When President Bush submitted his budget proposal to Congress, he set off a renewed battle for sex-education dollars. Bush announced in his State of the Union address plans to double federal funding for abstinence-until-marriage education immediately, and triple it by 2005.

That would raise it from the current level of $80 million a year to $273 million next year—narrowing the gap that exists between it and the $2.2 billion the federal and state governments spent on condom-based sex education in 2002.

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), which has received a huge chunk of that funding for the last decade to teach kids about condoms, was quick to denounce Bush's proposal.

“Not one of these [abstinence] programs has proven effective,” PPFA spokesman Michael McGee told FoxNews.com in March. “It's not what the public wants.”

But two recent studies would appear to prove McGee wrong.

The first—conducted for Focus on the Family and The Heritage Foundation by Zogby International—reveals that the overwhelming majority of parents want their kids to be taught the value of waiting until they're married to have sex.

The survey of 1,004 parents nationwide with children 17 or under living at home, conducted between Dec. 18 and 21, 2003, carried a margin of error of 3.2 percentage points. It showed that:

• 68 percent want schools to teach kids that remaining abstinent until marriage gives them the best chance of marital stability and happiness.

• 56 percent said contraception either should not be taught at all, or should be taught separately from abstinence, such as in a health or biology class.

• 40 percent think abstinence and contraception education should be combined. But of those, only 2 percent said sex education should focus on teaching kids how to use condoms.

The 2-percent response on the condom question is a “shocking” number, said Linda Klepacki, manager of the abstinence department at Focus on the Family, “because the vast proportion of government programs in the past had as their goal getting more teens to use more condoms. As hard as the comprehensive sex-education lobby has tried to sell its ‘safe sex' message, it's clear parents aren't buying it.

“This poll illustrates that the people most concerned about the health and emotional well-being of America's children—their moms and dads—recognize that abstinence is the only surefire way to protect their kids.”

The second study, released Feb. 24 by the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill's School of Journalism and Mass Communications, found that, of the 18 million new cases of sexually transmitted diseases reported in 2000, nearly half were contracted by sexually active children between the ages of 15 and 19.

Moreover, the report concluded, half of all sexually active teens can realistically expect to contract some kind of STD by the time they're 25. The Alan Guttmacher Institute—PPFA's research arm—estimates that about half of the nation's high schoolers are sexually experienced or active.

The solution, family advocates say, is increased funding for abstinence education so the playing field is level: According to a recent Heritage Foundation report, for every federal dollar abstinence educators receive, comprehensive sex educators get $12.

“A lot of people who work on abstinence from a public-policy perspective have known there's a huge disparity,” said Heritage Foundation Fellow Melissa Pardue, who co-authored the study. “We felt we needed to lay it out. Before the president announced this, people were concerned that the liberals in Congress would take money away from the abstinence programs.”

They still might—but not if congressmen like Florida's Dave Weldon get their way. Weldon, a medical doctor, is committed to seeing the president's wishes brought to fruition.

“Dr. Weldon understands that it's been 30-plus years of the federal government funding condom-promotion programs that hope to normalize adolescent sex,” Weldon aide Paul Webster told Citizen. “We're not necessarily surprised about the disparity, but we're going to work on getting people to understand that abstinence is a public-health approach to the problems adolescents face.”

This article originally appeared in the May 2004 issue of Citizen magazine.