Congress has temptingly offered to distribute $250,000 far and wide if America's state school boards will agree to teach abstinence only.

This offer, to their great misfortune, has been seized upon by nearly every hand-out-ready state, each eager to enter into a bad bargain that spells rampant disease and death to the ignorant. Young people who are at war with their biological urges are, hereafter, to be given no trusty weapons should their much vaunted front-line of defense--abstinence--fail them in daily experiences. Not only disease but, without the technologies of protection, the undeclared war against teen pregnancy is also at stake.

For the sake of imposing fundamentalist religious control over all reproductive matters, politicians at the service of religious ideologues are willing to risk the lives of America's children. They stand ready to enforce, even with increases in terminal diseases or spates of unwanted pregnancies, their pleasure-denying sex-control programs.

"Would that nature" would "sign on" to such a plan sighs Deborah Mathis, a syndicated columnist. "Children need information," she writes, "as much as we can give them. Its a jungle out there."

It appears to Ms. Mathis and to many others that no educational programs that are worth their salt leave untutored teens without prerequisite knowledge as to how to administer vital self-protection in matters of sex. Surely no one would want to object to the teaching of abstinence as preferable for teens, but since hormonal energies so often win out over religious ideology--and they do-- teaching abstinence alone leaves youth in significant peril while educators fail to mention condoms--technology's first line of defense-- during the penetrative sex act-- against death-dealing bodily invaders.

Voters must understand that their representatives in the Congress are foolishly spending tax moneys collected in order to promote a deranged anti-sexual religious fantasy. Each school board that accepts promotional moneys to support this fantasy strikes a bad bargain, one that will reap despair and havoc in their communities as school officials preside over haywire transmissions of STDs and HIV infections.

Benighted 20th century primitives in fundamentalist sheep's attire will, because they have compromised with the equivalent of religious witchdoctory, live to painfully watch many of their offspring perish as a result.