Neutrality on sex education
Ross Douthat makes a typical neutrality-based argument for leaving sex ed decisions up to local communities, not the federal government. Liberals have attacked the fed’s endorsement and funding of abstinence education since the Clinton years, citing studies illustrating its ineffectiveness and often counterproductive results: teenage pregnancies have gone up, not down, with the introduction of abstinence-only. But Douthat contends that comprehensive sex ed does no better, and that this is more about culture than pragmatism anyway:
America’s competing visions of sexuality — permissive and traditional, naturalist and sacralist — have been in conflict since the 1960s. They’ll probably be in conflict for generations yet to come.
But as long as they are, it shouldn’t be Washington’s job to choose between them.
I don’t find this convincing. The fact that there are “competing visions” in a debate doesn’t mean one of them isn’t empirically correct and justifiable as national policy (there are many who don’t accept evolution, western medicine, or global warming, but I think it’s in our national interest to set policy according to the accepted science rather than popular opinion in those matters). But where you stand on this will depend on a number of philosophical assumptions, including your view of democracy, of individual liberty, and of course, on the line between perfectionism and neutrality.
Secondly, I think that Douthat, David Brooks and other conservatives sometimes jump too quickly to “we just can’t prove anything either way in this area”; it’s part of a larger worldview that holds many ethical and political questions beyond the power of reason to answer. Brooks recently used this ephemeral skepticism to call international aid into question and now Douthat employs it to lay sex ed arguments to rest. I think it’s dangerous to give up on analysis this easily – but perhaps that’s my liberal, “everything can be rationally understood” bias 
-Colin
Related posts:
- The debate over net neutrality
- On commuting and value neutrality
- Reason and faith in higher education
- Obama & international relations
- Douthat on religious dialogue
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