Contact: Don Beehler, 615-566-0776, don@abcdcommunications.com

NASHVILLE, Nov. 3, 2011 /Christian Newswire/ -- The controversy over a new sex education mandate in New York City -- which reportedly includes vivid descriptions of various sex acts and assigns "risk cards" to middle schoolers so they can rate the safety of everything from French kissing to oral sex -- has outraged many parents and generated calls for an abstinence alternative.

According to the New York Daily News, Reps. Michael Grimm and Bob Turner, the city's two GOP congressmen, are backing concerned parents who want to have an abstinence-based curriculum as an alternative to the city's required sex-education program.

LifeWay Christian Resources' True Love Waits, a movement that encourages teenagers and college students to avoid pre-marital sex, today added its support for an abstinence option.

"Although True Love Waits is not directly involved in school abstinence programs, our team has long recognized that education is the first step in leading students to make a commitment to refrain from sex until marriage," said True Love Waits spokeswoman Dawn Cornelius.

"We owe it to students to give them a positive message about the benefits of remaining abstinent until they get married, and to warn them about the physical and emotional consequences that can result from pre-marital sex," she added.

"It's wrong to force them [parents] to choose between what the city is planning and no sex education at all. Parents who want a more traditional, abstinence-based sex education curriculum for their children should be able to have that," said former Democratic Assemblyman Michael Benjamin, who's heading up the NYC Parents' Choice Coalition.

"The city and its extremist allies will tell you that only so-called 'comprehensive' sex education works, and that 'abstinence-only' curricula have been 'proven' not to work. But this is simply not true," the Parents' Choice Coalition states on its website, citing abstinence-centered curricula that have been evaluated by independent researchers and found to have statistically significant results in reducing teen sex.

"Many abstinence-centered programs contain plenty of information about contraceptive methods... These are real-world, medically accurate facts that should influence a child's decision about whether he or she should be sexually active outside a long-term mutually monogamous relationship such as marriage."

Richard Ross, a student ministry professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and cofounder of True Love Waits, told Baptist Press last month, "[T]he government's own Centers for Disease Control reports annually that rates of teenage sexual activity have dropped every year since True Love Waits and the broader abstinence movement came on the scene.”

For more information about True Love Waits, visit www.truelovewaits.com.