Not an editorial I expected to read in the Christian Science Monitor

If you read the statistics, it isn't difficult to question the effectiveness of abstinence-only education in schools. It is about as effective as telling a three-year-old to not eat that big cookie on the table and then leaving the room to see what happens. However, I was under the distinct impression that there were still many people in denial of this fact -- hence my surprise when I read the following editorial in the Christian Science Monitor:

It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. The abstinence-only sex-education programs on which the federal government has been spending around $176 million a year have been shown to have zero effect. That's right: zero.

"Abstinence-only" classes in public schools, funded by provisions of the 1996 federal welfare reform law, focus on the message of waiting until marriage. They do not teach about contraception or safe sex.

But a national study that tracked 2,000 young people over several years has found no evidence that such classes as currently taught actually increased rates of sexual abstinence. It found that program participants had similar numbers of sexual partners compared with peers who were not in the specialized abstinence programs.

Among teens who had sex by the end of the period of the study, the average age of their first intercourse was the same for participants as for nonparticipants: 14.9 years.

This is especially disappointing given that earlier research seemed to indicate that abstinence programs were at least changing teen attitudes, if not behavior.

Listen, I am not going to participate in the deafening and unseemly "Ha! I told you so." that is likely to emanate from this piece, but I am curious to speculate about how they chose to end it:

So where do we go from here?

To confront the apparent failures of abstinence programs is not to give up on teen abstinence as a standard.

...

It may be that sex education that includes abstinence is more useful than abstinence-only classes. The head of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy said Mathematica's research supports what other studies show: "The most effective programs are those that say abstinence is the best choice but birth control and protection are also worth knowing about."

Is this indicative of a cultural thaw? The culture wars have been going on long enough that I doubt I am the only one to find any emerging consensus somewhat bewildering.

The fact of the matter is that there was really no good reason for us to disagree in the first place. Both socially-liberal and socially-conservative people want to raise their children in an environment where they will be safe and happy. Most of them would admit that this includes their children not having children of their own early. Is it possible that both have finally come to the same conclusion about how?

(On the other hand, maybe I am just reading too much into this editorial? I would be the first to admit the danger of over-reading editorial columns as suggestive of cultural trends; at best they tend to represent cultural views at the extreme ends of the spectrum.)