I’ve been reading the Inkwell, the IWF’s (Independent Women’s Forum) new weblog, faithfully. So far it seems to be a cookie-cutter Republican blog; “the party line, the whole party line, and nothing but the party line.” Despite the connection with the IWF, the Inkwell doesn’t seem especially focused on women or on (anti-) feminism.

One thing about the Inkwell is unexpected: the writers seem obsessed with Tony Kushner, gleefully reporting “low” ratings for Angels in America over and over, and expressing hopes that Kushner’s new musical (Caroline, or Change) will be a flop.

Does anyone else find this strikingly petty? There are many artists and novelists whose politics are too right-wing for my tastes, but I don’t sit around saying “boy, that Sarah Michelle Geller is a Republican - I sure hope her next movie flops miserably!” That would be ridiculous.

By the way, The Inkwell used a biased standard in declaring Angels a flop: they compare it to stuff like a CBS Christmas special and Fox’s The Simple Life. But that’s meaningless: aside from the fact that serious drama isn’t expected to match the ratings of fluff like The Simple Life, there’s also the obvious fact that many fewer households receive HBO than receive CBS and FOX.

The actual measure of success is: How did Angels do compared to other made-for-cable movies? According to the December 11 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

That’s not even including HBO’s broadcasting of the same material in six one-hour segments. Overall, HBO estimates that 7.8 million viewers watched Angels in its first week (New York Times, 12/22/03), putting Angels miles ahead of any comparable made-for-cable movie in 2003.

So, unsurprisingly, the IWF folks are once again “factually disabled.” But that’s beside the point - to sit around wishing failure on an artist because you don’t like their politics is ugly, and would be ugly even if they had gotten their facts straight.

I’ll be writing in more detail about this later (probably in a day or two), but recent findings in Minnesota, where the State funds an abstinence-only sexual education program for its public schools, seem to be suggesting that the program is not effective.

The findings, in the form of an evaluation report, can be found here (.PDF format, 225K), an article on the findings can be found here, and the program’s website is saynotyet.com.

The key paragraphs in the article I linked to are:

I’m not well-versed in the statistical evidence related to contraception vs. abstinence-only programs (this is part of the reason for the delay before I write more on this subject) but having been through both contraception-based and abstinence-only sexual education programs I can say that I’m not entirely surprised that the abstinence-only programs don’t seem to be working. When I was going through those programs they were viewed by myself and my peers as something of a long, boring joke. Those of us who were going to end up having sex had already decided to have sex and those of us who weren’t planning on having sex had already decided to abstain.

Then again, the programs I went through were filled with lies, lies, and more lies. For instance, we were taught that the AIDS virus could slip through “tiny holes” in condoms (remember that one? No, the Vatican was not the first to spout that crap), that 90+% of women who had abortions suffer from terrible, mind-breaking depression with most of those going on to kill themselves, and that no contraceptives were effective even in the slightest degree.

Maybe I just got a bad program that left me with poor impressions, but I’m not surprised that the program in Minnesota doesn’t seem to be doing all that well.

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Edited for clarity, 0:55 1/5/03.