Originally published in 2014
By Matt Walsh
A reader sent me a message declaring quite excitedly that I’m “not gonna believe” what’s happening at this public school in California. Apparently, Planned Parenthood has taken over sex ed duties at a local high school and has begun teaching 13-year-olds that, among other things, they’re ready for sex so long as they think it will feel good. Planned Parenthood also has some informative tips on effective lubricants which they eagerly passed along to an unsuspecting collection of barely pubescent children.
In other words, that reader lied. I can totally believe this. Honestly, at this point I’m not sure there’s any public school related atrocity that would shock me. Send me something about kids being trained in ritualistic cannibalism, or being given reading materials from the Satanic Temple, and then maybe I’ll be surprised. (Wait, that second one is actually happening, and no, I’m still not surprised.)
Our government school system, like most every other institution in this country, has plunged into a state of intellectual and moral chaos, making it fertile ground for the depraved perverts at Planned Parenthood to spread their gospel. And before you accuse me of claiming that every person who works for Planned Parenthood is a depraved pervert, please understand that, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.
Anyway, I’m not trying to downplay this latest bit of debauchery. It’s outrageous—even if it is routine—and it deserves attention. The whole thing is made all the more egregious by the fact that parents were not properly informed about the “lesson” plan ahead of time. The school didn’t make it clear that the sex-ed class would be conducted by Planned Parenthood—a detail that may have been pertinent, considering Planned Parenthood is a business which makes hundreds of millions of dollars aborting babies. The conflict of interest here is staggeringly clear. Having this organization teach sex ed is like bringing in spokesmen from McDonald’s to talk about proper nutrition. In both instances, the “teachers” are financially invested in making sure the kids do anything but make healthy choices.
Sorry, that analogy is ridiculous. McDonald’s could never set foot inside an American public school. It would never be allowed. We wouldn’t want the kids to be scandalized by soda and French fries, especially when it might distract them from learning about anal sex and transgenderism.
Speaking of which, the school in California found some creative ways to instruct the students in warped leftwing gender theory. Just in time for the holidays, here’s the “genderbread person.”
This is science, folks. Pure science. Well, either science or progressive superstitions cloaked in absurd faux-complexities. I can imagine that many of the parents probably didn’t realize they had to preemptively sit their children down and say, “Listen, ‘agender’ isn’t a thing, and if anyone tells you otherwise, they’re either on drugs or on the payroll at your school, or both.”
Another worksheet was supposed to help the children decide if they’re ready to get busy.
According to adults who’ve taken it upon themselves to entice children into having sex, any child is ready provided they want to and they can find someone else who wants to. Who could foresee any pitfalls to raising kids using this strategy?
“Dad, can I — ?”
“Stop right there, son. Whatever you want to do, do you want to do it?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that settles it then. You’re always ready to do anything as long as you want to do that thing!”
“Wow, thanks Dad! So where are your car keys?”
The learning materials also explain how a boy should obtain consent from a girl. Specifically, he should ask important questions like, “Can I take my pants off?” and “Do you want to go back to my place?”
These are 13-year-olds, remember. A bunch of 13-year-olds who can, it turns out, invite their booty calls back to “their place.” I’m sure their parents won’t mind, unless their parents are sex-hating prudes. Indeed, as creepy progressive weirdos constantly insist, we parents just have to resign ourselves to the fact that all kids—all kids—will start having sex approximately three or four years before they’re able to get their ears pierced without permission from a legal guardian.
That’s the nature of a self-fulfilling prophesy. If you assert it as fact often enough and loudly enough, eventually it might become one. The question, then, is why do progressives want this to be a fact? And when I say want it, they really seem to want it. They want it in graphic detail. Take this sex conference for students in Oregon as an example. Kids as young as 11 were encouraged to “wear each other’s underwear,” “watch porn together,” “eat Pop Rocks while making out” (this is just getting way too specific), and “masturbate while someone else is watching.”
That’s all pretty bad, but not as bad as the sex-ed presentation given to students at Pine Valley Middle School, which featured a poster of a man with a bloody face and a caption reading: “A real man loves his woman every day of the month.”
And this is relatively in line with another sex-ed curriculum, also in California, that taught students about the wonders of bondage and vibrators.
All of these examples happen to be from the West Coast, but this is not a regional problem. It’s inevitable that government sex education will take a sharp left turn into grotesque and lascivious places in any school, anywhere in the country. That’s because a discussion of sex will be unavoidably wrapped in the moral and philosophical beliefs of whoever is leading the discussion. It’s one thing to teach about the human anatomy, but once you veer into sexuality, you’ve entered a realm that is just as spiritual as it is scientific. Therefore, if the sex-ed course is run by hedonists, the children will be taught hedonism. There is no way around it.
And this is why sex ed has no business in public schools at all. If you want your kid’s school to teach him about sex—homeschool him. Public school should be a place for pure academics, and nothing else. To be clear, I’m not advocating for “abstinence education” here. I don’t want a government employee training my kid in how to avoid sex any more than I want her to train him in how to have it. Abstinence education, in my view, has to be grounded in something deeper than scare tactics and STD statistics. My convictions on abstinence before marriage have to do with not just my views about sex, but my views about marriage itself, and about love, and about loyalty, and about self-control, and about virtue, and about faith. Everything is wrapped up in everything, and if you try to teach abstinence using just the practical aspects (“sex might cause AIDS!”) without any of the deeper, spiritual substance, you’ll end up with a lesson plan that’s equal parts superficial, paranoid, and unconvincing. Sex is just too big a topic. There’s too much there. It’s too important. The schools cannot handle it, either way, and they shouldn’t try.
