[ While You Were Out :: Capitol Hill ]
The Budget, Health Care, Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and a rant on federal abstinence studies

President Obama’s ten-year budget proposal has drawn fire from both Republicans and Democrats for cutting too much and increasing the deficit. We have no idea why everyone’s complaining, because the budget outline shows that even while he’s trying to get the U.S. out of a mess that he didn’t start, Obama’s doing exactly what he said he’d do: cut ridiculous military spending, tax the rich, give breaks to the middle class, fund education and research, and scrap that insane Bush-era promise to put us back on the moon by 2020. So kwitcherbitchin!

Health care legislation is assumed and provided for in Obama’s budget outline. But with health care reform champion Senator Ted Kennedy’s Massachusetts seat taken over by some sexy-ass punk who voted to filibuster the current health care bill, the 60-seat majority needed to pass the bill in the Senate has been reduced to 59. To try to woo one of the opposition, bill negotiations are flying so fast that even the press can’t keep up. Americans are now doubtful that the reform will pass, but we’re keeping our fingers crossed. After all, health care reform might help solve that deficit problem you’re all whining about.

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”, the longstanding policy for gays in the military, came under fire from the Joint Chiefs’ own chairman on Tuesday. (By the way, if you didn’t see the State of the Union last week, at least watch the part where the Joint Chiefs of Staff all get hilariously stone-faced when Obama suggests getting rid of DADT.) The Pentagon is launching a lengthy investigation into the matter, i.e. they’re hemming and hawing, but given that their top guy basically just said, “Look, guys, this policy is f***ing stupid”, it looks like DADT is on the out and out. Score one for the American LGBT community, who’ve been suffering setbacks in gay marriage as of late.

Abstinence programs are back in the limelight this week because a new study said that they might be effective. With Heisman winner and nearly-aborted fetus Tim Tebow’s anti-abortion ad coming out on Super Bowl Sunday, we’d like to point out a few problems with this study, with special regards to the way it’s being touted in the media.

First of all, there is a HUGE difference between the wait-until-you’re-ready abstinence program used in the study and the no-sex-before-marriage programs that seem to have made the teen pregnancy rate shoot up during the Bush administration: Namely, this program doesn’t involve religion! But the no-sex-before-marriage folks are going to use the study’s success anyway as proof that their religion-based health curriculum works, which is like vegans using studies confirming the positive health effects of vegetarianism to promote their beliefs.

Secondly, although it’s great that there’s now federally-funded proof of a method to keep kids from doing the nasty until they’re older, these kids were only followed for two years. By the end of the study, they didn’t even reach 15-19, the average age range when first-world kids start having sex. Even the study’s authors warn that abstinence isn’t a long-term solution. Kids are eventually going to have sex, and this study didn’t account for that in the least. In fact, it didn’t account for the long term at all. Sounds like Capitol Hill to us!