THE TIMES HYPES DANGEROUS RIGHT-WING VIRGINITY STUDY

Today's Times front-pages a report on new studies by the oh-so-conservative Heritage Foundation claiming "young people who took virginity pledges had lower rates of acquiring sexually transmitted diseases and engaged in fewer risky sexual behaviors." This is nonsense -- in an article last year for the L.A. Weekly on the Bush administration's war on the condom, I cited "a Minnesota Department of Health study of the state’s five-year, abstinence-only program, which found last year that sexual activity by students taking the program actually doubled, from 5.8 percent to 12.4 percent."

My old friend Ken Sherrill, chair of the Political Science Department at Hunter College, immediately fired off an outraged letter to the Times (a copy of which he sent me), saying: "The Times' headline neglects to identify the ideological bias of the sponsors of this study and the story buries the fact that this 'study' has yet to be peer-reviewed to see if it meets professional standards. Perhaps the Times is finding its own way of becoming fair and balanced."

The Times article was by the paper's medical correspondent, Lawrence Altman, whose dreadful coverage of AIDS at the height of the epidemic in America was considered complicitous by the AIDS community. The Times continues its blindness and distortions on AIDS even today. Remember how, when Ronald Reagan died, its obituary of him failed to mention the word AIDS even once? And, last year, I did an article for The Nation on how "Bush's AIDS Hypocrisy Cons the New York Times." In that article, I cited another study completely contradicting the Heritage Foundation's fantasy the Times celebrates today: "A study by Columbia University department of sociology chairman Peter Bearman followed the lives of 12,000 adolescents from 12 to 18 years old over a five-year period. Released in March, and partially funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the study found that while 59 percent of teenage males who did not pledge abstinence used a condom during sex, only 40 percent of abstinence-pledging boys used a condom. Bearman [said] that telling teens 'to 'just say no' without understanding risk or how to protect oneself from risk turns out to create greater risk' of HIV and other STDs."

By giving such play and credence today to this mendacious and unscientific Heritage study, the Times is encouraging the myth that abstinence-only sex ed and virginity pledges help stop the spread of AIDS and STDs -- when, in fact, the reverse is true. Shameful.