Legal Commentary

A Closer Look at McCain's Sex Education Ad

By TChris

As Jeralyn pointed out yesterday, the McCain campaign has gone beyond negative. It's latest ad is filled with disgusting lies, most prominently its accusation that Barack Obama sponsored an Illinois bill to teach "comprehensive sex education" to kindergarten students. The bill, which Obama did not sponsor, would have allowed teachers to give kindergarten students enough information to protect themselves from sexual predators, while reserving "medically accurate" information about sex to be taught to older students in higher grades.

Almost as troubling is the advertisement's false claim that this bill was Obama's "one accomplishment" in the field of education. [more ...]

In reality, Mr. Obama not only helped administer a $49 million education project in Chicago in the 1990s, but also sponsored or co-sponsored measures that increased the number of charter schools in Illinois, and expanded federal grants to summer school programs and to historically black colleges.

The McCain ad cites criticism of Obama by the trade publication Education Week while ignoring that publication's recognition that Obama's "biggest accomplishment in the field was the creation of a state board to oversee the expansion of early-childhood education in the state" as part of an early-childhood initiative that was considered "innovative and progressive." Rather hypocritically, the McCain ad overlooks what Education Week said about McCain:

Early this year, in an article titled “John McCain Where Art Thou?” it complained that he offered “a laundry list of fairly vague answers” on how to improve schools and did not make education a priority.

Is this what we have to look forward to for the next seven weeks? Lie after lie after lie from the McCain campaign? Will the corporate media ever stop talking about lipstick (or the invented outrage du jour) and start talking about the derailment of the Straight Talk Express?

Full post as published by TalkLeft on September 11, 2008 (boomark / email).