KISH begins 6-city tour of western Kentucky
Kentuckians take a closer look into teen sexual activity
From Kentucky Citizen Digest, Sept, 1998

The Kentucky Initiative for Sexual Health (KISH), a coelesced project of a number of organizations including pregnancy care centers and The Family Foundation, will focus upon the western part of the state this fall.  In September, KISH begins a six-city sweep of the region, holding town meetings and youth gatherings to elevate the message of “abstinence before marriage, faithfulness after.”

The six cities and their respective dates for the town meetings are: Sept. 10, Hop-kinsville; Sept. 17, Madisonville; Sept. 24, Murray; Oct. 1, Paducah; Oct. 6, Bowling Green; and Nov. 19, Henderson.

Two significant Kentucky speakers, Dr. David Hager and Cameron Mills, are highlighted in the different parts of the three-phase effort.

The Phase I speaker (for the town meeting in each city) is Dr. David Hager, a nationally recognized expert in the field of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and author of a number of books that engage sexual intimacy far more broadly than simply sexually transmitted diseases.  Hager, a professor at the University of Kentucky School of Medicine, currently serves on the Board of the Medical Institute for Sexual Health and on Focus on the Family’s national Physicians Resource Council.  His past service includes the Centers for Disease Control, specifically in the area of STDs.

Hager has profound concerns about the casual attitude Americans display towards nonmarital sexual relationships, “America, alas the world, is in the throes of an epidemic of behavioral consequence – the consequence of engaging in sex outside of marriage.”

Several weeks after the town meeting, Phase II, the outreach to youth, begins.  Phase II will feature a member of the national champion University of Kentucky basketball team, Cameron Mills.  Mills is a dynamic speaker and, though an “eligible bachelor,” delights in proclaiming “abstinence before marriage” among youth.  He will speak in schools, public and private, in five of the six communities several weeks after the city has its town meeting.

In each community after Mills’ daytime school presentations, a city-wide youth gathering will be held in the evening where he will speak at greater length.  Churches and their youth groups will play a key role in these evening gatherings.  Mills’ Phase II, “follow-up” message to teens will help bring Hager’s message to the next generation.

The third, and ongoing stage, is led by the local individuals and is bolstered by the pregnancy care center which is already doing quality abstinence education.  This local “task force” will be in place to lead and direct the course of ongoing policy and teaching about sexuality in the community, which too often has gone down the road of alternative approaches to teen sexual activity.

Hager’s presentation, a hard-hitting combination of statistics and clinical case studies, “gives the average parent information rarely available to the nonmedical community,” says Rachel McCubbin, project coordinator of KISH for the Family Foundation.  “When I’ve spoken to groups around the state and tell parents that the most common STD — HPV — causes cervical cancer, they are shocked.”

The initiative is crafted so that major media outlets should cover a large-scale town meeting in each of six key cities in western Kentucky, followed several weeks later by separate youth presentations (Phases I and II).  The effort in each city is broadly promoted by a coalition of community organizations, businesses and churches, and is focused turning out parents and policy-makers in each city for the town meeting, and later, challenging youth.  This, along with media advertising and resulting news coverage will help secure the short-term, high-profile impact needed to make this concern a commonly discussed, “kitchen table-top” issue.

The focused effort in one region of the state will help assure success, both educational/public relations and statistical, which will ultimately help influence the rest of the state to choose healthy sex-education principles and materials as opposed to the “safe sex” message widely used at this time.  The guiding concepts of KISH are clearly laid out in the eight congressional guidelines of the federal Title V monies allocated to states to promote abstinence.  Currently, the Kentucky program has carefully chosen to advocate only three of the eight.

Final assessment of KISH, unfortunately, must be delayed until statistics regarding teen pregnancy and teen sexual activity can be measured in the region, probably in two to three years.

The Family Foundation, a Kentucky non-profit education and research organization, was incorporated in 1989 as a part of the Focus on the Family state-level public policy network.  One of its early priorities was to organize the pregnancy care centers of Kentucky into an association for the mutual strengthening of each center and for cooperative statewide and regional efforts. This association, the Kentucky Association of Pregnancy Care Centers (KAPCC), is vital to KISH.

Of particular relevance to this effort, in August of 1994 The Family Foundation brought Dr. Joseph McIlhaney, founder of the Medical Institute for Sexual Health, to Lexington for a conference.  The conference, led jointly by McIlhaney and Dr. Hager, was planned for the purpose of encouraging and equipping the centers to move into the abstinence-education realm.

With a similar impetus, in May of 1998 The Family Foundation hosted its fourth annual Pregnancy Care Centers’ Volunteers’ Retreat (this one featuring Dr. David Hager).  The time-tested bond with the center directors and the working relationship with the PCCs as organizations is rich and is being well-utilized in this KISH effort.

KISH will be the broadest abstinence effort attempted in Kentucky, delivering a singular, clear message, in a variety of ways using well-respected speakers.  Through KISH, the short-term, issue-elevation component will be coupled with a long-term, day-in-day-out community-presence.  It speaks in the “language of the listener” – medical facts – but at the same time relies heavily on the people of faith – the salt of the earth – to deliver the message.
 

Key Family Foundation Contacts: Kent Ostrander, Executive Director Martin Cothran, Senior Associate Policy Analyst