Linda Ronstadt as a silicon crystal? Or the one that said the equator passes through the southern United States?
Meanwhile, the real story ought to be how Waxman has used his ranking minority position on the House Government Reform Committee as his personal whipcord against the Bush administration backside.
Check the history. Waxman assumed his current role on the Reform Committee in 1997, at the beginning of President Clinton's second term, two years after Republicans won control of the House. For those first four years Waxman determined that, during one of the most corrupt administrations in history, government reform should be restricted to concerns about tobacco industry ethics, guns, air pollution, and pharmaceutical companies. He issued 23 reports, investigations, announcements or studies during Clinton's last four years. None were critical of the then-president's policies or behavior.
But when January 2001 came, Waxman's almost-dormant inquisition machine powered to life. The House Reform Committee Minority Office generated more than 23 findings within the first six months of that year, with a revived interest in government, and less interests in liberal scapegoats like big tobacco.
The pace of activity has only increased since then. Every week the House Minority reformers deliver several press releases and reports that carry new allegations, suspicions, and criticisms about Bush administration activity. All the familiar subjects for liberal harangues are present: Enron, Halliburton, "disenfranchised" voters, executive pay, yellowcake uranium, arsenic levels in water, Abu Ghraib, inadequate AIDS research funding, flu vaccines, and prescription drug prices.
But the hysterical tone and irrationality of Waxman's minority committee has existed since he assumed control. One "special investigation" in October 2000 revealed that prices for breast cancer drugs were significantly higher for uninsured women on Long Island than they are for pharmaceutical companies' "preferred customers," like HMOs and the federal government. This practice, according to the committee Democrats, reveals discriminatory pricing. Waxman's researchers don't explain why HMOs and the government should pay more for drugs that they are purchasing for thousands, if not millions, of people.
With such penetrating studies, it's difficult to take anything Waxman produces out of the Reform Committee Minority Office seriously. And many of his findings in the abstinence education report, were absorbed by the media, even though they defied common sense. For example, in the face of several studies which reveal otherwise, Waxman claimed, "unlike comprehensive sex education, abstinence-only programs have not been shown to decrease rates of teen pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease."
Waxman also attempted to debunk one abstinence-only text's teachings that women who have had an abortion are more likely to have a premature birth with a subsequent child, and that 5 to 10 percent of women who have had abortions become sterile after an abortion. However, he uses only one obstetrics textbook to support his contrary view, and cites another in which the author says, "concerns about infertility as a result of induced abortion seem largely unfounded . . . " [emphasis added]--hardly a certainty.
Abstinence-only curricula, as with all textbooks, should provide dependable information and be scrutinized for errors. But when it comes to the findings of the House Government Reform Committee's Democrats, the mainstream press ought to abstain from reporting Waxman's wild-eyed claims, even though it might provide them a few moments of temporary pleasure.
Paul Chesser, a former Los Angeles resident, is an associate editor for the John Locke Foundation.
