A coalition of Republicans and religious conservatives launched a crusade that’s turned routine sex education requirements in public schools into a bitter partisan fight that combines efforts to prevent children from gaining life-saving insights about biology and modern society with a push for electing puritanical politicians.
Conservative con artists cheer on these misguided mothers who “instinctively know, in school board meetings across the country where they stand up courageously to fight for their children, is that a poisonous form of brainwashing has crept into the classroom” that the parents are the one brainwashed into reacting with emotional hostility to lessons that introduce kids to simple decency or common sense.
New commentary from leading pediatricians and public health experts in the Journal of Adolescent Health has identified key shortcomings in recent sex-education guidelines from the Medical Institute for Sexual Health (MISH) and calls for the adoption of science-based standards for sex education such as the National Sex Education Standards (NSES).
The article “School-based Sex Education in the U.S. at a Crossroads: Taking the Right Path,” analyzes discrepancies between MISH’s K-12 Standards for Optimal Sexual Health (M-SOSH) and the National Sex Education Standards, which have been used in the development of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Health Education Curriculum Analysis Tool.
“We are in the midst of a sexually transmitted disease epidemic in the United States and the numbers show that the epidemic is getting worse each year,” says an introduction to a MISH course featuring Joseph McIlhaney, a Texas-based doctor known for rejecting the use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases and for his advocacy of abstinence-only programs despite negligible evidence that they reduce pregnancy rates among young people. “Unfortunately, the epidemic is having its greatest effect on the nation’s young people between the ages of 15 and 25 years of age.”
Unlike NSES, M-SOSH omits key topics such as sexual orientation and gender identity, social determinants of health including poverty, racism and other forms of discrimination, disabilities, reproductive justice, prevention of HIV infection using PrEP therapy, and adolescent health care issues such as adolescent rights and minor consent laws.
Across the country, opponents of sex education are attacking attempts to include LGBTQ+ students and families, teach medically accurate information, and reflect in sex education students’ real experiences and struggles.
Pushing a conservative conspiracy theory hurts children but it results in political benefits for Republicans, like Glenn Youngkin, who exploited unfounded parental fears to become Virginia’s governor.
Seventeen Republican state attorneys general signed a letter Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita wrote to President Joe Biden and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, asking them to stop “intimidating parents away from raising concerns about the education of their children” and calling reports about the “harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against school personnel a “canard” despite the truth of such incidents.
Anti-mask demonstrators at school board meetings accused members of being “child abusers” and parents whipping into a frenzy over the imagined teaching of law school level subjects in kindergarten are symptomatic of the knee-jerk reaction to sharing information about sex that could save children’s lives.
While these contemporary American Taliban share the prudishness of the Puritans, they also reject the benefit of modern 21st Century knowledge about a host of things that make society more fair, benevolent and productive.
Many organizations champion ignorance in order to score political advantages, tapping parental emotions.
Among those are American Life League, Concerned Women For America, Eagle Forum, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, Heritage Foundation, Human Life International, Medical Institute for Sexual Health, National Abstinence Clearinghouse, National Coalition for Abstinence Education, National Consortium of State Physicians’ Resource Councils, and Stop Planned Parenthood International.
Several ‘abstinence education’ advocates and pseudo-science organizations like MISH enable misinformation and discrimination that jeopardizes children, who emerge from such indoctrination ignorant about sexually transmitted diseases and other consequences.
“Sex education should be medically accurate, help young people explore their identity and values, should build strong communication skills, and needs to be geared to the developmental capacity of children and adolescents,” said John S. Santelli, M.D., M.P.H. of the Department of Population and Family Health and Pediatrics at Columbia University.
“In a country that spends billions on sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancies each year, the least we can do is to provide young people with the truth about sex, healthy relationships, and how to keep themselves safe,” said Maria Trent, M.D., M.P.H. of the Division of Adolescent/Young Adult Medicine, Department of Pediatrics, at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
“Denying our youth science-based, medically accurate, developmentally appropriate comprehensive sex education is akin to throwing them in the deepest ocean without teaching them how to swim,” said David Bell, MD, MPH, President of the Society for Adolescent Health and Medicine and the Medical Director of the Young Men’s Clinic, a unique adjunct to New York Presbyterian Hospital’s Family Planning Clinic.
Developed in partnership between sex education organizations including Advocates for Youth, Answer, SIECUS, and more than 40 experts in child and adolescent development, sexuality and public health, the National Sex Education Standards (NSES) provide clear, consistent, and straightforward guidance on the essential content for students in grades K-12.
Key concepts within NSES include the following:
● Information should be medically accurate information, and curricula should include a broad set of topics essential to human sexuality. Medical accuracy means curricula should be based on the weight of scientific evidence and scientific theory, published in peer-reviewed journals, and recognized as accurate, objective, and complete by mainstream professional organizations.
● Opportunities for adolescents to explore their identity and values and the values and beliefs of their family, their religion, their culture, and their community.
● Opportunities to practice the communication, negotiation, decision-making, and assertiveness skills needed to create healthy relationships.
● Sex education should be developmentally appropriate information and geared to the age-appropriate interests and developmental capacity of children and adolescents. For example, while sex education for children should focus on family life, sex education for adolescents needs to focus on their expanding social world including peers, media, and culture.