From a John McCain ad titled “Education”:
Obama’s one accomplishment?
Legislation to teach ‘comprehensive sex education’ to kindergarteners.
Learning about sex before learning to read?
Barack Obama.
Wrong on education. Wrong for your family.
There are 3 2 lies at work here.
First, Obama’s list of accomplishments is indisputably greater that 1, as the ad contends. Winning the nomination for the Democratic ticket would certainly count, as would his legislative successes (most commonly cited examples accomplishments here and here) in the Senate. Though the ad was titled “education” we missed the now-obvious link between “one accomplishment” and education. Obama’s campaign has proffered a list of the Illinois senator’s education-related achievements, but the McCain campaign’s ad could argue that “accomplishment” is a title Obama’s education-related work doesn’t deserve. As a subjective statement, it’s neither objectively true or untrue.
Secondly Firstly, Obama was not a sponsor of the bill. The bill’s record, including it’s sponsors, is available here. It’s very gracious, but false, to give credit to someone for a bill they neither authored nor sponsored.
Thirdly Secondly, the bill did not pass. It was not Obama’s accomplishment, because he didn’t sponsor the bill. But it wasn’t anyone’s accomplishment because the bill did not pass at all.
McCain’s claim that Obama wanted to teach kids about sex before reading is even questionable, though we wouldn’t call it a lie. When Obama was asked on this issue in 2004 in a debate with Alan Keyes, Obama said:
We have a existing law that mandates sex education in the schools. We want to make sure that it’s medically accurate and age-appropriate.Now, I’ll give you an example, because I have a six-year-old daughter and a three-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.
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. So, that’s the kind of stuff that I was talking about in that piece of legislation.
McCain’s camp should head to detention for those three two lies. Calling an unpassed bill from the state senate in Illinois that Obama didn’t write his only accomplishment is untrue.
Update: We are tracking lies through refutable statements, thus any number of lies wrapped into a single instance qualifies as one lie, for now. Should this practice become commonplace, we may adjust the rules to reflect the fairest lie tallies.
Tags: johnmccain.com
September 11th, 2008 at 5:54 am
So does it count as 3 lies?
September 11th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
This is the way your other lies need to be documented. With facts and figures. Not just some reference to factcheck
September 11th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
More documentation would be nice but this site is doing very good job at revealing lies by both parties in fair manner.
Btw, if Palin is against sex education in high school and believe parents should do the job, then she better prove it herself by NOT having a pregnant teenage kid running around.
September 11th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
Ictoan, I don’t know if you’ve noticed this but, sometimes - just sometimes - kids don’t listen to their parents. Shocking, I know. Why is everyone acting like this is the first time a 17-year-old girl got pregnant? Do you know how many millions of other kids are taught abstinence and stick with it? Palin’s daughter is one exception out of many. She made a mistake, had a lapse in judgement (isn’t really that hard to understand?), she’s getting married and raising the child herself - that’s called dealing with the consequences.
September 11th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
KMV, the point is, parents should be reponsible for their kids behavior and upbringing. If Palin cannot execute the correct parenting skills, then how can we expect her to execute the correct political skills that could affect the whole country?
There are many 17 year old girls out there that are NOT pregnant either. No one is “acting like this is the first time a 17-year-old girl got pregnant”. It’s just that, in my opinion, the upbringing of kids do reflect how competent their parents are.
September 11th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
So, if a president made a mistake, had a lapse in judgement, we should all just accept that because it’s just one exception and deal with the consequences? No thanks. I don’t want to deal with the consequences. It’s better to be proactive instead of reactive.
September 15th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
“Do you know how many millions of other kids are taught abstinence and stick with it?”
Do you? Repeated studies have shown that kids taught abstinence-only have sex at the same time and in equal numbers as kids taught honest facts about contraceptives and STIs. The difference is, the abstinence kids are 50% less likely to use condoms or any sort of contraceptive.
Proponents for contraceptive education are not ’sexualizing our kids’, and abstinence is taught in every form of sex education as the best and safest way. Teaching kids about safety is just realistic and necessary.
