Via Feministing, here’s a priceless video of Texas Gov. Rick Perry trying to explain that you should ignore his state’s high rates of teen pregnancy and just trust him that his abstinence-only sex education policy works. The clip is from a sit-down that Perry did with Evan Smith of the Texas Tribune in October 2010, before he threw his hat in the ring for the 2012 GOP presidential primary.
Smith asks why the governor continues to promote policies that simply tell kids not to have sex when the state has the third-highest teen pregnancy rate in the US. The state actually appears to rank fourth in teen pregnancies, but third in teen birth rates. It’s pretty bad either way.
First Perry insists that, “Abstinence works,” despite being presented with evidence to the contrary. Then he argues that maybe the problem is “the way it’s being taught or the way it’s being applied out there,” or that educators simply aren’t “impressing it upon them” hard enough. Then he notes that in his own personal experience, abstinence has worked. Here’s the video:
