Woman Tells Texas School Board She's a 56 Year-Old Virgin, but She's Off by a Day

By Kevin Tillman, AlterNet. Posted September 19, 2009.

There are moments when life is almost exquisitely sweet -- when it's just great to be alive. Others, not so much.

A moment one woman experienced while testifying at a hearing on Texas school-book standards is now one of epic -- and viral -- discomfiture. Via Gawker:

Former schoolteacher Deborah Parish (we're unsure on the spelling, since we got her name from the video), wanted to impress upon the agency that you can teach kids to get sexy without taking their clothes off, a proposition for which the fact that she had gone all her 56 years without "technically" having sex somehow serves as evidence. But before she could testify about all her gratifying fully clothed sexual experiences, the agency's members informed her that they were taking testimony on alcohol awareness—the sex ed stuff, when her virginal status would have been relevant, had all happened the day before. Read the agenda, virgin!

They've got the video -- it's truly an instant classic.

Update: I didn't offer any context, and some commenters think I'm being a jerk. These hearings are an effort by a school board stacked with right-wing ideologues to revamp the state's text books with a distinctly conservative tilt. And the thing about it is that Texas buys so many books that publishers will use those standards for kids nation-wide. See here and here for interesting background.

And she's testifying against comprehensive sex ed, which only results in higher rates of teen pregnancies. So, it's politics.

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Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.

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