Before the beginning of the new school year, a mandate was issued that would require all middle and high school students in the New York City public schools to take sex-education classes this fall. Just another insane idea by the public school administration.
There has been de facto sex-education in New York City for decades—that’s how long they’ve been shelling out condoms to students. Moreover, literally tens of millions of condoms have been distributed all over the city, yet the rate of sexually transmitted diseases continues to skyrocket.
There is a sex-education program that could work, and it is similar to the approach being used to discuss smoking. We don’t tell kids not to smoke and then instruct them on the proper way to inhale. No, we tell them of the physical pain they are likely to endure by smoking and how it will shorten their life expectancy.
We could do the same when discussing sexual experimentation. We could discuss how abortion affects the psyche of the mother who elects to terminate her baby. We could show pictures of what abortion does to the child. We could inform them of the greater likelihood of acquiring a sexually transmitted disease.
The New York Daily News was so ecstatic with the new curriculum that it ran an editorial hyping the program. The editorial, “Go All the Way on Sex Ed,” noted that the curriculum, “Reducing the Risk,” has worked in California citing “a federal Centers for Disease Control study” as its source. In fact, there never was a study by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) on this curriculum. There was, however, a study on how this curriculum fared in California that was published in Family Planning Perspectives; the study was posted on the website of the CDC, because it met the CDC’s methodological standards.
Family Planning Perspectives is a journal of the Guttmacher Institute, named after former Planned Parenthood president Alan Guttmacher. For many years the Institute served as the research arm for Planned Parenthood and now, although independent, still receives funding from the pro-abortion group. Does anyone believe that Planned Parenthood would be associated with a study that undercuts its raison d’être?
The real question here is: Who gave Mayor Michael Bloomberg the authority to decide what should be taught in the classroom? To top things off, there were no hearings on the curriculum and no one in his administration would release to the media either the curriculum or the assigned textbooks. We said perhaps it was time for the parents to revolt.
