The controversy arose when, sometime in April, Heritage Keepers Abstinence Education was quietly added to an Office of Adolescent Health list of approved groups eligible for government funds — “the holy grail of the Administration’s commitment to a science-based approach to teen pregnancy prevention and a directive for grantees of the President’s Teen Pregnancy Prevention Initiative,” wrote four prominent sexual health experts in RH Reality Check. They accused HHS of “succumb[ing] to the political pressure of social conservatives and allowed the ideology of the right to prevail over the health and well-being of the nation’s youth.”

On April 30, over a dozen major organizations, including the ACLU and Human Rights Campaign, asked Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius to explain Heritage Keepers’ inclusion. They said the program “ostracizes lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) youth; promotes heterosexual marriage as the only acceptable family structure; withholds life-saving information from sexually active youth; and uses fear-based messages to shame youth who have been sexually active and youth living in ‘nontraditional’ households.”

Like most abstinence-only programs, contraception and condoms aren’t on the agenda, nor is detailed information about sexually transmitted diseases or safe sexual behavior. Sample language from the student manual: “girls have a responsibility to wear modest clothing that doesn’t invite lustful thoughts.” Both aspects are awkward at a moment in which the president’s reelection campaign is struggling to have it both ways on gay marriage, as well as to paint itself as a champion of reproductive health.

The RH Reality Check piece also says that there is “limited evidence of effectiveness” of the Heritage Keepers program. But Christopher Trenholm, associate director of research at Mathematica Policy Research, which conducted the independent research evaluation for HHS, and whose previous work is cited as proof that the Heritage Keepers program doesn’t work, told Salon there are actually two different programs in question. The one in the 2007 Mathematica study that was found to have little impact on sexual abstinence, a complementary after-school program called Life Skills Education Component, differs from the health class curriculum that ended up on the HHS list.

This time around, Trenholm’s task was to grade the outside research that purported to back up the organization’s claims. HHS decided that every organization that got a moderate or high rating on doing what it said it did would end up on the approved list. Mathematica took a look at a 2011 study of Heritage Keepers Abstinence Education as taught to 2,215 7th- through 9th-grade students, which found that a year after participating in the program, “sexual experience” increased from 29 to 33 percent of students, compared to 43 percent of students in the control group. The study quality was deemed “moderate,” allowing Heritage Keepers to tout its HHS seal of approval on its website.

In other words, Heritage Keepers simply followed the rules of the “evidence based” system – and prevailed. The problem for supporters of inclusive and comprehensive sex education is that the HHS criteria say that studies “must measure program impact on at least one measure of sexual risk behavior or its health consequences.” That measure can be contraceptive use or fewer sexually transmitted infections, or it can be simply delaying sexual activity, as Heritage Keepers was found to do – but it doesn’t have to do both or all. And as written, it certainly does not mean that the program can’t marginalize LGBT students or shame students about their sexual behavior.

I asked Weber, the HHS spokesman, what would have to change for such groups to be left out of the program. Would the criteria simply have to be revised? “What we’re committed to is an open and transparent scientific process,” he repeated. That process appears to have been followed here – but it shows the limits of a narrowly technocratic approach.

Update. Critics respond to the HHS rationale: “HHS is being frighteningly shortsighted,” said Dr. Elizabeth Schroeder, executive director for Answer, a national sexuality education organization based at Rutgers University. “Heritage Keepers relies on fear, shame, distorted information and biases. Why are we supporting any program that discriminates against groups of students and endangers their health? How can the HHS justify putting its seal of approval on a sexist, homophobic curriculum?”

The program, Heritage Keepers Abstinence Education, “contains little or no information about puberty, anatomy, sexually transmitted diseases, or sexual behavior,” they write, nor does it “include information about the health benefits of contraception or condoms.” Worse still, it relies on inaccurate, fear-based classroom exercises, promotes heterosexual marriage as the only happy and healthy life path, harps on the potential harm of premarital relationships, promotes hoary gender roles and stereotypes and entirely ignores the existence of LGBT people.

