Topper McFaun Is Giving Me Hope
While some people watched the dueling town halls last Thursday night, I watched the West Wing special on HBO Max. The show, which has now been off the air for twice as many years as it was on, remains my all-time favorite. It’s always been competence and decency porn; a fantasy about what would happen if laws and decisions were made by not just the smartest people in the room, but the most honorable. It even imagined a centrist Republican presidential candidate who was pro-choice, refused to court the far right, believed in science, and looked like Alan Alda in his grandfather phase (who wouldn’t want Alan Alda as president). While we can’t have that in our 2020 election, I can bring you Topper McFaun, a GOP representative in Vermont who wrote one of the most common sense laws about sex and contraceptives we’ve seen in a while. I haven’t checked out the rest of his voting record, and I don’t think I will, because right now, Topper McFaun is giving me a little bit of hope.
Vermont Makes Condoms Available to All Students
A Republican state senator in Vermont introduced a bill to make condoms available in schools because he wanted to reduce the number of abortions in the state, his colleagues passed it, and the governor—also a Republican—signed it into law this month. It’s straight out of an Aaron Sorkin fantasy about how laws should be made.
The law, which will go into effect in July, requires that all middle schools and high schools in the state make condoms available to students free of charge. Schools can decide the best way to do this, but at a minimum must place condoms in safe and easily accessible areas of the school such as the nurse’s office. The law also requires schools to provide information on contraception and strengthens the state’s rules regarding insurance coverage for contraceptives.
Representative Topper McFaun (R-Barre) introduced the bill in the hope of preventing pregnancy among young people as a way to reduce abortion. He told Vermont Public Radio: “We know that people are having sex at early ages. We know that….You know, there is a consequence. It doesn’t happen every time, but you may become pregnant, or you may get some kind of venereal disease. So why not protect everybody concerned. And make those ways of protection easily accessible. And that was what the bill was all about.” (We haven’t used the term VD in decades, but other than that we’re totally with you, Topper.)
This open-minded approach to condom availability programs is rare; according to the CDC, only 7.2% of high schools and 2.3% of middle schools make condoms available to students. Over the years parents and politicians have objected to such programs, arguing that giving kids condoms sends the wrong message and promotes promiscuity, but research has consistently found just the opposite. These programs do not increase sexual activity but often do increase condom use which has been dropping among young people for years. The 2019 YRBS found that 46% of sexually active high school students did not use a condom the last time they had sex.
The logic behind preventing abortion by making contraceptives more readily available is glaringly obvious, and yet the same forces that want to outlaw all abortions usually fight against birth control access as well. Not McFaun. He explained: “I’m talking about allowing people to be in the position where they don’t have to make the decision, that crucial decision, to have an abortion or not — that’s what I’m trying to prevent. And the way to do that is to provide ways to allow people to protect themselves.” This is beyond refreshing in an era when facts and reason have been replaced by rants and rhetoric.
Teens Have Unanswered Questions about Sex; Virginia Republicans Would Like to Keep it that Way
Unfortunately, Republicans in Virginia do not share McFaun’s attitude about prevention, and in this case, we’re not even talking about condoms, just information.
BrdsNBz is a text information line run by the American Association for Sexual Health (ASHA). Young people send their questions by text and get confidential, medically accurate information from certified health educators within 24 hours. ASHA has an agreement with the Virginia Department of Health (VHD) to give young people in the state access to the service. At the end of last month, VHD sent postcards advertising the text line to households in counties with high rates of teen pregnancy that had been identified as having teens, ages 13 to 19, living in the home. This set off a firestorm of controversy.
Parents and politicians were apparently outraged that such a service existed and that VHD would have the nerve to advertise it directly to young people. (In truth, the postcards were mailed to adults in the households or to 18- and 19-year-olds directly.) Delegate Kathy Byron (R-Bedford) told a local paper that she thought the service violated parental rights because it might expose teens to information on sexual identity or abortion. Senator Steve Newman (R-Lynchburg) added: “I’ve been very supportive of sex education for many, many years, but I do not believe that anybody should send a flyer to a young person and encourage them to text them all their questions.” His colleague Sen. Bill DeSteph (R-Virginia Beach) went even further and suggested that the text line provides “…a dream job for child sexual predators.”
I spoke to Lynn Barclay, the president of ASHA, who is a longtime friend and colleague. As I suspected, the truth is far less intriguing or controversial than these lawmakers would like to believe. The text line is answered by health educators on ASHA’s staff; they don’t provide direct medical advice but work with medical advisors to make sure the information is accurate; they rarely get questions about abortion; and they encourage young people to turn to trusted adults, including their parents, for guidance. As Lynn told me: “We know these conversations can be uncomfortable and many young people seek information from friends and online. All of this is made much more complicated by the array of confusing and often misleading sexual health information available online. The value we see in the BrdsNBz service is we respond to users with vetted, reliable sources of information.”
Nonetheless, Byron and Newman were both so outraged that they offered amendments to Virginia’s budget specifically prohibiting state expenditures for the BrdsNBz. Neither amendment passed, but Newman says he is not done fighting and questioned whether having an adult talk to kids about sex through text is even legal in his county. Well, of course, it sounds bad when you put it like that, but having professional health educators answer teens’ questions about sex so they don’t have to turn to friends or Google is clearly a good thing.
Dating During a Political Pandemic
For each of the last 10 years, the online dating giant Match.com (which now also owns Tinder, Hinge, PlentyOfFish, and OkCupid) has paired with social scientists to survey 5,000 of their members in an attempt to gain insight into how singles feel about sex and relationships. Not surprisingly, this year’s survey focused on the impact of pandemics, politics, and protests.
Singles are having less sex this year, with a whopping 71% of those surveyed saying they had not had sex at all during the pandemic. While we might have assumed that people are making up for the lack of available partners with some good self-love, only 16% said they masturbated more during lock down. (Perhaps, they were already doing it a lot?)
In a plot twist straight out of a bad 1980s sitcom, sex among non-romantic roommates went up during the pandemic; 46% of Gen-Z and 33% of Millennial singles admitting to falling into bed with the person down the hall.
You know who they’re not sleeping with? People in the other political party, that’s who. Almost half (45%) of singles want to know a partner’s political viewpoints by the second date. And, it looks like singles do not believe that mixed marriages work—76% think it’s important for a potential partner to share the same political beliefs. This represents a 25% increase since Trump took office.
In contrast, over the last decade there has been a 58% increase in singles being open to dating people of a different race or ethnicity. Moreover, 59% of singles (including 74% of GenZ and 66% of Millennials) want to know if their date supports Black Lives Matter.
This sounds pretty similar to advice I’ve given my daughters: feel free to bring home anyone of any race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or religion but the first thing I’m going to ask is how they voted.