Posts Tagged ‘Kate Tsubata’
What About the Pro-Abstinence Realists?
Last month, I wrote a story on why the government won’t fund local youth AIDS prevention group WAIT (or Washington AIDS International Teens). WAIT’s problem was this:
a. Their goal was stopping the spread of HIV.
b. Their methodology was abstinence.
c. The government only funds one or the other.
Last week, President Obama proposed to add another roadblock to their fight for funding by cutting abstinence-only cash from the budget altogether.
Now, groups like WAIT, which represent the most practical side of abstinence eduction—delaying sex only to prevent an uncurable deadly disease—will remain, well, pretty much unaffected. As I detailed in my piece, federally-funded abstinence-only education was always itself too much of a “comprehensive” strategy. In order to receive federal funding, abstinence groups couldn’t just work against AIDS—they also had to teach prevention of “out-of-wedlock pregnancy”; that “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity”; and that “sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”
So while proponents of comprehensive sex education rejoice at the White House rule, some abstinence advocates, at least, aren’t lamenting the move: abstinence’s realists have always been left behind.
Photo by Darrow Montgomery.
Why the Chaste AIDS Movement Can’t Get Paid
Waiting for the dough: Tsubata and children Lan Lee, Kensei Tsubata, and Mie Smith
Kate Tsubata is not your typical abstinence advocate. She wants you to choose one person to have sex with for the rest of your life, but her fidelity to the movement’s traditions ends there. She refuses to draft no-sex pledges, forge promise rings, stage purity balls, or cite scripture. She doesn’t care if the sex you’re not having is straight or gay. She likes sex, actually, as long as you only do it with one person ever—no wedding required. The stakes are lower, too. In Tsubata’s abstinence movement, sex won’t lead you down a road of eternal damnation—all it will do is kill you.
