Quote of the Day: “What’s good for me is good for a lot of people.”

That’s how Stuart Spitzer, Texas state representative and virgin until marriage, justified his support for a proposal to redirect HIV prevention funding toward abstinence education. 

Texas would cut $3 million in state funds for programs to prevent HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases and put that money toward abstinence education under a Republican-sponsored measure advanced by the state House.

The GOP-controlled House approved the measure 97-47 on Tuesday after a contentious debate with Democrats that veered into the unusually personal.

GOP state Rep. Stuart Spitzer, a doctor and the bill’s sponsor, at one point defended the budget amendment by telling the Texas House that he practiced abstinence until marriage. The first-term lawmaker says he hopes schoolchildren follow his example, saying, “What’s good for me is good for a lot of people.”

What a concise embodiment of the pure arrogance that drives so much conservative policy making. And perhaps nowhere in the US are the truly deadly consequences of this arrogant disregard for the diversity of other people’s lives more clear than in Texas.

The state is considering taking that HIV prevention funding and throwing it down the drain on ineffective abstinence-only programs, while it has one of the highest number of HIV diagnoses in the country. It passed a bill preventing schools, which are not required to teach sex ed, from distributing educational materials from abortion providers, while it has one of the nation’s highest teen pregnancy rates. In its ongoing efforts to destroy Planned Parenthood, it is trying to exclude the organization from its cancer screening program, while it has one of the nation’s highest rates of cervical cancer.

Texas’ anti-abortion, anti-contraception, anti-sex education policies are literally killing people, but hey, in Spitzer’s ideal world, at least they’ll enjoy not having sex for awhile before they do.

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