Sex: God’s design vs. comprehensive sexuality education
“It is not good for man to be alone…”
While most parents have been looking the other way, a subtle force called “comprehensive sexuality education” (CSE) has infiltrated our public schools.
Sponsored by SIECUS (the Sexuality Information Education Council of the United States”), Planned Parenthood, teachers’ unions and the ACLU, CSE represents curricula ostensibly designed to protect children: from bullying or feeling unwelcome, from unwanted pregnancy and STI’s. Certainly, these are goals we would all sponsor. Yet, on closer examination, one wonders about the spirit embedded in this powerful educational and legislative juggernaut. Could this be a deceptive spirit opposing the Creator’s design and purpose for sexuality?
Get Our Latest News for FREE
According to Family Watch International, comprehensive sexuality education represents a global movement that sponsors graphic sexuality and is designed to bring about profound changes in how humans understand sex. “CSE is designed to change the social and gender norms of society, promotes high-risk sexual behaviors and encourages even the youngest of children to experiment sexually.”
We are all familiar with the “culture wars,” yet the issues at stake here transcend Left vs. Right, conservative or liberal.
As Christians, we understand that a world divided against itself was never God’s intention. Rather, the Creator designed humans to exist in loving communion with one another. The Genesis narrative presents the original template for such communion as a sexual one: Adam and Eve together, as one flesh. The man and woman were not to function in solitary or competitive pursuits, but in mutuality and shared goals. Together, they were given the mandate to subdue the earth and fill it (Genesis 1:28). God obviously liked people and wanted lots of them.
The tragic fall of man depicted in Genesis 3 shattered their unity and frustrated their purpose. Tempted to see themselves as more than mere creatures, dependent on the Creator, the first humans would now experience life through a lens of conflict. Now knowing good and evil, they know themselves as naked; ashamed, they hide from God and turn against each other. The mandate to fill the earth with life and unity is now corrupted by death and conflict.
The Bible doesn’t tell us much about the tempter – that antagonistic force depicted as a serpent. Yet, the presence of this adversarial spirit in opposing God’s intention that the two sexes flourish together can be clearly discerned in every age. Disguised as a messenger of light, this presence continues to deceive, tempt and impede God’s design for the cooperative and generative purpose of sexuality.
Like a broken dam, various forms of CSE are saturating public schools across the country. As usual, California leads the way. Wearing a sheep suit of compassion for sexual minorities, the Board of Education, as evidenced in the California Healthy Youth Act, California Education Code 51930 – 51939, has aggressively mandated sweeping ideological changes in the way teachers present sex education.
With barely concealed menace for traditional attitudes or contrary opinion, progressive ideologies are enforced. Educators “must” affirm that a person may be attracted to the same or different genders. “Your instruction teaches that any of the different sexual orientations is normal.” Not only must this instruction include examples of same gender relationships but must also explore the harms of negative gender stereotypes. “Your instruction has activities addressing and debunking negative genders role stereotypes.” “You refrain from: suggesting that girls care about love and emotions… Talking only of young mothers and not young fathers, and so on.”
Indoctrination on gender identity begins in kindergarten. Teachers are to explain to children that their sex is merely assigned at birth and may not match their “true” gender identity. Teachers in no uncertain terms must affirm and normalize such conditions. “Your instruction explains that a transgendered girl is a girl and a transgendered boy is a boy.”
To further confuse children, the concept of two genders – in fact, the reality of two genders – is to be exploded completely. “Your instruction includes teaching about how some people do not identify on the gender binary and that there are gender identities other than male or female.” Books and videos that embrace non-gender binary as well as homosexual orientations are to be actively promoted. Not only should teachers expose and confront gender stereotypes, they are urged to invite members of the community who defy traditional stereotypes to be guest speakers as myth busters.
Recommended books for the primary grades include ridiculous statements such as, “Babies can’t talk, so grown-ups make a guess by looking at their bodies.” Graphic cartoon pictures of sexual intercourse and masturbation are included. Books recommended for Grades K-3 include, Who are you? The kids guide to gender identity, Jacob’s New Dress and My Princess Boy.
Middle school indoctrination includes teaching about oral and anal sex. Children are told to use a water-based lubricant because the anus does not naturally lubricate itself and that the correct use of a condom can reduce risk of infection making anal sex more pleasurable and safe. Kids are reminded that anal and oral sex do not lead to pregnancy. Condom and dental dam demonstrations are provided for seventh and eighth graders and same-sex relationships are again affirmed. Words like “boyfriend/girlfriend” or “husband/wife” are to be avoided in favor of “partner.” Students are again reminded what they learned in earlier grade levels, viz., that gender is not strictly defined by biology.
High schoolers are privileged to experience more hands-on demonstrations of the use of various male and female condoms and dental dams. They are also invited to explore their possible gender identities or sexual orientations. They are strongly encouraged to know their rights to receive birth control or abortion services at any age without parental knowledge.
Taken as a whole, the thrust of CSE is to sexualize children, deemphasize abstinence and ultimately delegitimize the traditional family. Under a banner of inclusiveness, these educators bully teachers to affirm as normal that which was historically understood as deviant, while presenting traditional views of sex and sex roles as harmful.
