"Obama's" Sex Education Bill Print
Written by The Fact Checker in Chief   

Claim: Barack Obama created a bill to teach comprehensive sex education to kindergarteners
Truth: Obama supported a bill that would have provided funding to teach young children how to avoid being sexually molested by adults

In what has widely been considered one of the lowest points in the history of political campaign commercials, John McCain's campaign recently released this advertisement:

There are multiple errors in this short advertisement. Obama did have other achievements related to education while in the Illinois legislature, but most notably, the bill in no way supported "comprehensive sex education" for kindergarteners. The only education in the bill aimed at children that young was to help them recognize inappropriate touching, or other signs that an adult might be about to molest or abduct them.

“I have a 6-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old daughter, and one of the things my wife and I talked to our daughter about is the possibility of somebody touching them inappropriately, and what that might mean,” Mr. Obama said in 2004. “And that was included specifically in the law, so that kindergarteners are able to exercise some possible protection against abuse, because I have family members as well as friends who suffered abuse at that age.”
It is a misstatement of the bill’s purpose, therefore, to maintain, as the McCain campaign advertisement does, that Mr. Obama favored conventional sex education as a policy for 5-year-olds. Under the Illinois proposal, “medically accurate” education about more complicated topics, including intercourse, contraception and homosexuality, would have been reserved for older students in higher grades.

NY Times - Ad on Sex Education Distorts Obama Policy 

The ad claims the bill was Obama's "one accomplishment." This is doubly false.  Obama was neither a cosponsor nor a sponsor of the sex education bill, which never got past "go" in the Senate. So it was not an "accomplishment" at all. Furthermore, Obama can properly claim a number of real accomplishments.
He was a cosponsor of what became the Chicago Education Reform Act of 2003, which allowed for an increase in the number of Chicago charter schools and required the Chicago Board of Education to enter into a formal partnership with the Chicago Teachers Union to "advance the Chicago Public Schools to the next level of education reform." He was also a cosponsor of a bipartisan bill to help Illinois high school graduates be eligible for in-state college tuition rates even if they weren't U.S. citizens.
On the federal level, Obama sponsored three amendments to The America COMPETES Act, which became law in 2007. All three amendments were passed in the Senate by unanimous consent and became law. One amendment proposed language that would create a mentoring program for women and minority groups during their studies in Department of Energy programs. He also proposed language to support summer learning programs and boost their math curricula.  And he put forward a requirement that women and minorities be represented in the President's Science and Technology Summit. Whether or not one considers any of these measures earth-shaking, they're accomplishments nonetheless.
 
Obama spokesman Bill Burton said Tuesday of McCain's ad: "It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls."

McClatchy - Out of bounds! McCain Mis-states Obama sex-ed record


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