“Of the one in six teenage girls who took a chastity pledge, 88 percent broke their vow before marriage, many within a few years. And girls who had taken chastity pledges were less likely to use condoms, and less likely to seek testing and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.
The abstinence-only approach is rooted in a denial of the reality of teenage sexuality. By the age of 19, 70 percent of teenagers have become sexually active. Refusing to face this reality means that teenagers, especially young women, are ill-equipped to take responsibility for their own sexual choices and reproductive health.
In Europe, teenagers become sexually active in equal numbers as in the U.S., but contraception and comprehensive sexual education are widely provided. In addition, there is little societal pressure to remain abstinent. This goes a long way to explaining why the teen pregnancy rate in the U.S. is dramatically higher.”
September 17th, 2008 at 3:09 am
I think that the Obama camp, the media response, and this site have been disingenuous. Obama argues that it’s a lie because the intent of the bill was to teach kids about molestation. Indeed the language did include language that each grade level’s sex-ed classes should be age-appropriate, but it also stated:
“Each class or course in comprehensive sex education in any of *grades K through 12* shall include instruction on the prevention of *sexually transmitted infections*, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV.”
I read the bill (http://bit.ly/2L4JxS) and there are 15 points that it makes. Point 11 is the only one of them has to do with molestation.
Byron York from National Review actually tracked down one of the authors of the bill and to find out if Obama had been honest about the intention of the bill: http://bit.ly/2suSkh
—–clip—–
“When I asked Martinez the rationale for changing grade six to kindergarten, she said that groups like Planned Parenthood and the Cook County Department of Health — both major contributors to the bill — “were finding that there were children younger than the sixth grade that were being inappropriately touched or molested.”…
After we discussed other aspects of the bill, I told Martinez that reading the bill, I just didn’t see it as being exclusively, or even mostly, about inappropriate touching. “*I didn’t see it that way, either*,” Martinez said. “It’s just more information about a whole variety of things that have to go into a sex education class, the things that are outdated that you want to amend with things that are much more current.”
So, I asked, you didn’t see it specifically as being about inappropriate touching?
“*Absolutely not.*”
—–end clip—–
I just watched the ad again (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVLQhRiEXZs). The nut of the commercial, that Obama voted for a bill that taught comprehensive sex ed to kindergarteners, is accurate.
And to further clarify Obama’s stance, here is a quote from Obama last November at a Planned Parenthood event (where he is referring to Alan Keyes using the same line of attack as this McCain ad during the Senate campaign):
“I remember him, uh, using this in his campaign against me, saying, “Barack Obama supports teaching sex education to kindergarteners.” (laughter) And, you know, which — I didn’t know what to tell him. *But it’s the right thing to do.*”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJ6vZRy62KY
September 17th, 2008 at 8:37 am
You read the bill, but missed the several places it clarifies that all the information will be age and developmentally appropriate?
September 17th, 2008 at 1:49 pm
You apparently didn’t read my post, because I said in the very first paragraph “Indeed the language did include language that each grade level’s sex-ed classes should be age-appropriate”.
September 17th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
I’ll admit I don’t follow the legalese perfectly, but even just a few lines down from the quote you posted it clarifies:
“All sex education courses that discuss sexual activity or behavior intercourse shall satisfy the following criteria:
[...]
(2) All (1) course material and instruction shall be age and developmentally appropriate.”
And from the article you linked, the head of the Illinois Education Ass. said:
“The intent of the language and inclusion of kindergarten was simply to make it possible to offer age-appropriate, not comprehensive, information for kindergartners so that those young children could be given basic information so that they would be aware of inappropriate behavior by adults,” Swanson told me. “Certainly, it was never intended to be some sort of inappropriate information that might be appropriate for junior high or high school students.”
You also cut off that Obama quote mid-sentence. He says: “But it’s the right thing to do, to provide age-appropriate sex education, science-based sex education in the schools.”
McCain’s ad take the education bill, and deliberately misrepresents the intent. How is that not a lie?