Texas Schools Admit Abstinence-Only Ed. Doesn’t Work

School districts across Texas are introducing a whole new sex ed. curriculum this school year, and guess what’s not on it? Abstinence only.

Turns out the state with one of the highest rates of teen pregnancies in the entire country has finally figured it out - their kids aren’t actually abstinent! Continue reading »

School Skipped Obama Speech, Sends Kids to Bush Speech

Some five hundred kids from Arlington will be bused out to watch former President George W. Bush give a speech later this month at the new Dallas Cowboys Stadium. These are the same kids who weren’t allowed to watch President Barack Obama’s speech to American school children yesterday.

Hypocrisy has a new name, and it shares it with a school district in Texas. Continue reading »

12-Year-Old Girl Arrested for Sexual Assault

Currently in Texas, there are about 4,000 people on the permanent sex offender registry for crimes they committed as juveniles–in some cases, when they were as young as 10 years-old. The case of a 12-year-old Texan girl who was recently arrested for sexual assault has raised the question of whether it’s ethical to register juveniles as sex offenders. Continue reading »

Mom Forbidden by Judge to Get Pregnant Does it Anyway

Judge Charlie Baird was accused to providing judicial support to enforced sterilization when he told Felicia Salazar she couldn’t have anymore children as part of her probation last year. This year he’s singing a different tune.

Felicia Salazar walked into a Texas courtroom with her two-month-old baby, just ten months after being ordered by Baird not to procreate. So what did the judge say? Continue reading »

Texas Takes Neutral Look at “Cosleeping” Deaths

I think it’s been years since I’ve read a mainstream news story on cosleeping that didn’t make me want to start cursing at the screen. It has sometimes seemed like every couple weeks there is an over-simplified alarmist story in another regional daily, taken uncritically from a public health agency’s press materials. They usually go like this: “Babies sometimes die in adult beds! It must be the adult beds/adults who did it! Don’t sleep with your baby!” (Imagine if we said the same about cribs. . .)

So I have to say I was pleasantly surprised by the report in the Houston Chronicle titled “‘Cosleeping’ Deaths Scrutinized“—and by the research it was based on.

Continue reading »