Constitutional Law

Paper: The Effect of Religion On The Politics and Jurisprudence of Abstinence Education

Papers written for "The Religion Clauses in the 21st Century" Symposium are now available. In this blogpost, Naomi Cahn, Professor of Law at the George Washington School of Law, and June Carbone, Professor of Law at the University of Kansas-Missouri School of Law, introduce their paper, "Deep Purple: Religious Shades of Family Law."

Abstinence education in contemporary America represents a crisis in cultural values. Beyond the legal issues of whether parents’ religious views can appropriately foreclose their children’s life choices, abstinence education shows the diverging moral and family law systems underlying contemporary politics.

In our recently released paper, we explore the effect of religion on the politics and jurisprudence of abstinence education in the context of the contemporary culture war between red and blue state values.

In the public school context, abstinence education reinforces a cultural script that encourages early marriage and reproduction, perpetuates traditional attitudes about sex and gender, and forecloses greater autonomy in the creation of family life. Moreover, abstinence-only education, which is strongly rooted in religious beliefs, has been shown to be of limited effectiveness in delaying teen sexual activity, and counterproductive to the extent it discourages contraceptive use.

As age of family formation increasingly reinforces class advantage, however, and as the secular justifications for abstinence only programs become increasingly attenuated, the issue becomes much more direct. Can – and should – the state mandate instruction whose principal effect is to reinforce religious understandings of the good life, and does so with disproportionate impact on the life opportunities of the least advantaged students?

Full post as published by ACS Blog on April 08, 2008 (boomark / email).