For social conservatives, there are two interesting pieces in the New York Times today. Reporter David Kirkpatrick, usually assigned to covering those strange alien beings known as conservatives, covers how any move to the center on abortion by Democrats “runs risks.” (The Times would be slow to assert that doing a hip-shaking boogie on the pro-abortion extreme is a risky strategy.) No one in the story is a “liberal,” but NARAL is running an ad in the “conservative” Weekly Standard. The more shocking article comes from candidate Nicholas Kristof, who is eager to assert that abstinence-only sex education is a death trap:

You see, for all the carnage in President Bush’s budget, one program is being showered with additional cash – almost three times as much as it got in 2001. It’s “abstinence only” sex education, and the best research suggests that it will cost far more lives than the Clinton administration’s much more notorious sex scandal.
Mr. Bush means well. But “abstinence only” is a misnomer that in practice is an assault on sex education itself. There’s a good deal of evidence that the result will not be more young rosy-cheeked virgins – it will be more pregnancies, abortions, gonorrhea and deaths from AIDS