Gail Collins has a wonderful piece in today’s New York Times that rightly slams Texas and its governor, Rick Perry, about education and abstinence.
This month, The Houston Chronicle published an opinion piece by the former first lady titled “We Can’t Afford to Cut Education,” in which Mrs. Bush pointed out that students in Texas currently rank 47th in the nation in literacy, 49th in verbal SAT scores and 46th in math scores.
Seriously, those are Alabama-like numbers.
The next piece would be funny if it wasn’t so serious. Texas has one of the highest rates of teenage pregnancies in the United States and Perry is a fan of abstinence-only education.
“Abstinence works,” said Governor Perry during a televised interview with Evan Smith of The Texas Tribune.
“But we have the third highest teen pregnancy rate among all states in the country,” Smith responded.
“It works,” insisted Perry.
“Can you give me a statistic suggesting it works?” asked Smith.
“I’m just going to tell you from my own personal life. Abstinence works,” said Perry, doggedly.
Wow, just wow. The only thing Collins left out in her evisceration of Texas was an attack on the Dallas Cowboys. But we can’t have everything can we?