Sharron Angle Quotes
I'm pro responsible choice. You know, there is choice to abstain, choice to do contraception. There are all kinds of good choices.
Ralston, Jon. "Face to Face with Jon Ralston." KSNV, 8 July 2010.
Addressing a group of religious leaders who were objecting to sex education to reduce teen-age pregnancy:
In 1877 Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh attempted to publish The Fruits of Philosophy in Britain. It was a book on Birth Control. The two were immediately arrested and charged with publishing an ‘obscene’ book. Gifford was the Public Prosecutor. The authors were convicted and sentenced to 6 months in prison. However, they appealed and were exonerated in the appeal. The case was good for Gifford who went on to become Lord Chancellor of Britain. The trial was a strong motivator for Annie Besant to have a very activist career thereafter.
Many religious fundamentalists saw condom advocacy as basically immoral as people, in their religious view, ought not to be having sex outside of marriage. A number of programs were started where young people were encouraged (and some say pressured) to take vows of abstinence. Instead of just advocating the abstinence programs, some conservatives chose to attack condom programs by publicly telling people that condoms can break and have a failure rate of over 10 percent. Elders and others who did not think abstinence only programs sufficient, then were able to use the evidence which showed that very few condoms failed and comparatively many vows of chastity and abstinence fail much more frequently. Abstinence was always preferable if it worked and because of the polarization of American Society it was very difficult to develop programs which strongly advocated abstinence and also taught condom use in case a particular young person could not avoid a situation where they became sexually active. The 10 percent failure rate is a very misleading statistic. A couple who is sexually active—intercourse once a week—who use a condom always and properly will have about a 2 percent failure rate in an entire year of sex. That is less than 1 25th of one percent chance of failure per act of intercourse. Couples who do not use condoms always and properly will have a 10 percent or more failure rate but that is for the entire year. Per act of intercourse, the failure rate can be as high as one fourth of one percent—and not the one out of 10 chance of failure that condom opponents sometimes state or imply. The important fact is that there is always a chance of failure with a condom but it is relatively small and far smaller than the failure rate of teen agers who take a vow of abstinence. Abstinence, however, is the only perfect way to prevent pregnancy.
Kenyans were dying in droves from AIDS and the abstinence programs had not stemmed the spread of AIDS.
Sharron Elaine Angle is an American politician who served as a Republican member of the Nevada Assembly from 1999 to 2007. She ran unsuccessfully as the 2010 Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate seat in Nevada, garnering 45 percent of the vote. On September 15, 2013, she was unanimously elected the fifth President of the National Federation of Republican Assemblies, and resigned in 2016 to run again for the Nevada U.S. Senator position being vacated by Harry Reid but failed to win the Republican primary. In 2018, she ran in the Republican primary for Nevada's 2nd congressional district and lost to the incumbent, Mark Amodei.
