According to the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California, teaching comprehensive sex education to children as young as kindergartners can help stop predatory and misogynistic behaviors. Melissa Goodman, director of the LGBTQ, Gender and Reproductive Justice Report for the ACLU of Southern California, is capitalizing on the #MeToo movement to advance radical notions about sex education in schools.
Goodman argues, “To stop the objectification of women and power imbalance that fuels this societal epidemic, we need to start long before anyone enters the workplace. If we want to be serious about making long-term cultural change to stop sexual harassment and violence, we should provide comprehensive sex ed in all of our schools.”
Goodman suggests that sex education programs should refrain from preaching abstinence and should address gender and power, as well as consent. She contends it is important to engrain these ideas in children at a young age. “Teaching this kind of comprehensive sex ed can have real impacts. A recent global study that included the United States shows that young people firmly believe and act upon gender stereotypes by at least age 10.”
Some of the subjects Goodman encourages in sex education are commendable, including how to communicate personal boundaries and recognize unhealthy and abusive relationships. But sadly, some of the other ideals that Goodman advocates fly in the face of traditionalism. In fact, it seems that the sort of sexual education programs Goodman supports condone sexual behaviors and the notion of gender identity, deny biological differences between males and females, and destroy traditional morality.
She writes, “Abstinence-only education is a proven failure and frequently reinforces gender stereotypes that play out in our behavior.” Goodman links to the website for the Future of Sex Education (FOSE), an initiative launched in 2007 that seeks to “create a national dialogue about the future of sex education and to promote the institutionalization of comprehensive sexuality education in public schools.” FOSE takes issue with abstinence-only-until-marriage sexual education programs because they “depict abstinence until heterosexual marriage as the only moral choice for young people,” and because those programs “use outdated gender roles, urging ‘modesty’ for all girls while painting all boys as sexual aggressors.” FOSE also writes that those programs “ignore the needs of LGBT youth.”
She is contending that teaching youth to have respect for their bodies by not engaging in uninhibited sex is somehow wrong and somehow leads to the painting of “boys as sexual aggressors,” while believing that teaching kids to participate in risky and rampant sex wherein girls (and many guys) would be used as soulless sperm receptacles as part of one’s casual entertainment will not lead to predatory and misogynistic behaviors — hardly rational or likely.
Goodman condones sex education learning standards that include information about gender roles, gender identity, and sexual orientation. In fact, she holds up the California Healthy Youth Act as a model other states should emulate because the law “aims to minimize gender and sexual orientation bias and stereotyping as well as foster a positive and healthy attitude toward sexuality.”
She writes of the law:
It mandates teaching about gender, gender identity, and the harm of negative gender stereotypes. Same-sex couples must be depicted. Transgender and non-binary people cannot be erased. Accurate information about all contraception methods and pregnancy options, including abortion, must be taught, giving young people a greater ability to control their fertility and, relatedly, equality.
And what is the result of these teachings? A recent poll in California found that 25 percent of students are gender non-conforming — they don’t identify as the sex they were born with and they are far more likely to be psychologically distressed and suicidal. Should anyone cheer California for normalizing delusional behavior?
And California parents have taken issue with what they view as the schools’ usurpation of their role. “We didn’t want someone else teaching our kids about morality, and what was right and what was wrong,” said Fesno Unified school board president Brooke Ashjian. “That’s the role of a father and mother: You bring a child into the world and you talk to them about things that matter. With society going away from church — whatever church that is — you’re not getting the first crack at that kid. Somebody else is. And that’s a problem.”
Additionally, there is a danger to sex education curriculums aimed at teaching gender equality and undoing gender stereotypes, particularly since there has been a sociological movement toward denying science to advance a more left-wing agenda. According to Charlotta Stern, deputy chair of Stockholm University’s sociology department, gender sociologists have all but denied that biological differences exist between men and women. Stern states that they do this despite research in the neurosciences, genetics, anthropology, and developmental psychology that has “amassed findings of differences in competitiveness, aggression, sexual interest, risk behavior, and many other traits, and differences in brain physiology and neuroimaging, by many different methods and approaches.”
Political writer Ivar Arpi notes that the Left is motivated to advance social engineering projects and therefore rejects biology because it acts against that which the Left is trying to achieve. “If genes and biology affect people, it also puts some limits to what the policy can hope to achieve. If there is a biological basis for several observable differences between the sexes then one cannot reduce everything to a question of discrimination or power,” Arpi argues.“And then that compromises the radical feminist project. The political aim is therefore allowed to obscure scientific achievements in other fields of research.”
Groups and individuals such as Melissa Goodman are unfairly conflating gender differences with gender inequality, and as such view those biological differences as a threat to be eliminated. Traditional values represent another threat to the leftist agenda and as such must be destroyed. Goodman is hoping that state-funded sex education can be used as the tool to accomplish these things.
Photo: Clipart.com
