Parents Stand Up for Children in ‘Sex Ed Sit Out’

COMMENTARY BY

Cathy Ruse / April 25, 2018

Cathy Ruse is a senior fellow for legal studies at the Family Research Council.

Parents across the country pulled their children out of public schools on Monday for the “Sex Ed Sit Out”—a grassroots awakening of frustrated parents who are sick of the sexualization of children in their taxpayer-funded schools.

The Sex Ed Sit Out was conceived by Elizabeth Johnston, who blogs at Activist Mommy, and other moms on social media who are concerned about the increasingly graphic, unscientific nature of sex education in public schools.

Parents protested in cities across the United States, as well as in England, Canada, and Australia.

In solidarity with the event, parents in Northern Virginia held a conference on Saturday on the radical changes in sex education and how schools deliberately deceive parents.

A common note struck at the conference was the anti-science approach of the Fairfax County sex ed curriculum. Students are taught that they weren’t really born male or female—rather, a sex was assigned to them at birth by a delivery room doctor who might have gotten it wrong.

In fact, sex ed curriculum advisers recently announced that “biological sex is essentially meaningless,” and the phrase is being scrubbed from all lessons and replaced by the phrase “sex assigned at birth.” It’s a little sexual-revolutionary agitprop to keep the youngsters off balance.

Parents discussed how “transgender identity” is now presented in schools as a healthy alternative for children, but the risks of surgical and hormonal “sex transition” are not mentioned—such as the serious risks of untested, experimental puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for children, or side effects like stunted growth and ruined reproductive systems.

Informing children about medical risks was voted down by the school board advisers.

Several parents discussed how they are sick of being played for fools in Fairfax. The eighth-grade lesson called “abstinence” is a scam. It doesn’t teach children abstinence until marriage, but abstinence “until a person is in a faithful, monogamous relationship.”

In fact, the word “marriage” doesn’t even appear in the actual lesson—not even once.

Sex ed in Fairfax is called “Family Life Education,” but savvy parents know that’s a joke.

In the more than 80 hours of sex ed that kids are subjected to during their public school career, children are asked to become experts on every contraceptive drug and device imaginable, and yet no time is spent on how to form healthy marriages and happy families.

In fact, the only lesson that focuses on fathers is a ninth-grade lesson on sexual assault, where students are shown a video about a father who repeatedly rapes his terrified daughter. It’s a disgrace.

Fairfax schools now teach the use of a daily drug regimen known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP. PrEP is a drug that promises reduced risk of HIV/AIDS to gay men who have condom-free sex.

LGBT advocates have called PrEP a “catastrophe” that will lead to risky behavior, and today the rates of HIV infection are skyrocketing. Yet PrEP is pushed on kids every year from ninth grade on—even though the Food and Drug Administration has not approved its use for those under the age of 18.

Shocking? Absolutely. But then you discover that one lesson plan for eighth-graders includes 18 separate mentions of “anal sex.”

A highlight of the Saturday conference was the appearance of Judith Reisman, an internationally acclaimed researcher and author on the ideologically driven origins of the modern sex ed movement. Reisman detailed the child abuse and fraud at the core of Alfred Kinsey’s research, and how the Kinsey model has corrupted classroom education on human sexuality. (Kinsey was an early sexologist who had a lasting influence on sex education.)

We are light years away from bird-and-bees biology. We are now into the age of recruitment. And it’s parents’ tax dollars that are used to fund the recruitment of their children into the sexual revolution—a revolution that has destroyed more lives than any other in human history, if you consider deaths from diseases such as HIV/AIDS and the tens of millions of children lost to abortion.

The sexual revolutionaries’ answer to all of this misery, noted one parent, is that we just need a little bit more—more sexually explicit lessons, more judgment-free choices, more sexual identities, more daily sex drugs, more hormones, more surgery.

And more silence from parents and the church.

But parents will be silent no more. They are sick of sex ed lessons for children that sicken their bodies and burden their souls.

https://stream.org/sex-ed-even-stalinism-local-school-board/

More Sex Ed and Even More Stalinism at the Local School Board

By Austin and Cathy Ruse/ April 20, 2018

The craziness continued at the recent meeting of the Fairfax County sex-ed advisory committee. That’s the group responsible for creating over 80 hours of sex-ed for every public-school child.

No wonder we’re lagging in math.

On the agenda this time were abstinence, party drugs, and the very notion of male and female.

