{"id":15322,"date":"2008-04-24T12:40:53","date_gmt":"2008-04-24T16:40:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/15322.html"},"modified":"2008-04-24T12:40:53","modified_gmt":"2008-04-24T16:40:53","slug":"those-experts-and-their-fancy-degrees-cant-teach-house-republicans-anything","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/those-experts-and-their-fancy-degrees-cant-teach-house-republicans-anything\/","title":{"rendered":"Those ‘experts’ and their ‘fancy degrees’ can’t teach House Republicans anything"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve already done approximately 10 gazillion items<\/a> about how and why abstinence-only programs — championed by the Bush administration and conservatives everywhere — don’t work, waste money, mislead young people about reality, and undermine public health. This is not<\/i> another one of those posts.<\/p>\n

Instead, it’s about Republicans’ reaction<\/i> to the evidence on abstinence-only programs.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, for example, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing<\/a> on the effectiveness of government-sponsored abstinence-only curricula. Not surprisingly, researchers, medical professionals, and scientists in the field explained to lawmakers that the evidence is overwhelming — abstinence-only doesn’t reduce teen pregnancies, doesn’t reduce sexually transmitted diseases, and doesn’t even lead minors to abstain from sex.<\/p>\n

So far, so good. Then, of course, committee Republicans piped up<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Republicans said even if some abstinence-only programs do not work, others do, and it would be wrong to end the funding.<\/p>\n

Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, said that it seems “rather elitist” that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate. “I don’t think it’s something we should abandon,” he said of abstinence-only funding.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That’s one of my favorite Republican quotes in a while. Just a few weeks after the so-called “bittergate” story prompted a media frenzy, the right has already taken to defining “elitism” down — it’s now apparently “elitist” for qualified experts to tell federal officials about available evidence while they consider how to spend federal resources.
\n
\nAs John Cole put it<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Damned elitists with their facts and figures and numbers and statistics and fancy degrees. What do they know about public health that a regular Joe from Tennessee doesn’t?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

To hear John Duncan tell it, Congress should disregard<\/i> the evidence entirely. It’s ideological policymaking at its most comical — start with the answer and then work backwards, looking for substantiation to bolster the conclusion. If you can’t find any substantiation, declare evidence-based decision making “elitist.”<\/p>\n

Honestly, sometimes far-right lawmakers just become parodies of themselves. I almost feel bad for the guy.<\/p>\n

Here Duncan is, at a congressional hearing, defending abstinence-only programs. Told that they don’t work and that we’ve wasted $1.3 billion of taxpayer money, he not only says he doesn’t care, Duncan argues he shouldn’t<\/i> care.<\/p>\n

Panel chairman Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, said, “We are showering funds on abstinence-only programs that don’t appear to work, while ignoring proven comprehensive sex education programs that can delay sex, protect teens from disease, and result in fewer teen pregnancies.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And some Republicans are intent on keeping it that way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve already done approximately 10 gazillion items about how and why abstinence-only programs — championed by the Bush administration and conservatives everywhere — don’t work, waste money, mislead young people about reality, and undermine public health. This is not another one of those posts. Instead, it’s about Republicans’ reaction to the evidence on abstinence-only programs. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15322\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}