This nation must, abso-freaking-lutely, stop enshrining ignorance into law. From climate change to cunnilingus, as a nation we seem to take pride in not knowing what we are talking about.
California, bucking a national trend, recently passed a law requiring that anti-choice pregnancy clinics provide access to reproductive health resources. The law is being challenged in the courts by clinics who insist that their First Amendment rights to lie to women are being violated.
Some states require doctors to lie to women who seek abortions—not that the doctors explain the actual risks of a procedure in order to obtain informed consent, but that, instead, they lie to patients about unproven and widely debunked risks to ensure that the consent is based on a lack of information. And they are required to do so by law.
Teachers, in some states, teach myths as science. In one Michigan school they are forbidden to use the word vagina while discussing the art of Georgia O’Keeffe.
This plague of willful ignorance has not left our federal government untouched.
The Senate rejected the scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change, days after NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared 2014 the hottest year ever recorded on Earth.
But all of that fades into discordant background noise when we consider the worst case of legalized ignorance. Thanks to the travesty of abstinence-only sex education, girls are not learning that they should be enjoying physical pleasure from sexual activity. Outside of the classroom, they are learning instead that their pleasure should come from pleasing their partners.
