The International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission (IGLHRC) has closely monitored the Bush administration’s increased funding and implementation of abstinence-until-marriage programs in the United States and around the world. Abstinence-until-marriage programs very often suggest to young people that the only means for preventing the transmission of HIV/AIDS is abstinence through virginity pledges and other forms of promises. On March 25, 2005, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) launched www.4parents.gov, a website intended “to help you and your teen discuss important, yet difficult, issues about healthy choices, sex and relationships.”

While IGLHRC congratulates HHS for taking a bold step in offering parents ways to discuss sensitive issues like sex and sexuality to their children, we are concerned that www.4parents.gov seems to rely upon fear-based, biased, and inaccurate information, such as exaggerating the failure rates of condoms and encouraging young people to shun people living with HIV/AIDS by telling them to only marry “uninfected” persons. In particular, the website fails to address how parents discuss sex and sexuality to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning (LGBTQ) youth, who are already marginalized and stigmatized because of their sexuality.

As a response, IGLHRC joins the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the US (SIECUS) and 144 national, state, and local organizations to request that HHS:

1. Temporarily suspend 4parents.gov from public view;
2. Form a task force of a wide-range of experts in the field of public health, sexuality, and parent-child communication to review its content for medical accuracy and ensure that the presentation is comprehensive in scope—addressing abstinence as well as sexual activity—without judgment;
3. Revise the content to be more inclusive of all young people, including LGBTQ youth;
4. Provide a wide-range of resources to reflect the diversity of views, including information that will be sensitive to LGBTQ and sexually active youth and help them practice sex safely if they choose to do so.

For a more complete explanation of SIECUS’ concerns about 4parents.gov, please see the letter that SIECUS and its colleagues sent to Secretary Michael O. Leavitt: http://www.siecus.org/policy/Advocates/advo0002.html

To take action, please go to the website below and send a letter to Leavitt: http://www.familiesaretalking.org/hhs_letter.htm

SIECUS will collect your letters and deliver them to the Secretary.

For more information on how abstinence-until-marriage programs fail and endanger the lives of LGBTQ youth in the US, see:

1. Human Rights Watch (HRW), Ignorance Only: HIV/AIDS, Human Rights and Federally Funded Abstinence-Only Programs in the United States, http://hrw.org/reports/2002/usa0902
2. SIECUS, Towards a Sexually Healthy America: Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Programs that Try to Keep Our Youth Scared Chaste, http://www.siecus.org/pubs/tsha_scaredchaste.pdf
3. Towards a Sexually Healthy America: Roadblocks Imposed by the Federal Government’s Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Education Program, http://www.siecus.org/pubs/tsha_roadblocks.pdf