Douthat on Keeping "Culture Wars" Local

Columnist Ross Douthat chimes in on abstinence-only versus contraceptive-oriented sex education in today's New York Times. He argues "we should understand it more as a battle over community values than as an argument about public policy," and "What is taught in the classroom is vastly less important than the matrix of family, culture and economics: the values parents impart and the example that they set, the friends teenagers make and the activities they join, and the cross-cutting effects of wealth, health and self-esteem." "The abstinence-based courses that social conservatives champion produce unimpressive results — but so do the contraceptive-oriented programs that liberals tend to favor."

I hate to wonder how much effort and money is being put into debating these things at the Federal level, for little effect.