Oh, also? The evidence of the program’s effectiveness is highly questionable. A report ordered by Congress concluded that Heritage Keepers “had little or no impact on sexual abstinence or activity.”

Several years ago, the Sexuality Information & Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS), where two of the RH Reality authors are employed, conducted an in-depth review of the Heritage Keepers’ curriculum and found it “relies on messages of fear and shame” and that even topics “frequently discussed in detail in other abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, such as condoms and STDs, receive very little mention.” The review offers up many disturbing examples of the fear-based messaging, most memorable of which is the following exercise:

Each student rolls a six-side die; the number that comes up corresponds to a particular consequence. Students who roll a one have contracted HIV, a two contracted herpes, a three HPV, a four untimely pregnancy, a five infertility, and a six emotional pain.

I believe that’s what you call a loaded die. All of the potential outcomes are crap; there is no chance in this “educational” exercise for emotional intimacy or pleasure. The game is designed to end with a simplistic takeaway: “Having sex outside of marriage is gambling with your future.”

It isn’t the only instance where the program presents marriage as an infallible guard against all potential negative consequences of sex. Consider this excerpt from the program’s student manual: “Sex is like fire. Inside the appropriate boundary of marriage, sex is a great thing! Outside of marriage, sex can be dangerous.” Right, because it’s never dangerous within marriage. A signed piece of paper from the justice of the peace magically eliminates risk of STIs, sexual violence, infidelity — you name it!

Seriously, though, I’m not being hyperbolic — the program actually presents marriage as a rape prevention tool. The program claims, “According to the data, 9 percent of married women are forced by their spouse to perform sexual acts, however 46 percent of women report that someone they were … ‘in love with’ forced them to have sex against their will, and 22 percent of women report being forced to do so by someone they ‘knew well.’”

First, as SIECUS beautifully points out, those figures come from a survey of women who had been forced to perform a sexual act — not of women in general. In other words, the correct factoid is that, at least within a small sample of women who had experienced sexual assault, 9 percent were assaulted by their marriage partner. Second, “even if married women as a whole face fewer incidences of sexual assault, for women in abusive relationships, marriage provides no protection,” says the SIECUS report. (Also, correlation ain’t causation.)

According to the Heritage Foundation, in addition to putting you at risk for being raped, premarital relationships may destroy your ability to bond. (I’m having Eric Keroack flashbacks! What is this, 2006?) “[It] may be that when people bond closely through sexual activity, then break up and bond with someone else, and then someone else, it may become increasingly difficult to maintain a lasting bond.” It may be that it may be? That’s considered evidence-based education?

It’s no surprise that the program calls on students to abstain from sex until marriage – not to think about whether that’s a choice that they want to make, just to do it, teacher’s orders: “Now is the time for you to make the commitment for the very best for yourself, to wait for the commitment of marriage to have sex.” The teacher is instructed to then hand out “commitment cards.”

None of that is to mention the sexual double standard in the curriculum. It invokes the ol’ saw about males being visual creatures and explains, “This is why girls need to be careful with what they wear, because males are looking! The girl might be thinking fashion, while the boy is thinking sex. For this reason, girls have a responsibility to wear modest clothing that doesn’t invite lustful thoughts.” The familiar message is that girls are the sexual gatekeepers (there’s also an undercurrent of “don’t ask for it”).

It follows, of course, that the curriculum would ignore same-sex partnerships: It “operates under the assumption that all students in the class, or all people in the world for that matter, are heterosexual,” says the SIECUS review. “All references to sexual activity, arousal, and relationships are specific to male-female couples.” As the RH Reality piece argues, “The stigmatization of LGBT youth throughout the program reinforces the cultural invisibility and bias these students already face in many schools and communities. The curriculum’s focus on marriage as the only appropriate context for sexual behavior further ostracizes LGBT youth and the children of LGBT parents who still cannot legally marry in most states.”

No wonder HHS didn’t issue a press release. It’s hard to put a positive spin on the Obama administration giving its stamp of approval to a sexist, anti-gay, fear-based education program.

