In the end, advocates of both comprehensive sex education and abstinence-only want to discourage teenagers from having sex. "The problem with abstinence-only until marriage is not the 'abstinence,' it's the 'only until marriage' part," says Wagoner. "Public health should be guided by what works. The last thing we need is politicians grandstanding as moralists, because it ends up delivering bad health for young people. These programs are prohibited from providing information about condoms or contraception for the prevention of pregnancy or disease."

That's true even if a teenager in the program tells the instructor that he or she is already having unprotected sex. Clearly, such teenagers endanger themselves if they remain ignorant about safe sex, but abstinence educators say that giving advice about condoms would cloud their absolute condemnation of premarital sex. Besides, it's prohibited under the terms of government grants.

"We don't tell them, 'If you're going to have sex, go ahead and use this,'" says Charles Eaddy, project coordinator for Metro Atlanta Youth for Christ's abstinence program. "We're specifically restricted from doing that by law, and it would not be consistent with the spirit of the program. We really encourage you not to do this thing."

Last year, Metro Atlanta Youth for Christ received a federal grant of $363,936 a year for three years, doubling its budget. The group has used the money to hire three "abstinence educators." These educators aren't required to have any specific credentials in public health. They do, however, have to be Christian, because Metro Atlanta Youth for Christ won't employ people who aren't.

Other federal grantees include Bethany Christian Services -- listed on the Department of Health and Human Services Web site as Bethany Crisis Pregnancy Services -- which bills itself as a "not-for-profit, pro-life, Christian adoption and family services agency," and A Woman's Concern, a crisis pregnancy center in Boston. None of the 2003 grants went to Jewish or Muslim groups. Not that many Jewish groups are applying -- the Central Conference of American Rabbis, which represents the Rabbis of Reform Judaism, the country's largest denomination, passed a resolution in 2001 calling for comprehensive sex education and rejecting government funds for abstinence-only programs.

While Christian abstinence-only groups are enjoying federal largesse, many medical organizations with expertise in protecting children from AIDS are ineligible. Chicago's Children's Memorial Hospital Section for Pediatric, Adolescent and Maternal HIV Infection, which does outreach and education in colleges and high schools in at-risk areas of the city, relies on private donations to finance its teaching. According to Tom Foster, the section's academic manager, teaching abstinence isn't an option. "What I've heard from the very beginning is that abstinence doesn't work, especially for our target market, high-risk adolescents," he says.

The Centers for Disease Control used to agree. "Until recently, a CDC initiative called 'Programs That Work' identified sex-education programs that have been found to be effective in scientific studies and provided this information through its web site to interested communities," says a report on the Web site of U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. "In 2002, all five 'Programs That Work' provided comprehensive sex education to teenagers, and none were 'abstinence-only.' In the last year, and without scientific justification, CDC has ended this initiative and erased information about these proven sex education programs from its web site."

Waxman has been so outraged by Bush's manipulation of science that he's set up a Web site called Politics & Science to chronicle it. As Politics & Science shows, "Programs That Work" isn't the only government health document that's been scrubbed. "In October 2002, CDC replaced a comprehensive online fact sheet about condoms with one lacking crucial information on condom use and efficacy," says Waxman's site. "Like the CDC, the State Department's Agency for International Development (USAID) has censored its Web site to remove information on the effectiveness of condoms."

Conservatives hope that by challenging the idea of safe sex, they can encourage Americans to change their louche ways. In the meantime, though, whether the right likes it or not, Americans aren't waiting until marriage to have sex. Thus abstinence-only programs and the censorship of information about condoms ignore the needs of the majority of the population. By age 18, Wagoner says, 70 percent of young people in the United States have had sexual intercourse. "What relevance do these programs have to young people when they stress abstinence until marriage? Less than 10 percent of Americans are virgins on their wedding night," he says. Of course, that's exactly what many proponents of abstinence-only education want to change. They argue that by accepting and accommodating this unwholesome state of affairs, sex educators only encourage it. Traditional sex educators "make a fundamental assumption that the vast majority [of kids] are going to have sex and that therefore the job of sex education is to prepare them for that event," says Webb.

Instead, Webb says, educators should focus on preventing the "event" from happening before students are legally wed. That might seem unrealistic, but Webb believes that abstinence education can change the mores of an entire society. As evidence, he points to Uganda, which he calls "probably the best example of a long-term abstinence and character-based approach."

"You have a situation there where HIV/AIDS rates were as high as 30 percent," he says. "Those rates have been brought down to around 5 percent. It's the only country in the world that has significantly reduced the prevalence rate of HIV infection."

The idea that Uganda is an abstinence success story is popular on the right these days. The Heritage Foundation recently published a background paper that concluded that Uganda's experience shows that "[a]bstinence and marital fidelity appear to be the most important factors in preventing the spread of HIV/AIDS" and "[c]ondoms do not play the primary role in reducing HIV/AIDS transmission."

As the Heritage Foundation acknowledges, though, Uganda used a so-called ABC approach. "A" stands for abstinence, "B" for "be faithful," and "C" for condoms -- a formula very similar to that espoused by most comprehensive sex educators in this country. A report from the Alan Guttmacher Institute, one of the country's leading sexuality research organizations, says that Uganda benefited from "a range of complementary messages and services delivered by the government and a wide diversity of nongovernmental organizations. To be sure, those messages included the importance of both young people delaying sexual initiation and 'zero grazing' (monogamy). But contrary to the assertions of social conservatives that the case of Uganda proves that an undiluted 'abstinence-only' message is what makes the difference, there is no evidence that abstinence-only educational programs were even a significant factor in Uganda between 1988 and 1995."

That hasn't stopped conservatives from trying to export the abstinence-only messages to countries that receive American aid. A recent law mandates that one-third of U.S. assistance to fight AIDS globally be used for abstinence education. "In effect, this makes 'abstinence-until-marriage' advocacy the single most important HIV/AIDS prevention intervention of the U.S. government," says the Guttmacher report.

Meanwhile, the U.S. is trying to force its anti-condom agenda on the rest of the world. As Politics & Science reported, in December 2002, "the U.S. delegation at the Asian and Pacific Population Conference sponsored by the United Nations attempted to delete endorsement of 'consistent condom use' as a means of preventing HIV infection. U.S. delegates took this position on the grounds that recommending condom use would promote underage sex."

As Waxman's site points out, there's no scientific basis for this. "Contrary to these U.S. claims, scientific studies have shown that comprehensive sex education delays the onset of sexual activity," it says. It's not surprising, though, that the administration would assert otherwise. "In pushing an 'abstinence only' agenda," Politics & Science says, "the Bush Administration has consistently distorted the scientific evidence about what works in sex education."

Some in the administration may secretly agree. In a 2002 story, Newsweek quoted a top Bush adviser who dismissed the data showing that the only effective sex education programs are those that teach both abstinence and contraception.

"Values trumps data," the adviser said.

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