The Keystone Kops were a silent film series about a group of bumbling, incompetent police officers who were more likely to blow up the police station than arrest criminals. They were apparently the inspiration for yesterday’s hearing on Capitol Hill in Salt Lake.

Lawmakers spent two hours debating sex education in schools Wednesday despite the fact that they didn’t have a new bill to debate.

Chris Buttars demonstrating his usual insight said on the record he didn’t know the bill was not ready and decided to hold the hearing anyway. Why? Well, he brought in Miriam Grossman – on his own dime – to argue against medically accurate, effective sexuality education.

Grossman spent about a half hour talking about how not enough scientific facts are included in sex education and how the national Planned Parenthood promotes what she considers to be high-risk sexual behavior among teens.

“The primary goals of these organizations is not to fight disease,” Grossman said. “It is to create a society that tolerates, indeed celebrates, any kind of sexual activity.”

Trust me, it gets better:

Ultimately, Sen. David Hinkins, R-Orangeville, proposed a motion to urge the legislature “to consider any person or organizations that promotes, recommends or teaches high-risk sexual behavior, Web sites, examples or talks” as not appropriate in public schools.

I have to be honest about my extreme frustration here – it’s not just that our legislators are by all appearances completely uninformed about sexuality education, how it works and what kinds of programs work, but they seem proud of their ignorance and wish to advertise it to the world.

Here’s the thing: abstinence only education programs do not produce behavioral changes in adolescents. Every mainstream, peer-reveiwed research study to date has shown it does not reduce rates of sexual activity among teens, it does not delay the beginning of sexual activity and does not reduce rates of STIs or unintended pregnancy among teens. Abstinence only programs have also come under heavy criticism for promoting harmful stereotypes about both genders and about sexual minorities. Abstinence only programs are a waste of time, money, and energy.

The model offered by comprehensive sexuality education says we give people the information they need, in age appropriate ways, we prepare them to deal with situations they may confront and we encourage them to explore their own values and ideas, to develop their own capacity to become moral agents for themselves and to examine their actions and the possible consequences and then trust them to make the right choices for themselves. Mirroring the mainstream view of parenting, this model produces adults who have greater self-confidence, the ability to make their own moral choices, the capacity to predict and deal with the consequences of their behavior and, perhaps most crucially, the ability to think empathetically concerning their actions. Graduates of comprehensive sexuality education programs are demonstrably and signficantly more likely to make responsible sexual choices than are their peers who complete abstinence only programs.

That Chris Buttars would bring in Miriam Grossman should not be surprising. Grossman has made a career out of pushing distorted information about women and sexuality built on a platform of slut-shaming.

In Max Blumenthal’s Republican Gomorrah he discusses people like Grossman – focusing on Leslie Unruh of the abstinence clearing-house. The story these conservative women tell – one they share at conferences, on blogs, in personal confessions – is to my eyes a hackneyed narrative of being a fallen women redeemed by embracing strict father sexual morality. The narrative follows a consistent pattern – the women, an innocent ingenue goes to college or the big city where she falls for the bright and shiny secular world and becomes involved in a sexual relationship (often putting aside her concerns that doing so is morally suspect, but overwhelmed by a smooth talking man and his sexual and secular world). In the course of this relationship (it might even be a marriage with children) she is constantly at war with herself – trying to avoid her feelings that something is “wrong” in her life. At last, she confronts some personal crisis – it might an unplanned pregnancy, a divorce, an abortion, or discovering her husband is having an affair or a daughter is pregnant – at which point, in despair and morally and emotionally bankrupt and exhausted – she turns (or returns) to conservative sexual mores – belatedly embracing abstinence and rejecting sex outside of marriage. She may become a conservative activist – volunteering at a “Crisis Pregnancy Center” or at a parachurch organization that specializes in promoting abstinence only. Often, she portrays herself as a reluctant activist – drawn against her will into the dirty world of activism and politics out of a desperate and dire need to protect her own children from the world to which she fell victim. Redeemed by her turn to conservative morals and politics, her own past sins (both real and imagined) are simply forgiven – wished away with the wave of a hand. Blumenthal describes is thus:

Abstinence education propaganda is valuable perhaps only as a document of the philosophy of right-wing women like Unruh. To Unruh, sex for the purpose of pleasure is a satanic act that ultimately harms women. By coercing girls to deny their essential urges, she and her cohorts believe they can protect them from demonic male aggressors on sexual hit-and-run missions. It is no wonder right-wing women insist they are the “true” feminists.

A huge chunk of conservative sexual mores are expressed as “slut-shaming.” It is a whole category of rhetoric built around blaming women who have sex outside of marriage for every unfortunate event that befalls them. In essence, slut shaming tells women “You’re not happy because you didn’t wait for marriage.” It tells women, “You got raped because you dressed like a slut. No man could be blamed for raping you since you wore a low cut dress.” It tells women “If you weren’t a bad girl, you would be virginal, happy and pure and healthy. But you’re a dirty slut who had sex outside of marriage, so you deserve to be alone and miserable.” At times, the rhetoric is that blatant.