Santorum said, “What we’re seeing is a problem in our culture with respect to children being raised by children, children being raised out of wedlock, and the impact on society economically, the impact on society with respect to drug use and all — a host of other things when children have children.” And Romney, having started with a by now halfhearted defense of “religion freedom,” jumped in eagerly to defend abstinence-only education and say, “We have to have a president who’s willing to say that the best opportunity an individual can give to their unborn child is an opportunity to be born in a home with a mother and a father.” Bonus points for raising the specter of abortion when asked about contraception. (By comparison, Ron Paul sounded halfway sane when he said immorality, not birth control pills, kills families. Or something.)

You might wonder if contraception isn’t logically a way to reduce potential unwanted pregnancies. But this subject change is one that some social conservatives have been trying to push for awhile. It involves conflating teen pregnancy and adults choosing not to marry when they become parents, and low-income women’s access to contraception with their “failure” to marry. (And drug use, why not?) But most crucially, it involves a nostalgia for the days when women neither had a choice over when they got pregnant nor had much of a choice but to try to marry the father.

Santorum even doubled down on the suggestion that more access to contraception leads to an increased “breakdown of the family,” citing to Greta Van Susteren, again, the New York Times story about the high rate of children born outside of marriage. Then teen pregnancy got thrown in, with Van Susteren asking, “Are you saying that with contraception there’s more sexual activity? That young people will be less sexually active without contraception?” Santorum replied, ”That certainly was the case in the past.”

Inconveniently, teen pregnancy is at a 40-year low, so you might wonder which past Santorum is longing for. It’s true that between 1971 and 1988, more teenagers were having sex than before, but according to public health researchers, “At the beginning of the 1990s this trend reversed.” The data also indicates that it’s not an accident, so to speak, that the U.S. still has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the world: ”A mid-1990s analysis of five developed countries showed that adolescents in the United States initiated sexual activity at an age similar to that of adolescents in Sweden, France, Canada and Great Britain but that they used contraceptives less frequently.” A 2007 study in the American Journal of Public Health concluded that between 1995 and 2002, “the decline in pregnancy risk among 18- and 19-year-olds was entirely attributable to increased contraceptive use. Decreased sexual activity was responsible for about one quarter (23 percent) of the decline among 15- to 17-year-olds, and increased contraceptive use was responsible for the remainder (77 percent).”

As for the number of adults engaging in sexual activity outside marriage, it’s also been pointed out that the trend of later marriage — which also happens to correlate to a more lasting one — is on a “collision course” with abstinence-until-marriage doctrine. (Rick Santorum may have eight children, but he married at 32, for what that data point is worth.) That Times piece about how more than half of births to women under 30 are outside of marriage (though a majority of women across the age spectrum are married when they have children) summed up the debate as follows:

“The forces rearranging the family are as diverse as globalization and the pill. Liberal analysts argue that shrinking paychecks have thinned the ranks of marriageable men, while conservatives often say that the sexual revolution reduced the incentive to wed and that safety net programs discourage marriage.”

Birth control, of course, is used as a stand-in for the sexual revolution, but the suggestion is that without the pill, women might have been better able to coerce men into marriage in exchange for sex, whether those men are equipped to be partners and parents or not. Now, of course, they no longer need to solely rely on a man to support themselves (although two-partner households can certainly enjoy major economic advantages). How many women who lived through that earlier, more limited set of options would wish it on their daughters and granddaughters, as Santorum and apparently Romney do?

Conservatives also have suggested that the lure of no-strings-attached sex may have tricked women, too, into giving the milk away for free and saddled them with a baby or an abortion instead. “It is possible that women who are more confident in the reliability of their contraceptives may engage in sexual activity more often,” speculated National Review contributor Michael J. New last year in seeking to explain why the abortion rate had risen for low-income women while it had dramatically dropped among more affluent women. The implication was that Planned Parenthood handing out pills to sluts had encouraged them to wildly have sex, get pregnant and hightail it to an abortion clinic. Wealthier women, who are more likely to be married, did … what, exactly? Abstained? In fact, married couples report having sex more often than either single or partnered people, and according to census data, 78 percent of them use contraception. (There are still a million unplanned pregnancies that occur within marriage, and almost four in 10 of them end in abortion.) Meanwhile, contraceptive use among unmarried women overall is up, from 80 percent in 1982 to 86 percent in 2002.