So this is really very simple. How much sexual guidance and instruction should the government offer our kids? None. What percentage of your child’s government education should be comprised of sexual enlightenment? Zero percent. How many times in a given school day should teachers talk to their kids about lubricants? No more than three times? Actually, zero.
It’s the Great Compromise. Instead of arguing about what the schools should tell kids on the subject of sex, let’s contemplate the possibility that a collective, government-controlled, mass produced, and disseminated curriculum about sex and intimacy isn’t necessarily the best way to handle such a profound and personal subject.
I’m not saying that we should put censor bars over the penis and the vagina in the anatomy textbooks (or in books of Renaissance art, for that matter). I’m also not saying that high school biology teachers should tell their students that a magical stork drops the baby off on Momma’s porch. And I’m not saying that students shouldn’t learn about the facts of human reproduction when the subject comes up in science class. What I am saying is that the schools ought to treat sex the same way most people think it ought to treat religion, and for the same reasons. The “keep religion out of schools” folks will argue that schools should not endorse a particular religion, encourage kids to be religious or irreligious, ask kids about their personal religious practices, or attempt to influence those practices. In these ways, we should “keep religion out of schools,” but if they’re reasonable they know that we can’t and shouldn’t keep the fact of religion out of schools.
You can’t very well give your students a comprehensive understanding of western history without discussing Christianity. You can’t provide a well-rounded education about literature without introducing the Bible. You can’t teach about art and avoid da Vinci. You can’t talk about contemporary Middle Eastern conflicts without introducing Judaism and Islam. You can’t teach the history of Asia without Hinduism or Buddhism. Religion will inevitably be a part of many other subjects, but it shouldn’t be up to government school teachers to tell kids how to feel about religion or what to do with those feelings. That’s what parents and churches are for.
And it’s in that sense that I make my case for keeping sex out of schools. Anatomy will come up in anatomy classes, and reproduction will come up in science classes, and that’s where it should end. Tell about the fact of sex, but nothing else. It’s absolutely horrifying that so many people—actual parents with actual kids—think that public schools should tread further into the topic and teach kids how to have sex, when to have it, and why they should or shouldn’t have it. Look, I try hard, I really try hard, not to judge parents or to criticize parenting styles different from my own. But I will judge someone who wants the Department of Education to help shape their child’s sexuality. I will judge that. God help me, I judge it.
“Comprehensive sex education” is a sham and a joke. It’s also more than just a little disturbing. If an adult in any other context came up to your child and tried to strike up a conversation about masturbation, oral sex, or dildos, you’d call the police. Imagine a grown man approaching your 12-year-old daughter on the playground and saying, “Hey little girl, do you think you’re ready to have sex?” Now imagine it happening inside the school, and explain why it’s suddenly less frightening.
Can anyone explain that?
Anyone?
I didn’t think so.
So if you can’t explain the distinction between a sex-ed teacher and a guy who should be on a registry somewhere, maybe we should just let parents handle this topic. Let them handle it because there are boundaries, and when a strange adult starts talking to children about self-pleasure, that boundary has been crossed, then crossed back over again, then carpet bombed into obliteration. And let parents handle it because, as we all pretend to agree, public schools aren’t in the moralizing business. Without a doubt, it is impossible to discuss sex without attaching a set of moral lessons to it.
This subject belongs to parents. It is their domain. “Yes, but many parents don’t talk to their kids about sex,” I often hear it argued. That might be true. Still, public schools are not surrogate mothers. Lazy, selfish parents might want them to be, but that doesn’t change anything. There are facts about sex (“this is a penis, this is a vagina, this is a uterus, etc.”) and then there is subjective (and depraved) moralization about sexuality (“you can choose your gender, you should have sex if you want to, masturbation is a good way to explore yourself, try making out with Pop Rocks in your mouth, etc.”). There is a time for the former but definitely not for the latter. If you want to tell your son or daughter about those things—go ahead and tell them. If you’re too embarrassed to do it yourself, maybe that ought to be a sign of some sort.
However you choose to parent—and I really hope your parenting doesn’t involving telling your son he can be a girl if he wants, but that’s your prerogative in a free country—we should all agree that there is a distinction between a parent’s domain and the school’s, unless you homeschool. Indeed, maybe we’re all finding out that separating factual lessons from moral lessons is nearly impossible to do perfectly, which is yet another argument in favor of homeschooling. Maybe homeschooling is again the only real answer here. Be that as it may, as long as public schools exist, we must try to beat back its attempts to intrude on parental turf.
So while progressives take the Ten Commandments and the crucifixes out of the schools, I’ll come in right behind them and clean out the condoms and the genderbread drawings. And then we can meet in the parking lot and swap. I’ll take my religion home to my kids, and they can take their sexual permissiveness and confusion home to theirs.
Meanwhile, the schools can stick to the ABCs and 123s, and we’ll all be better for it.
Matt Walsh is a blogger, writer, speaker, and professional truth-sayer.
This article has been reprinted with permission and can be found at http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/no-thanks-public-schools-i-dont-need-you-to-teach-my-kids-about-sex/.