Miriam Grossman is the author of two books – Unprotected which argues that college counselors and health workers are endangering students by not telling them to not have sex and You’re Teaching My Child What? in which Grossman takes the post of the anti-Dr Ruth and attacks sex education for a wide variety of imagined sins, which come down to not telling people to not have sex.

Jessica at Feminsting delivers a pretty good take down of Grossman:

What Miriam Grossman wants to teach your child!!!:

When girls have sex, it is often at bars or because they’re drunk. Also, they’re depressed.

The more you have sex, the sadder you become: “As the number of casual sex partners in the past year increased, so did signs of depression in college women.” (Cough, bullshit, cough)

Even fictional characters can get herpes: “It’s easy to forget, but the characters on Grey’s Anatomy and Sex in the City are not real. In real life, Meredith and Carrie would have warts or herpes. They’d likely be on Prozac or Zoloft.”

After a one-night-stand, girls are swooning, and guys don’t give a shit: “You might think of him all day, but he can’t remember your name.”

You can say really creepy things about sex, so long as its written in cursive.

Grossman’s statement at the hearing yesterday – “The primary goals of these organizations is not to fight disease,” Grossman said. “It is to create a society that tolerates, indeed celebrates, any kind of sexual activity.” – is really not about actual comprehensive sexuality education or about the organizations that promote it. Unspoken behind Grossman’s statement is the right’s depravity narrative – that sex is such a powerful force that without rigidly taught and enforced morals and without absolute social opprobrium, people will run wild – they’ll be having sex on the street corners in broad daylight, pedophiles will stroll in public schools like the rest of us go to the grocery store and walk out with any child they fancy, that good girls will be ravaged by packs of marauding drunken frat boys and good boys will be remorsely tempted by wanton harlots and be unable to resist because they have not been taught “right”.

I want to point out that for social and religious conservatives, this isn’t a slippery slope – it’s literally a binary situation – either you are moral and upright or you utterly immoral. It’s a view of human sexuality that holds that unless you are constrained by the strictest of moralities, you will engage in every sexual behavior, that teaches that the only reason men don’t rape children and goats and babies and women and each other is because their sexual impulses are held in check by strict morals. Spend time reading articles and books about sexuality by conservatives and you quickly confront a world in which women are sexually passive; they are recipients of male sexual misdeeds and must restrain male sexuality, yet are given the job of providing all restraint on male sexuality. Taking pleasure in sexuality is a crucial danger; in fact, the pleasure of sexuality is in an of itself a source of danger because that pleasure tempts you from morality, and leads you into engaging in acts of unrestrained hedonism. Unspoken in this view of sexuality is the idea that if sex with one person feels good, you’ll automatically decide sex with two would be better and sex with three, four, six, nine-thousand would be better and you’ll of course see no reason to not do it. If sex outside of marriage is not stopped, what is to stop you from inviting 9000 of your close friends to football stadium, getting naked and jumping in a pile? The answer of course is strict father morality – in which you submit to an outside authority who not only indoctrinates you into the correct morality but who punishes you when you fail to adhere to it. Conservatives had a minor fit when Barack Obama correctly translated their rhetoric about unwed mothers as being punished with a baby; it’s not that they don’t see it that way it’s just rude to say it so plainly.

To Grossman and other such activists, comprehensive sexuality education is not only morally dangerous, it is a direct attack on systems fo authority. Pleas to “teach sex at home” are geared at preserving parental authority over children. Teachers of comprehensive sexuality education are distrusted because they may teach children about morality in ways the parents don’t approve. In teaching comprehensive sexuality education – which generally employs a public health mindset – schools are undermining parental authority by refusing to endorse parental morals. There’s also the problem of undermining parental authority by teaching children to make their own moral choices – which more often than not probably fly in the face of the parents’ preferences.

Grossman’s comment to Utah legislators about “a society that tolerates, indeed celebrates, any kind of sexual activity” fits within the conservative understanding of sexuality. For conservative legislators, it makes perfect sense that teaching kids about contraception is going to lead to a society that celebrates any kind of sexual activity. The fear truly is that without teaching and enforcing the strict father morality, adolescents will be unable to make any kind of moral choices and will simply run wild. They will grow into adults who are incapable of making moral distinctions between sex with their spouse and sex with the neighbor’s dog and tree and cat and baby and wife and babysitter.

That’s not how the human animal functions and most of us already know that by virture of living in our own bodies and leading our own lives.

When Grossman says Planned Parenthood promotes dangerous behavior, it’s hot air. Teaching comprehensive sexuality education is the best means by which to reduce risky sexual behaviors. Our state legislators apparently went for her shtick hook, line and sinker, which is a real shame. Utah deserves better public policy in this area than we’ve been getting.