Probably bad news for Rick Perry and his state’s abstinence-only approach to sex-ed: according to a study by the University of Texas’ Health Sciences Center at Houston, about one in ten Texas sixth graders have had sex. If that seems like a lot of precocious preteens to you, imagine how frighteningly large the proportion seems to the stalwart sex-educators of Texas, some of whom, according to HuffPo, employ such cutting-edge teaching tools as biblical short answer questions. Forget for a moment how much you hate short answer tests because they make your hands cramp, and consider instead that using the Bible to teach kids about sex is sort of the same as using a textbook that’s a couple thousand years out of date, except that isn’t so much a textbook as a collection of occasionally apocryphal parables. Oh, and it’s loaded with all kinds of inconsistently taboo sex like incest.
This most recent study, published Monday in the Journal of Applied Research on Children, comes after a 2010 study by the Guttmacher Institute that similarly found that Texas youth were “disproportionately represented” in respect to the nation’s teen birth and pregnancy rates. Most alarming is that Texas girls are at much higher risk for sexually-transmitted diseases (probably because they’ve largely been denied access to health care, contraceptives, and accurate information) and that the teen pregnancy rate, already at 63.1 per 1000 women ages 15-19, is rising. The study authors write,
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