One of us reported recently about how the committee shut down discussion of any controversial issue. The two conservative members of the 26-person board were simply not allowed to speak their objections. Public exposure forced a changed in this practice, but still there is no real engagement of dissenting concerns or questions. Case in point was the “debate” about biological sex.

Last month, the advisors changed the lessons so that whenever the kids hear a reference to a person’s “sex,” they are to be informed that sex is “assigned at birth.”

This is a central faith claim for the sexual revolutionaries. We are not born male and female. Rather the delivery room doctors look at genitalia and then pronounce a sex that may, after all, turn out to be totally wrong. Surely women can have penises too. Just ask the committee.

At the last meeting, advisor Dan Press, a local Democratic activist without even a passing knowledge of science and medicine, announced that “biological sex is essentially meaningless.” He said that everyone in the medical and scientific establishment agreed. Well, last week, advisor Laura Murphy made an incontestable rebuttal of those claims. She moved to put the phrase “biological sex” back in, and quoted from numerous credible sources, for which she presented written documentation.

In her rebuttal, Murphy quoted from the diagnostic manual of the American Psychological Association (APA). It defines sex as the “biological indicator of male and female.”

She quoted the National Institutes of Health, which use the term biological sex. The National Academy of Science says a person’s sex is established in the womb. These scientific experts say the biological sex of either male or female is an “undeniable and irrevocable medical reality.”

She quoted the World Health Association that defines sex as “the different biological and physiological characteristics of males and females.”

She cited numerous examples of how doctors prescribe certain drugs differently based on biological sex.

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Murphy pointed out that even the APA defines sex as male or female based on biological indicators like chromosomes and genitalia. The group also recognizes the notion that transgender is fluid — that is, changeable — something that sex-ed advisors confidently deny. In an odd twist, they say that sex can be changed, but gender cannot.

When the 3-minute timer ran out, Murphy asked for 30 more seconds to finish her statement. The Chairman asked, does anyone object? Yes, there were objections. No, Murphy would not have 30 more seconds. Such is the Stalinism of this group.

Speaking against “biological sex” was Dan Press, among the most radical and intransigent of the committee. He was the person responsible for taking it out of the lessons in the first place — on the grounds that all of science and medicine now uses “sex is assigned at birth.” Press dismissed Murphy’s well-researched argument with a flippant statement. “We discussed this last time. Let’s move on.” And so they did. The committee voted 24-2 against Murphy and science.

But, the committee was just getting started. Current lessons suggest that kids with concerns about sexual orientation and gender identity should talk to a trusted adult. Why, that creates stigma! How terrible to suggest a kid could have such concerns! In the end, they left in “concerns” and took out “clergy” from the list of trusted adults, to appease the gods of the pelvic Left. They allowed a lone clergyman to speak on this matter. A leftist woman, who wanted the group to know that not all clergy are judgmental. Take that, you benighted Catholic priests.

The committee talked about whether to leave “abstinence” in the lesson as a goal for 9th graders. Press, quoting studies he did not produce, railed against abstinence education as an utter and even harmful failure. When the dust cleared, abstinence remained. The committee grudgingly acknowledged it was mandated by Virginia state law.

Perhaps the most shocking decision of the evening was to promote to kids grade 9 and above a daily drug regimen called PrEP, which is supposed to inhibit the spread of HIV. PrEP is advertised all over the New York City subway system as a way for gay men to party out at night and not worry about infection in the morning. Michael Weinstein, founder and director of the AIDs Healthcare Foundation, told the New York Times in 2017 that the use of PrEP “will cause a ‘public health catastrophe’ by triggering a dangerous increase in risky sex.” Public health data now shows this to be true. HIV infections are skyrocketing.

But adding irony to insult, PrEP is not even FDA approved for people under the age of 18. That’s right, this oh-so-scientifically minded committee of experts is pushing a drug on kids that the FDA says is not for them, and that gay-friendly experts call “a catastrophe.”

But this is not a committee of experts. Nor is it made up of parents with a real stake in the outcome. But what they lack in professional training they make up in political correctness, for they are in lock-ideological-step with the trendiest ideas in human sexuality.

So, what happens is that pure ideology is in the driver seat.

The Stalinist nature of this committee is not just in shutting down debate, it is ignoring medical and scientific facts in order to advance a particular agenda. There was such a thing as “Soviet science” and God help those who might disagree. Well, Soviet science is alive and well at the sex-ed committee of our local school board.