Public School Sex-Education Classes --- Bad News For Parents and Children
One of parents' most important duties is to protect their children from harmful sexual values and behaviors. Yet many public schools force potentially harmful, sometimes shockingly explicit sex education on their students. Most of the time, parents have no control over the content of these classes. Occasionally, a group of parents finds out about a particularly obnoxious sex education class and protests to the principal or local school board. The class may be dropped, only to be replaced by another class that teaches equally objectionable material. School authorities' cavalier attitude towards parents on this issue shows their anti-parent bias, and their contempt for parents' rights to control the values their children are taught.
Many school authorities insist that children need comprehensive sex education from kindergarten through high school. They believe parents can't be trusted because they have shameful feelings about sex or have "outdated" moral or sexual values. School authorities, claiming that they know best regarding sex education, usurp the parents' role, allegedly for the good of the children. In doing so, they show contempt for parents' rights, values, and common sense.
Many sex-education classes indoctrinate children with sexual values that can cause them irreparable harm. For example, these classes often promote the idea that most sexual behaviors are acceptable, including adultery, homosexuality, masturbation, and premarital sex. The sex-education instructor simply tells the kids to "be careful" or use their "common sense" when they engage in these behaviors. As if we can depend on teenagers with raging hormones to be careful or use their common sense. The soaring teen pregnancy rate in this country puts the lie to this notion.
Horror stories about sex education classes and flagrant violations of parents' rights confront us from around the country. Here are only two of those stories:
- On March 19, 1996, a public school in East Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania made 59 sixth-grade girls submit to a genital examination as part of a routine physical. The school did not ask for parental consent. During the exam, school officials blocked the exit doors and refused to let the crying and pleading young girls call their parents.
- In Stephens County, Georgia, parents were shocked to discover that their fourteen- and fifteen-year-old daughters had been driven to a birth control clinic by a public school staff member without their knowledge. The county clinic administered AIDS tests and Pap smears to the girls and gave them birth control pills and condoms. The school denied parents access to the test results and defended its actions on the grounds that the counselor believed that she was doing what was best for the girls.
Joel Turtel
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