First we had Hillary Clinton asserting that economists wouldn’t know how a gas-tax holiday would work, uh, economically. Now the stupidity goes bipartisan with Rep. Duncan musing on abstinence education:

The Zogby poll that’s been mentioned showed by a more than 2-1 margin that parents … prefer the abstinence approach, and it seems rather elitist to me for people who maybe have degrees in this field to feel that they, because they’ve studied it, somehow know better than the parents what is best for … their children.

Academics really need to start standing up to this kind of ignorance — if your full-time job is to study something, you have special knowledge of it, and it’s absurd for politicians to dismiss that knowledge out-of-hand. As Eugene Volokh writes:

People thinking that because they’ve studied a subject … they know better than those who just have intuition, casual observation, and anecdote? How elitist! …
Look, if you want to challenge the reliability of various studies, by all means please do that. … Likewise, if you want to make an argument based on pure morality or democratic theory about what should be done and shouldn’t, that’s fine.

And as for the underlying issue, the ideal situation would be for public schools to leave sex ed to parents, who can tailor their messages to fit their kids’ penchants for risk-taking. As Reason’s Kerry Howley summarized the available studies:

Kids are not as malleable as supporters of comprehensive sex ed policies make them out to be. The available evidence suggests that abstinence-only programs have no impact whatsoever. Kids might as well spend the 40 minutes staring at a brick wall. It’s a waste of class time and money. … there is no solid evidence that “comprehensive” sex ed — the relevant alternative — has any impact on sexual behavior either.