The conservative view that states should be free to make their own decisions regardless of what the federal government wants has led four members of the Supreme Court to condemn the trend and some liberal groups to fret about the potential loss of civil rights. But if the Bush administration does for sex education what it did for school testing, neither the court nor the lobbyists have reason to worry. Unfortunately, in both cases, the administration’s rigid views of how states should act is not in Maine’s best interest and may not be in the nation’s either.

The school-testing debate occurred last winter, when the president demanded a standard national test for each grade when places like Maine, which is unusually successful at national assessments, already had a comprehensive test and its own testing schedule. Though the legislation has passed, the question of whether states with proven tests can continue them has yet to be answered and smart states will do nothing to irritate the administration’s test enforcers until it is worked out.

The sex-ed debate is within a welfare reauthorization proposal to be heard in the Senate Finance Committee in the next few weeks. President Bush wants $50 million a year in the reform to continue to be spent for abstinence-only programs and another $88 million to fund private organizations that teach abstinence-only courses and mention birth control only in the context of saying something bad about it. The opposing view wants states to decide for themselves what type of sex education works best.

Maine has experience in this area. In the 1990s, it led the nation in the decline of births to teen-age mothers. Its rate for pregnancies among 15- to 19-year-olds has remained low for a lot of reasons; telling teens who are sexually active about birth control has been one of them. Telling those same teens about the spread of sexually transmitted diseases is another reason to talk about birth control, and, yes, abstinence guarantees avoidance of both pregnancy and STDs, though the question of who guarantees abstinence has yet to be answered. The failure rate for birth control vs. the failure rate for abstinence pledges would make an interesting comparison.

Sen. Olympia Snowe, as a member of the Finance Committee, will hold a crucial vote on the welfare bill and this funding issue. She is said to favor the more flexible approach of allowing states to use the money in ways they think most effective. But she also has a difficult challenge of reforming the welfare bill’s provisions on areas such as number of hours required for work and what counts as work and she needs to attract committee support for encouraging the expansion of Maine’s successful Parents as Scholars program without alienating senators who like the abstinence-only provision.

The administration’s interest in telling states what to do, even as the court’s more conservative members assert states have more authority than traditionally recognized, exposes a philosophical contradiction that is hard to reconcile. A willingness to negotiate on the legislation may be the safest way out.