Conservative states are more promiscuous than we’ve been led to believe

The teachers have become students, and today they are learning about the devastating consequences of sex.

Jeff Friedel, a professional chastity educator, is explaining to middle-school teachers that teenage girls who are sexually active are three times more likely to be depressed than girls who are not. Moments later, Friedel shows an image of a chlamydia-infected cervix.

Friedel works for Choosing the Best, an Atlanta company that designs abstinence programs. He has come to the Clay County Public Health Center in Liberty to train teachers from public schools in North Kansas City, Excelsior Springs and St. Louis. "Abstinence education is working!" exclaims one of his PowerPoint slides.

This morning's lesson is designed for eighth-graders. The workbook tells the story of Kendra, a high-school student who feels ashamed after having sex with a boy. The encounter leaves Kendra feeling so confused and empty that she misses two days of school.

As Kendra's story unfolds, Kathleen Welton, a Clay County health official, passes out hearts made of construction paper. She tells each teacher in the room to tear a piece from the paper heart every time Kendra expresses remorse. Later, their students will repeat the exercise.

Friedel, who is wearing khakis and a cranberry-colored knit shirt, encourages the teachers to stick to the script in the lesson plan. "Everything is in there for a reason," he says.

Choosing the Best teaches that abstinence is cool and that sex outside of marriage leads to guilt, depression and biological calamity. To help provide armor against these scourges, the company's workbooks contain forms whereby students can pledge their sexual virtue to future spouses.

The federal government has helped students make these abstinence pledges. Every year since 1996, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has distributed $50 million for teaching premarital abstinence. More funds became available after George W. Bush, a supporter of abstinence education, took office.

More and more states are questioning the effectiveness of the message, however, and are passing up the money. (California is the only state that has declined the money over the life of the program.) Colorado stopped participating in one of the federal programs in 2007. "Why would we spend tax dollars on something that doesn't work?" Colorado's chief medical officer asked.

A list of the states that continue to teach abstinence until marriage looks similar to the map of red states, where voters are more likely to ascribe importance to "moral values."

In reality, red-state America talks sexual purity but practices something else. The five states with the highest teen birthrates all went for Bush in 2004. States with the highest divorce rates are also in Bush country.

What happens when the behavior doesn't match the lesson plan? A professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City is co-writing a book that attempts to come up with an answer.

June Carbone teaches family law at UMKC. One of her interests is how the law reacts to advances in medicine, such as fertility treatments. She followed the case of a sperm donor whose quest for parental rights made it to the Kansas Supreme Court. The judges ruled that the man lacked standing without a written agreement with the birth mother.

Carbone's interest in red states and blue states began when she and a colleague, Naomi Cahn, a professor at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., set out one day to find a new research topic. They eventually settled on age as it relates to family formation. Carbone says parents who start families in their teens or early 20s lead different (that is, harder) lives than people who delay having children.

The 2004 presidential campaign was going on while Carbone and Cahn began their research. So-called values voters gave Bush his winning margin. But his critics took pleasure in noting the teen births and failed marriages streaming out of red-state America.

People in red states do look pretty silly moralizing on same-sex marriage and other topics. According to one survey, evangelical Protestants begin having sex at the average age of 16.3, just a few months after the typical nonreligious teen becomes active (15.9). "They're having sex as much as anybody else," Carbone says.

But hypocrisy isn't the only factor at work.

Carbone and Cahn have noticed that red states and blue states congregate at opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of the average age at first marriage. The youngest brides and grooms live in Utah, Oklahoma, Idaho, Arkansas and Kentucky — all red states.

Families form at earlier ages in red states partly because an unintended pregnancy is more likely to be met with marriage than an abortion. (Blue states have higher abortion rates.) Opponents of abortion rights cheer decisions to take unexpected pregnancies to term. But shotgun marriages frequently end in divorce.

According to Carbone, Bristol Palin's pregnancy provides a window into the lives of red-state families. Palin, the daughter of Alaska governor and former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, gave birth to a boy in December. She and the baby's father, Levi Johnston, are now 18.

"Think about what they're going to be like if they have two kids, which is predictable within the next four years, and he's, let's say, 21," Carbone says. "What's he doing? Your average 21-year-old guy, even if he's married and has kids, is not fully employed. He's going out drinking with the boys. He's much more likely to be unfaithful. He's not so attentive to the wife's emotional needs."