Donald Trump may claim to be be the “Great Abstainer,” given his history I know that sounds ridiculous, but parents, teachers, and students in Colorado would rather teens learn real sex education. The Trump administration is using federal funds, an estimated $475 million, to push for school programs that emphasize “sexual risk avoidance” (total abstinence) and “sexual risk reduction” (stop having sex). Andrea Kane, vice president of Power to Decide, charges that Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services talks about providing teens with “skills to avoid sex” but “it doesn’t really leave any opening for those young people who continue having sex and how we help them prepare for their futures.” She could have added, or teens who follow Trump’s sexual behavior model.
Most districts in Colorado, but not all, already provide students with a comprehensive sex education course that includes teaching about safe and responsible sexual behavior. Under pressure from parents, teachers, and students, the Colorado House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed legislation to mandate that schools offer comprehensive sex education classes that include teachings about informed sexual consent, safe sex and sexual orientation. The bill, which still must be approved by the state’s Senate, provides money to support sex education and also bans abstinence-only curriculum.
The Colorado bill was introduced by Susan Lontine, a Colorado state representative who connected the proposed sex education legislation with the #MeToo movement. She believes “The sooner we talk to kids about what consent looks like, the sooner I hope a tide will turn so we’re no longer hearing stories of people being harmed.” Conservative groups marshaled forces to oppose the bill condemning it as promoting homosexuality, accusing a Democratic member of the House of being a pedophile, and inaccurately claiming it would require schools to teach about explicit sex acts to children as young as nine-years old. The legislation does allow parents to withdraw their children from classes presenting the sex education curriculum.
Nationally, conservative group have launched massive campaigns to block comprehensive sex education. After California enacted a Healthy Youth Act in 2016 requiring school districts to provide comprehensive sex and H.I.V. education, anti-sex education forces charged the curriculum was “pornographic.” They also organized “Sex Ed Sit Out” protests in a number of cities.
According to the Guttmacher Institute, thirty-seven states currently require abstinence be stressed, or at least included, in sex education classes and seven states actually prohibit teachers from describing same-sex relationships as normal and healthy. At the Colorado House hearings, a high school student described how when he was in 8th grade his “sex education teacher” rolled a piece of tape on a table until it lost its stickiness and compared what happened to the tape to “tainted” and “impure” teenagers who engage in premarital sex.
According to a report in the New York Times, studies of teenage sexual behavior repeatedly find that abstinence-only education contributes to increased rates of teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Meanwhile, for teens exposed to comprehensive sex education, risks for pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases decline. In what can only be described as negligent lunacy, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, that tracks school sex education programs, found that between 2000 to 2014, a period when rightwing Republicans increasingly dominated state governments, the percentage of schools requiring sex education declined by over a third from 67% to 48%. In some ways even worse, sex education in half of the middle schools and over 75% of high schools primarily focused on abstinence. Only 25% of middle school curriculum and 60% of high school classed even included lessons about birth control.
Unfortunately, Donald Trump, who has his own history of irresponsible sexual behavior, is either uninterested or unable to read studies like these.
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