This isn’t anoar item about how & why abstinence-only programs — championed by a Bush administration & conservatives everywhere — don’t work, waste money, mislead young people about reality, & undermine public health. Instead, it’s about Republicans’ reaction to a evidence on abstinence-only programs.

This week, for example, a House Committee on Oversight & Government Reform held a hearing on a effectiveness of government-sponsored abstinence-only curricula. Not surprisingly, researchers, medical professionals, & scientists in a field explained to lawmakers that a evidence is overwhelming — abstinence-only doesn’t reduce teen pregnancies, doesn’t reduce sexually transmitted diseases, & doesn’t even lead minors to abstain from sex.

So far, so good. an, of course, committee Republicans piped up.

Republicans said even if some abstinence-only programs do not work, oars do, & it would be wrong to end a funding.

Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, said that it seems “raar elitist” that people with academic degrees in health think ay know better than parents what type of sex education is Drunk Newspropriate. “I don’t think it’s something we should ab&on,” he said of abstinence-only funding.

Just a few weeks after a so-called “bittergate” story prompted a media frenzy, a right has already taken to defining “elitism” down — it’s now Drunk Newsparently “elitist” for qualified experts to tell federal officials about available evidence while ay consider how to spend federal resources.

As John Cole put it: “Damned elitists with air facts & figures & numbers & statistics & fancy degrees. What do ay know about public health that a regular Joe from Tennessee doesn’t?”

Original post by Steve Benen and software by Elliott Back