It is no accident that the use of condoms is repeatedly advocated. In a way, we are witnessing a battle between generative sexuality and prophylactic sexuality. The first brings the two sexes together and assumes an essential, differentiated value that each brings to the other.
Beyond psychological fulfillment, traditional sexuality entails the promise of new life and with it, the purposefulness inherent in raising a family. In the sexuality promoted by CSE, the stress is on individual and subjective experience. Private pleasure is substituted for communal purposes. In God’s design, sexuality is posited as an integrated experience, pulling together present and future time, the knowledge and commitment of persons and the approval of family and society.
In contrast, our teachers are being forced to promote sexuality as an end in itself, disconnected from parents, personhood or future purposes. Transgender-ism invites little children to wonder if their own reality is disconnected from their body!
In God’s economy, sexuality reflects the nature of the Creator as one who gives and finds joy in loving others. In contrast, self-centered sexuality leads to loneliness and depression. In traditional societies that stick around, boundaries, order, rules and taboos direct and protect the unfolding of sexual expression. These include the value of modesty, the necessity of restraint and the recognition that children are immature and not yet capable of experiencing or even thinking about their sexual orientation or gender identity. We do not allow a seven-year-old to announce his bedtime, yet our teachers are to invite him to choose his gender?
When traditional sex roles are denied, natural linkages to the production, protection and rearing of children are broken. As a whole, the spirit behind comprehensive sexuality education in its depiction of a sexuality devoid of any meaning inherent in the different genitals cannot help but deny their design of procreation. This is not a spirit of life but a terminal spirit. Sex as an end in itself is a dead-end.
This kind of curriculum is dangerous. For example, the repeated suggestion that anal sex ought to be an option is contraindicated by medical science. Board certified pediatrician, Dr. Dale Volquartsen writes, “… There is no way to ever have ‘safe sex’ anally… with anal sex, it is easier to contract chlamydia, gonorrhea, HPV and rectal cancer, syphilis, chancroid, HIV, hepatitis A, B and C, herpes, campylobacter, shigella, anal fissures, and hemorrhoids, fistulas, abscesses, and amoebas.”
Misinformation about STI’s is not the only danger. While numerous studies affirm that the vast majority of children outgrow gender dysphoria with a “watch and wait” approach, CSE demands that teachers automatically affirm a gender choice not congruent with biology.
As physician and medical researcher, Dr. Andre Van Mol points out, such affirmation ignores “40 years of studies around the world showing the overwhelming probability of underlying issues and psychological comorbidities in minors with gender dysphoria… Further, gender affirming therapy has not been proven safe nor does it reduce suicides. The consequences of this gender affirming therapy are not trivial and include potential sterility, sexual dysfunction, thromboembolic and cardiovascular disease, and malignancy.” Board certified endocrinologist, Michael Laidlaw, M.D., lays out the scientific facts contradicting the myths of gender affirming ideology in “Gender Dysphoria and Children: An Endocrinologist’s Evaluation of I Am Jazz.”
Other pediatricians and psychiatrists have accused gender ideology of ignoring fundamental principles of child development and have even suggested that such indoctrination is a form of child abuse. Dr. Judith Reisman makes the additional comparison between CSE and the kind of sexual grooming used by pedophiles.
Family Watch International commissioned the Institute for Research and Evaluation to examine 60 peer-reviewed studies of comprehensive sex education in the last 25 years. Based on a preponderance of evidence, they found “there is no scientific justification for the designation of comprehensive sex education in U.S. schools as ‘evidence-based,’ nor for its broad dissemination in school settings.” Their report also states, “We found no evidence of effectiveness for school-based CSE at reducing teen pregnancy or STDs (rarely measured), or increasing teen abstinence or consistent condom use.”
Finally, not only does CSE hijack common sense and good science, it undermines parental prerogatives. Barely concealing an attitude of superiority, CSE advocates posture themselves as knowing what is best for children. They seem to believe it is up to them to dispose of myths and hangups of parents, especially religious ones.
One of the leaders of the growing grassroots opposition, Protect Our Kids Coalition, pastor Gheorghe Rosca writes, “The state does NOT have joint custody of our children… We are calling for a parental revolution in America as the only force that is able to turn the tide of this evil Planned Parenthood driven CSE agenda that instructs our kids into a philosophy of meaninglessness.”
Informed Parents of California and the California Family Council have organized protest rallies at the Capitol. Other parent groups are forming under the rubric, “Mass Resistance.” These have formed in Washington, California, Texas, New Jersey other states. Together, parents find the knowledge and power to rise up and oppose activist co-opting of public education. While alternative curricula are not yet fully developed, Sexual Risk Avoidance Education (SRA) promotes traditional values and helps young people avoid the pitfalls of teen sex.
While opposing the CSE agenda, let us affirm that nature and nature’s God have not designed us to define ourselves, complete ourselves or to be subject only to our own impulses or emotions. Let us sound the warning that solipsistic pursuits of sexual fulfillment are lonely dead ends. And let us affirm the classic view of sexuality as a communal endeavor, designed to foster life. Two becoming one, loving and taking care of each other. In finding the counterpart, finding wholeness.
Hopefully, as we pray for a cultural resurgence, more of our young will be able to relate to Adam, “Yes! This is what I’ve been waiting for!”
