E-Mail This Article to a Friend IN DENIAL Bush heats up the sex-ed wars BY DEIRDRE FULTON

Despite his State of the Union pledge to eliminate ineffective and wasteful programs, President Bush’s 2006 budget calls for increasing funding for abstinence-only education programs.

And while Bush’s proposal calls for $39 million more this year than last (grand total: $206 million) to scare kids away from condoms, comprehensive-sex-education advocates here in Massachusetts are struggling to keep their own budgets from being cut even more than they already have been.

This year, the state will receive more than $1 million from the federal government to promote abstinence as the only good disease- and pregnancy-prevention method (despite studies that show just the opposite). In the past, the state’s Department of Public Health got around federal abstinence-promotion grant requirements by using the money to produce public-service announcements touting the benefits of waiting — that way, kids got the abstinence message without making it the only message. Then, last fall, social conservatives in the state legislature slipped through a law dictating that those funds be funneled directly to educational programs.

"That is more problematic," says Patricia Quinn, director of the Massachusetts Alliance on Teen Pregnancy. "From our perspective, abstinence-only hurts kids, in that it leaves them with ambivalence about the efficacy of condoms to prevent disease or pregnancy ... and doesn’t promote development of healthy sexuality."

With all that in mind, the Prevention First Coalition, a network of several local organizations (including the Alliance, Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts, NARAL Pro-Choice, and the Cambridge Economic Opportunity Committee), took to the State House early this week in an effort to educate legislators about the dangers of abstinence-only education.

For now, the coalition’s goals are modest — members want to identify legislative allies who can champion comprehensive sex ed on Beacon Hill while helping to galvanize grassroots support in communities and pushing for increased funds. Eventually, however, Prevention First wants to standardize a comprehensive-sex-ed curriculum across the state.

"Once there’s a potential for harm," Quinn says, "you have to aggressively fight it."