Jesus loves you -- and your orgasm

That purring engine has become the prime mover behind "abstinence only" sexual education -- perhaps the religious right's most lasting contribution to mainstream society. Where traditional sex ed programs attempted to give teenagers the knowledge to protect themselves in sexual encounters, Herzog writes, "new abstinence advocates use the fear of disease to frighten kids away from sex entirely."

Consider this classroom exercise: "Boys and girls are invited to chew cheese-flavored snacks and then sip some water, after which they are to spit the resulting 'bodily fluids' into a cup. After a game in which the fluids are combined with those of other students, ultimately all cups are poured into a pitcher labeled 'multiple partners' sitting adjacent to a pitcher of fresh water labeled 'pure fluids.' In the final segment, each boy and girl is asked to fill a cup labeled either 'future husband' or 'future wife' with the contents from one of the pitchers."

The Georgia-based program behind all this expectoration received more than half a million dollars in taxpayer dollars, and it is by no means the only such program to benefit. At every turn, the abstinence-only movement has been abetted and advanced by the Bush administration. As recently as 2006, the Department of Health and Human Services was offering grants for programs that teach "the potential psychological side effects (e.g., depression and suicide) associated with adolescent sexual activity" and that instruct students that "non-marital sex in teen years may reduce the probability of a stable, happy marriage as an adult."

"May reduce"? According to whom? Pro-abstinence forces have never been too rigorous in their scholarship; the categorical assertion is their preferred vehicle. (According to the Abstinence Clearinghouse, virgins "invariably do better in their professional and personal lives than nonvirgins.") And when they fail to persuade with fear, they dangle the carrot of future sex. As Herzog summarizes it: "Only those women who have been premaritally abstinent will be truly, deeply, and consistently desired by their husbands in the long years after marriage ... Have no sex before marriage and you will have outstanding sex after marriage."

Once again, a religious argument is being advanced on strictly secular grounds (in this case, the language of women's mags). Fortunately, it can also be refuted on secular grounds. According to a recent Yale-Columbia study, some 88 percent of adolescent virginity pledgers fail to keep their pledge. And while they tend to have sex later than their peers, they are one-third less likely to protect themselves when they do.

But then protection has never been part of the grand scheme. In the abstinence worldview, faltering virgins can still find God. ("It's never too late to be a virgin. No matter what you've done, you can have a secondary virginity, it's there for you to reclaim.") But they cut themselves off from salvation the moment they take the pill or slip on a rubber. As one activist puts it: "There is no condom that can protect you from a broken heart and a shattered dream." Susan Orr, formerly of the Family Research Council and, for a short unblessed time, the deputy assistant secretary overseeing family planning and reproductive health, once declared that contraceptives are part of "the culture of death."

In fact, they are part of something even more troubling to the evangelical mind: a culture of non-procreative sex that has done as much as anything to destabilize the institution of marriage. In their efforts to get this genie back in its bottle, pro-abstinence forces routinely overstate both the success rate of abstinence and the failure rate of condoms.

As Herzog demonstrates, that policy of calculated denial has had particularly ruinous effects in the developing world. Under the guidelines of President Bush's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, African countries risk losing funding altogether unless they can show they have earmarked two-thirds of their prevention monies solely for abstinence and fidelity messaging. According to a GAO report, abstinence mandates have significantly reduced outreach to sex workers and sexually active youth, as well as programs to inhibit mother-to-child transmission of the virus -- at a time when HIV has already infected some 33.2 million people around the world.

"What should have been a comprehensive war on HIV," writes Herzog, "instead turned into a war on condoms." Which is only a natural outcome, she argues, of an often overlooked truth: The religious right is "not simply a religious movement or a political movement; it has also, and above all, been a sexual movement."

That it should have used sex as a springboard to power is particularly infuriating to a libertarian like Herzog, who has spent many months delving through the archives of the enemy and has the anger to prove it. Words like "incoherent," "cruel," "mendacious" are flung with increasing frequency as the book progresses, and any pretense of trying to understand or engage the evangelical mind is abandoned in favor of tracking its carnage.

But even as I applaud Herzog for her passion, I wonder: How great is the carnage? Has the religious right really changed our national conversation about sex? Or has it been speaking to itself all along?

Teens, after all, are still having sex. (America has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the developed world.) Gay sex, as Herzog admits, has "lost its power to repulse," and our most populous state has now opened the doors to gay marriage. "Abstinence-only" has been a regression, it's true, but liberal sex educators have pulled off a co-opting trick of their own, creating "abstinence-plus" programs that make abstinence simply one component in a comprehensive array of informed choices.

Even that is too great a concession for Herzog. She hates the fact that "many self-defined sexual liberals now rush to concede that a delay in sexual debut is desirable and that keeping the number of sexual partners in a lifetime to a minimum is an important sign of psychological health and self-valuing ... What's missing is the basic idea that sexual rights are human rights -- for adolescents, for sexual minorities, and for individuals both within and outside the institution of marriage."

For sexual minorities and consenting adults, yes. But what does it mean to say that an adolescent has a "human right" to sex? How can any adolescent in our eroticized culture be said to exercise "sexual self-determination"?

At the risk of sounding like the kind of liberal Herzog dislikes, I don't think it's unreasonable for parents to want to complicate their children's sexual choices, even if that means delaying them. When my 8-year-old son asks me why Jamie Lynn Spears, the star of one of his favorite shows, is having a baby at 16, I'm genuinely torn in how to respond -- not wanting to condemn and not wanting to endorse, either. It's the same discomfort many parents felt at seeing the topless pictures of Miley Cyrus in Vanity Fair. How do we accommodate our children's sexuality? And how far?

The religious right was able to shape this dialogue only because the dialogue was already happening -- and is still going on today, even in the most progressive quarters. It says something about the ideologues on both sides that we can no longer have that conversation without being called ideologues ourselves.