As I wrote earlier this week, the evidence suggests that the key to reducing unplanned pregnancies, within and outside of marriage, is not less contraception — it’s more and better contraception, made more accessible alongside better information, all of which happens to correlate to your class situation. The substantive part of this “do you believe in birth control” nonsense is that the Obama administration has taken solid steps to correct the financial disparities in birth control access, by mandating that insurers fully cover it. And the fact that reproductive rights, when fully exercised, ultimately help women make choices for their own lives — whether to have children, whom to have them with and when — rather than making biology their inexorable destiny is what really rankles these Republican men.

Snarky blog The Superficial put it in more salacious terms. “Bristol Palin is accusing Levi Johnston of rape!” reads its headline, but that’s not really fair to Bristol. Sure, she calls Levi a “gnat” and quotes his reaction to the pregnancy news as “Better be a f***ing boy,” (which … classy!), but that’s not Bristol calling it rape. Saying she doesn’t remember the event isn’t saying she was unconscious for it, just wasted.

The statement is left ambiguous enough that if you held the story up to the light in one way — Alaskan girl gets drunk for the first time, boyfriend takes advantage — the colors slant toward an uncomfortable position for Levi, one that some may define as rape (if Bristol was incapacitated, say, and Levi wasn’t). But the wording is left just this side of vague enough (Mama Grizzly’s lawyers made sure of that, no doubt) that Levi can’t exactly call it libel. And Levi will get the chance to tell his own side of the story when his own book, “Deer in the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin’s Crosshairs” hits the stores. Though if his prose is as clunky as that mixed-metaphor title, I don’t know how anyone will be able to read it.

The site, which is run by the AIDS Action Committee of Massachusetts, centers on the fictional character Maria, an 18-year-old who dispenses sexual health information in teen-speak with the help of her aunt who is an OB/GYN. Maria has a diverse group of friends who accurately reflect the range of teenage experience that you see in the real world: Some are abstinent, some are sexually active; some are gay, some are straight; some have protected sex, some do not. The edgiest language can be found in a section of the website that explains various sexual acts in technical terms, alongside the slang translation kids are more likely to have heard. It’s a sweet, albeit sometimes awkward, adult attempt at “speaking their language.” For example: “digital sex” (“fingering/hand job”), “cunnilingus” (“going down on her”), “clitoris” (“clit”), “fellatio” (“giving head” or giving a “blow job”), “erection” (“hard-on”),” “anal sex” (“butt sex”), “anus” (“rectum” or “butthole”). Yes, they said “butthole” — I hope no one needs a paper bag to hyperventilate into.

The other issue that triggered local politicos’ protest is, of course, abortion. The site acknowledges that termination is an option for pregnant young women and that abortions are “safe and effective” — all of which is without a doubt factually correct. Before abortion is even mentioned, though, adoption and parenthood are listed as options — and yet state Rep. Colleen Garry calls it part of “a blatant agenda by the liberal part of our society to introduce children to sex and give them the opportunity to have an abortion without their parents’ involvement.” You know us liberals, we just can’t wait to pressure teenagers into having sex and to corrupt their innocent ears with “disgusting,” “inappropriate and crude” sexual slang.

This is one of those cases that reveal just how profoundly the war over sex education is influenced by adult fears of sex. Teenagers aren’t the issue here — they’re the ones generating this apparently horrifying slang, after all — but rather the alleged grownups who want to stick their fingers in their ears, hum a pleasant little tune and protect themselves from the scary and complex reality of human desire. When I read Rep. Poirier’s remark that “there are words that I would find difficult to speak,” I genuinely and affectionately think: Poor darling, if only your youthful curiosity had been met with support — and awkward adult attempts at speaking your language — instead of shame and reproach.