Check out this Newsday story from last week about the growth of abstinence-only programs under the Bush administration. Earl Lane writes:

The administration requested $272 million for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 for abstinence-until-marriage programs, up from $138 million in fiscal 2004, and well above the $60 million at the end of the Clinton administration. It sought almost as much as the $278 million that went to family planning clinics in 2004 under another federal program, Title X, that has been flat funded under Bush. Congress has not completed action but the House voted a record $173 million for abstinence programs and the Senate appropriations committee approved nearly $175 million.

The campaign of Sen. John Kerry has said he supports comprehensive sex education that includes information about both abstinence and contraception.

While there has been federal money for abstinence education since 1981, the current Bush administration has turned the program into a major policy initiative, both here and abroad. Under Bush’s AIDS prevention plan, according to the nonprofit Alan Guttmacher Institute, at least one-third of U.S. global AIDS prevention funds must be used for abstinence-until-marriage efforts beginning in 2006.

And while there’s no evidence these programs are effective, who needs evidence when you got commitments? Lane continues:

In 2000, at the end of the Clinton administration, HHS developed performance measures for abstinence programs that included the birth rate of female participants and the percentage of participants who have sexual intercourse before marriage. The Bush administration dropped those in favor of attitudinal measures such as “the proportion of youth who commit to abstain from sexual activity until marriage.”