A day after I write a piece about making progress in the field of sexual health, I get bumped back two spaces. I take a bathroom break but something on the office TV stops me in my tracks en route from the cubicle to bladder relief.

ABC News is reporting that three citizen organizations are petitioning the Maryland State Board of Education to block the new sex-ed curriculum in Montgomery County. Leading the effort is Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum. Getting rid of instructions on condom use? Sounds responsible to me!

When I get back to my desk (the flooded bathroom actually made it a longer absence than I’d anticipated), I see the Washington Post reported that a report requested by my esteemed former senator, Rick Santorum, and his distinguished colleague Mr. Tom Coburn concluded that sex-ed programs that demonstrate how to use condoms gives abstinence “the short end of the stick,” in the words of a Health and Human Services Department official. But as Douglas Kirby, a senior research scientist at ETR Associates, the California-based nonprofit organization that developed one of the “comprehensive sex-ed curricula” programs, points out: "There's twice as much material in this curriculum on abstinence than on condoms and contraception."

The icing on the cake came at lunch today. I attended an event at Heritage about the lonely despair of being single in the twenty-first century. I’ve never been given such a look of disgust as when I suggested abstinence-only wasn’t a practical approach to sex education. But those conservatives sure do lay out a nice crudite spread.