Watch Governor Thickskull respond to a question about the inefficacy of abstinence-only sex education (interview with Evan Smith of the
Texas Tribune, October 15, 2010):
Partial transcription:
Smith: Let me ask you another one here on a different topic, Governor. Why does Texas continue with abstinence education programs when they don't seem to be working? In fact, I think we have the third-highest teen pregnancy rate in the country.
Perry: Abstinence . . . works.
(Laughter from audience.)
Smith: But we have the third-highest teen pregnancy rate among all states in the country. The questioner's point is, it doesn't seem to be working—abstinence education.
Perry: (Stammering a bit.) It works. Maybe it's the way it's being taught or the way it's being applied out there. But the fact is, it is the best form of—to teach our children.
Smith: Can you give me a statistic to suggest it works?
Perry: I'm sorry; I'm just going to tell you from my own personal life: abstinence works!
In trying to find the source of this video, I was led back in time through a chain of pages reproducing it and making various comments (here offered in reverse of the order of discovery):
"We’re not calling you old fashioned, governor, we’re calling you a freakin’ moron." (John Wright,
The Dallas Voice, Oct. 16, 2010)
"Perry appears completely unable not only to answer the question but even to think in empirical terms." (Jonathan Chait,
The New Republic, Aug. 18, 2011)
"The problem here isn’t just that Perry has the wrong answer. The more meaningful problem is that Perry doesn’t seem to know how to even formulate an answer. He starts with a proposition in his mind (abstinence-only education is effective), and when confronted with evidence that the proposition appears false (high teen-pregnancy rates), the governor simply hangs onto his belief, untroubled by evidence." (Steve Benen
Washington Monthly, Aug. 19, 2011)
One point that is not reflected in these comments is that while Smith is asking Perry about
abstinence-only sex education, Perry's replies concern
sexual abstinence. (Note the shift in the reference of the pronoun "it" between Smith's second utterance and Perry's reply to it.) Perry seems unable to grasp that these are two distinct questions. It is indisputable that young people who remain virgins will have no pregnancies and no sexually transmitted diseases. This is the fact—the only fact—that Perry has in mind. But it does not follow from this fact that
teaching young people no sexual option besides abstinence will prevent or reduce such outcomes. On the contrary, there is evidence that it exacerbates them. To grasp this fact, however, requires a degree of intellectual breadth and complexity that is plainly beyond Perry's capacity.
Incidentally, Texas is actually only fourth among US states in the incidence of teen
pregnancy; it is, however, or at least was found in a study by the Guttmacher Institute to be in 2005, third in the incidence of teen
births (
source). I assume that the difference of ranking in the two figures reflects a lower incidence of abortion in Texas. The
report from the Guttmacher Institute (Jan. 26, 2010) includes this comment (bold type added):
The significant drop in teen pregnancy rates [across the US] in the 1990s was overwhelmingly the result of more and better use of contraceptives among sexually active teens. However, this decline started to stall out in the early 2000s, at the same time that sex education programs aimed exclusively at promoting abstinence—and prohibited by law from discussing the benefits of contraception—became increasingly widespread and teens’ use of contraceptives declined.
