I’ve got two very different points to make about this article :

It’s just a little bit of wording on a condom packet – so small that Justin Kleinman hadn’t noticed it until he squinted to read it recently.

“This is completely pointless,” the 24-year-old Chicagoan said of the warning telling him that, while condoms can help prevent the spread of some sexually transmitted diseases, there are no guarantees.

Even so, that tiny bit of print is at the center of a raging debate now that President Bush has asked the Food and Drug Administration to modify the current warning to include information about human papillomavirus, commonly called HPV or genital warts.

On one side are scientists who believe that condoms should be promoted as a crucial line of defense against several STDs and cervical cancer. On the other are groups that advocate waiting for sex until marriage, and who see the dangers of HPV as an argument for their cause.

“The lack of information getting to the American public regarding this disease is beyond comprehension,” said Linda Klepacki, manager of the abstinence policy department at Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based organization.

She and others point to research showing that condoms don’t necessarily prevent the spread of HPV, in part because it may be found on parts of the body the latex devices don’t cover. Abstinence is the best way to prevent the disease, she argues.

Adding that information to a condom label would be “truth in advertising,” said Libby Gray. She’s the director of Project Reality, an Illinois-based group that teaches public school students about abstinence – and notes that most students she speaks with have no idea what HPV is.

But scientists who study HPV worry that abstinence groups are dismissing important information to promote their own values.

Point One : What the hell is written on the label? This article is the only one I’ve seen about this and it doesn’t include the actual text of the warning. Didn’t anyone at the Associated Press think someone reading this article would at least like a quote from the warning??

Point Two : Since I can’t comment on this specific case, lemme just point out that abstinence education is completely worthless and this is just part of a larger pattern of Bush and co. dismantling sex education :

Over the past three years, Congress has appropriated over $100 million in grants to organizations that sponsor abstinence-only education. In November 2000, under the Clinton Administration, HHS developed meaningful, scientifically sound outcome measures to assess whether these programs achieved their intended purposes, including the ?proportion of program participants who have engaged in sexual intercourse? and the birth rate of female program participants.

In late 2001, however, the Bush Administration dropped these measures and replaced them with a set of standards that does not include any real outcomes. Rather than tracking pregnancy or sexual activity, these measures assess attendance and the attitudes of teens at the end of the education program, including the ?proportion of participants who indicate understanding of the social, psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from premarital sexual activity.?

Such standards are not scientifically valid. A 2001 review of scientific evidence concluded that ?adolescents? sexual beliefs, attitudes, and even intentions are . . . weak proxies for actual behaviors.? That is, even if teens pledge to remain abstinent, they may not actually do so. According to a major HHS-funded report, two ?hallmarks of good evaluation? in programs designed to reduce teen pregnancy rates are evaluations that ?[m]easure behaviors, not just attitudes and beliefs? and ?[c]onduct long-term follow-up (of at least one year).? However, the Bush Administration?s standards for measuring the success of abstinence-only programs contain no reports or assessments of actual behavior or health outcomes and do not require any minimum followup period.

The result is that the performance measures appear constructed to produce the appearance that scientific evidence supports abstinence-only programs when, in fact, the best evidence does not.

What’s next? Rolling back FDA standards and replacing them with the warning “the only guaranteed way to avoid food poisoning is to never, ever eat”? (Yes, I know this is very hyperbolic. There’s no need to point it out in comments)

But the obsession with abstinence education seems to point to an odd trend among conservatives : trying to fight complex problems with ideas that are so simple that they shouldn’t even be mentioned. Are people really stupid enough to believe that saying “don’t have sex” will really make people stop having sex?? Apparently so, since these are some of the same people that thought the Columbine shootings could have been prevented by writing the words “thou shalt not kill” on the wall and that kids will stop being curious about drugs if they’re told to “Just Say No.”