{"id":42477,"date":"2013-10-30T23:03:42","date_gmt":"2013-10-31T03:03:42","guid":{"rendered":"\/news\/?p=42477"},"modified":"2013-10-31T20:03:33","modified_gmt":"2013-11-01T00:03:33","slug":"abstinence-hating-bloggers-double-down-on-exploiting-elizabeth-smart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.liveaction.org\/news\/abstinence-hating-bloggers-double-down-on-exploiting-elizabeth-smart\/","title":{"rendered":"Abstinence-hating bloggers double down on exploiting Elizabeth Smart"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"deceptionBack in May, I wrote<\/a> about an especially sleazy push by liberal pundits to misrepresent Elizabeth Smart as blaming abstinence education for feelings of self-worthlessness she endured during her 2002 kidnapping and rape. Over the weekend, Jean Ann Esselink at the so-called New Civil Rights Movement blog decided to resurrect<\/a> that lie (complete with clich\u00e9d “war on women” hashtag<\/a>), citing my post in the process<\/p>\n

ThinkProgress’s Tara Culp-Ressler also joined the bandwagon<\/a>, but frankly, aside from characterizing Smart as not “retracting her point about abstinence education” that wasn’t actually her point in the first place, it’s pretty bland. So let’s dig into Esselink’s more combative offering:<\/p>\n

If Ron Howard wants to talk about making movies, or if Paul McCartney wants to tell stories about John Lennon, you not only listen, you take notes. I feel that way about Elizabeth Smart when she talks about rape syndrome. She was a fourteen-year-old when she was kidnapped out of her bedroom and held as a sex slave for nine months by a deranged vagrant. I don\u2019t question her bona fides in the area of what that does to a person. I take notes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Fair enough. But those notes had better be accurate, or you\u2019re going to flunk.<\/p>\n

Last spring, Elizabeth, who was raised in a conservative Mormon home, made news when she told an audience at a Johns Hopkins symposium on human trafficking that abstinence only education is a mistake because it shames women. I have no idea how Elizabeth votes, but the religious right has anointed her as one of their own, and she does wear a lot of pearls, so let me quote her verbatim, lest I be accused of putting my liberal spin on conservative Elizabeth\u2019s complaint.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I don\u2019t know if anyone else on the \u201creligious right has anointed her as one of their own,\u201d and Esselink doesn\u2019t back it up with links to anyone other than me, so it bears mentioning that I made a point of stressing that \u201cI do not presume to know [Smart\u2019s] views on the general subject\u201d of sex education.<\/p>\n

She goes on to quote the same passage I did previously, in which Smart discussed a teacher who, in the course of discussing abstinence, likened a sexually active girl to an old piece of gum that nobody wants anymore because it\u2019s all chewed up. As I explained at the time, decrying one teacher\u2019s callousness isn\u2019t at all the same as condemning abstinence education.<\/p>\n

Nowhere in the speech did Smart say anything a fair-minded reader would rationally construe as condemning abstinence education; in fact, she discussed realizing that her family\u2019s religious views on sex weren\u2019t<\/em> incompatible with valuing her equally before and after getting rape. The only educational changes she called for were teaching children how to avoid and resist predators at an earlier age – which is ironic, since the latest fad in left-wing feminist circles is shrieking that anyone who says such things is a victim-blaming enabler<\/a> of “rape culture.” (And yes, I re-watched the whole video<\/a> just to be sure.)<\/p>\n

Somehow the rabid right managed to turn their stories into: \u201cSick liberals exploit Elizabeth Smart\u2019s rape and kidnapping to demonize abstinence education<\/a>.\u201d The mud-slinging began. And Elizabeth\u2019s message was lost.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cSomehow,\u201d because apparently the possibility of being fact-checked is too difficult for liberals to process. And \u201crabid\u201d and \u201cmud-slinging,\u201d because I guess \u201cteaching abstinence helps rapists\u201d isn\u2019t hyperbolic or insulting at all.<\/p>\n

Did we all read the same quote?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yep. But some of us were honest about what it said.<\/p>\n

Elizabeth Smart says abstinence only programs hurt young women\u2019s self-esteem.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No she didn\u2019t. She said a bad teacher who presented abstinence badly did. Stop lying.<\/p>\n

