A $662 billion omnibus spending bill passed by Congress Wednesday night contains $5 million for abstinence education programs.
In 2009, the Obama administration slashed community-based sexual risk avoidance (SRA) programs from the federal budget — giving comprehensive, condom-based sex education programs $16 for every $1 spent on abstinence education.
"We are very pleased that Congress has chosen to redress a real problem in sex-education policy by re-establishing abstinence education as a program for America's teens," said Valerie Huber, president of the National Abstinence Education Association (NAEA).
But it's only the first step in the right direction.
"This funding of five million dollars is contrasted against about 100 million dollars in the budget for contraceptive sex education," she said. "So we are a long way from parity. But it's definitely a step in the right direction. The important thing that we were really working to see accomplished this year was for abstinence education to be re-established as federal sex-education policy."
The bad news is that the bill also contains $297 million for Title X, the main federal funding stream for Planned Parenthood. The House version aimed to completely defund the group, but the Senate version wanted to give it $299 million.
And with a Friday passage deadline looming, some legislators are playing hardball to get their way on other measures.
One of those is the reauthorization of the International Religious Freedom Commission — the only independent agency which advises the U.S. State Department on issues of religious persecution around the world. The agency has been granted one temporary reprieve after another over the last few months, and was set to expire for good Friday if legislators didn't come to an agreement. At the last minute, lawmakers passed a stand-alone bill to reauthorize USCIRF for one year, adding an amendment by Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., limiting the nine commissioners to two two-year terms apiece. That means the Commission will have seven vacancies in 2012.
The omnibus also contains language banning any federal funding from being used in the District of Columbia to subsidize abortions, but the Obama administration is leaning hard on legislators to take it out.
Capitol Hill insiders said the White House "is serious about its threat to shut down the federal government over the D.C. abortion ban,"
Contact: Karla Dial
Source: CitizenLink
