A few years ago, I was driving along listening to a talk-radio program about abstinence-only sex education. One of the guests, who was opposed to teaching kids anything about sex (other than not to have it), explained her reasoning something like this:

Teaching teenagers about sex is like handing your car keys to a 6-year-old. He doesn't know how to drive. He can't even see over the steering wheel. But he can hardly wait to get into the driver's seat and put his foot on the gas. You know he's probably going to get into a terrible accident. When he does, it will be your fault for handing him the keys in the first place.

I yelled so loud at the radio that I practically drove off the road myself. Handing them the keys? Lady, they're not only born with the keys, they're born with the car. Isn't a little drivers' ed in order?

The folks who are down on evolution and big on intelligent design tend to be the same ones touting the benefits of abstinence-only sex education. But human sexuality, unlike evolution, can't be spun as "just another unproven theory." We know where babies come from. And if you believe in intelligent design, you've got to give the Big Guy credit for a really clever idea.

Sometime around the age of 13 (if you will allow me to return to the automotive metaphor) our gas tanks are topped off with high-test hormones, and we are ready to go 100 miles an hour, whether anyone teaches us the rules of the road or not.

Now we parents and educators have several options.

We can say, "Wait just a minute - you're not old enough to take that thing for a spin," and hope our kids don't drive away while we're not watching. The trouble with this option is that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that around 60 percent of kids have sex by the time they turn 18.

Next we can try, "If you take that thing for a spin, you're going to crash and burn!"To this end, many schools have helped themselves to the more than $1 billion given out by the federal government since 1999 for abstinence programs. I'm all for teaching abstinence as part of a thorough, fact-based sex-ed class. Unfortunately, the curricula for many of these programs have been written by right-wing

advocacy groups and are full of misinformation and conservative religious subtext.

Last year, U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman conducted a congressional investigation into the most popular of these programs. He discovered that the several million students who had sat through these courses had been taught such misinformation as: HIV can be contracted from sweat and tears; condoms fail 31 percent of the time; women who've had abortions are more prone to suicide and sterility.

It was this sort of program that state Rep. Russell Albert, a Republican from Strafford, had in mind when he brought forward House Bill 39. The bill, which defines what should be taught in New Hampshire's sex-ed classes, doesn't concern itself with the mechanics of ova and zygotes. Instead, it promotes scare tactics - teaching kids that if they should have sex outside of "monogamous, heterosexual marriage," terrible things will surely happen to them.

This is hardly the fact-based, straightforward sex education teenagers want and need.

Programs such as the one Albert proposes have poor results at the practical level. Perhaps this is because abstinence-only education stigmatizes sexuality and gives out precious little useful information on where to get birth control and protection from or treatment for sexually transmitted diseases. As a result, while American teenagers have sex about as often as teens in Europe do, we see much worse outcomes in this country.

For example:

q An American girl is five times more likely than a French girl to have a baby .

q American girls are more than seven times more likely than Dutch girls to have an abortion.

q American kids have 70 times the gonorrhea rate of teenagers in France and the Netherlands. (next page »)