In an upcoming issue of New Yorker Magazine<\/a>, Elizabeth Smart is reported to have \u201cclarified\u201d her views on abstinence only programs. (I hate calling it \u201cabstinence only education\u201d since it is exactly the opposite. It\u2019s keeping kids uneducated about their own bodies and about sex.) She didn\u2019t \u201cwalk it back\u201d. She painted it in softer colors for the Right, by saying it was one example among many other ways women are shamed for their sexuality. But she did reaffirm her observation that abstinence only is a factor that often contributes to victims of sexual abuse blaming themselves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The new interview\u2019s subscriber-only, but here’s the entire paragraph Esselink offers just a snippet of:<\/p>\n

The speech received considerable media attention. The Washington Post summed up Smart’s comments with the headline “MORMON TEACHING ON SEX STOPPED ME FROM ESCAPING KIDNAPPERS.” Smart told me that she wanted to clarify her point. She had been lamenting that victims of sexual abuse often feel that they are \u201cno longer as good as everybody else.\u201d Nobody should have the power to take away another person\u2019s self-worth, Smart told me. But abstinence education was hardly the only way that victims of sexual assault could be shamed. A girl could be humiliated through social media \u2014 Smart and I talked about the incident last year in Steubenville, Ohio, in which high-school students recorded an assault with cell-phone cameras and mocked the victim on Twitter. Smart told me, \u201cI can\u2019t tell you how many women I\u2019ve met who say, \u2018When I was your age, I was raped, but it was kind of my fault, because of X, Y, or Z.\u2019 And I just want to pull my hair out.\u201d Autumn Hanna VandeHei, an organizer of the Johns Hopkins conference, told me in an e-mail that when Smart was invited to participate she “initially didn’t understand how she could be helpful.” But when VandeHei told Smart “how many of these girls are judged after coming out of trafficking for not leaving their pimps\/captors – for not running away – she became very indignant, and was passionate and defensive on behalf of the trafficking survivors.”
\n<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So once more we see the sentiment attributed to her, but her actual words don\u2019t go nearly that far. Again, Smart\u2019s original speech made clear that a traditional, religious outlook on morality and valuing rape victims were not<\/em> mutually exclusive – \u201cjust because all these things had happened to me, that wouldn\u2019t change their love.\u201d If anything, the piece goes on to strengthen that point:<\/p>\n

She remembered how her mother had consoled her after a popular girl at school invited others to a party right in front of her. Her mother had said, “There are only two opinions of you that really matter. One is God’s. And the other is mine. And don’t you know I will always love you, no matter what?” Smart decided that she’d endure whatever it took in order to see her family again […]<\/p>\n

Someone in Salt Lake City who knows the Smarts told me, “They are a prominent Mormon family, and a very tight one. Her family and her community folded her right back in” […]<\/p>\n

Kristine Haglund, the editor of a journal about Mormonism, told me [\u2026] “She had this terrible experience, and one that had weird and creepy Mormon overtones. Yet she still believes. She’s entirely faithful. And while she’s not part of the feminist ferment in Mormonism, and I doubt she’d call herself a feminist, she is strong in a way that feminists can admire. She emerged strong and whole, a modern woman able to address questions of sexuality directly and confidently.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In a last bid to give her revisionism a veneer of substance, Esselink links to a 2011 Slate<\/em> piece<\/a> allegedly showing that teen pregnancy is \u201csignificantly higher\u201d in abstinence-only states. But Mary Anne Mosack of the National Abstinence Education Association responds<\/a> that the study Slate<\/em> cites is severely flawed – it fails to account for \u201cnumerous [other] factors contributing to high teen birth rates,\u201d \u201cmake[s] the erroneous conclusion that these laws accurately reflect what is actually being taught in schools,\u201d and \u201cmake[s] no mention of the percentage of students in a state who actually received abstinence classes,\u201d which is significant because \u201ccontraceptive-based programs have been implemented in every state regardless of the law\u201d:<\/p>\n

Even the very anti-abstinence Guttmacher Institute concluded that only 25% of schools across the country were receiving abstinence education during the decade examined in this study. In actual practice, no state can be categorized as \u201cabstinence-only.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Beyond that, we have plenty of peer-reviewed evidence that says just the opposite:<\/p>\n