When our daughter joined our family through adoption at age six, she struggled with some safety rules. She hated wearing a seat belt. In India, she didn’t have to wear one. Nor did she have to wear a bicycle helmet. She didn’t understand why I wouldn’t let a six-year-old use matches or wander about the neighborhood by herself either.
“I want to keep you safe because I love you,” I’d tell her.
Most parents give their children such boundaries because they care about their children’s well being.
As children grow, parents, schools, and society teach them more about safety: Don’t play with matches or drive while distracted; and for their health, don’t drink, smoke, or do drugs.
Although our culture agrees with the above cautions, it refuses to warn our children about the dangers of casual sex. Instead, many public schools offer comprehensive sexuality education that actually encourages sexual experimentation without explaining the real risks involved. Such experiments often lead to harmful outcomes that destroy the well-being of children.
What Is CSE?
The comprehensive sexual education (CSE) curricula teach five-year-olds how to masturbate, nine-year-olds how to put on condoms, and all ages the doctrine of gender fluidity. The Stop CSE website describes CSE this way:
Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) is one of the greatest assaults on the health and innocence of children. This is because unlike traditional sex education, comprehensive sexuality education is highly explicit and promotes promiscuity and high-risk sexual behaviors to children as healthy and normal. CSE programs have an almost obsessive focus on teaching children how to obtain sexual pleasure in various ways. Yet, ironically, comprehensive sexuality education programs are anything but comprehensive as they fail to teach children about all of the emotional, psychological and physical health risks of promiscuous sexual activity. The ultimate goal of CSE is to change the sexual and gender norms of society, which is why CSE could be more accurately called “abortion, promiscuity, and LGBT rights education.” CSE is a “rights-based” approach to sex education and promotes sexual rights to children at the expense of their sexual health.
Stop CSE
Unfortunately, schools often can make these curricula look safe with noncontroversial names and objectives. My state’s Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction website lists these standards, which are the same as the Center for Disease Control’s list:
Washington State Health Education K-12 Learning Standards:
Standard 1: Students will comprehend concepts related to health promotion and disease prevention to enhance health.
Standard 2: Students will analyze the influence of family, peers, culture, media, technology, and other factors on health behaviors.
Standard 3: Students will demonstrate the ability to access valid information and products and services to enhance health.
Standard 4: Students will demonstrate the ability to use interpersonal communication skills to enhance health and avoid or reduce health risks.
Standard 5: Students will demonstrate the ability to use decision-making skills to enhance health.
Standard 6: Students will demonstrate the ability to use goal-setting skills to enhance health.
Standard 7: Students will demonstrate the ability to practice health-enhancing behaviors and avoid or reduce health risks.
Standard 8: Students will demonstrate the ability to advocate for personal, family, and community health.
Notice that six out of eight of these standards seek to “enhance health.” Granted, this list also applies to PE, nutrition, and other health instruction. But what do they mean regarding sexuality education? Here are some details.
- Under topic strand “Self-Identity,” kindergartners are expected to “Understand there are many ways to express gender” (H1.Se5.K—Health Standard 1, Sexual Health topic strand 5, grade K). Five-year-olds still believe in imaginary friends. Why are schools confusing them with the anti-scientific idea of gender fluidity? Their ABCs are more critical.
- By fourth grade, students are introduced to HIV protection (H1.Se4.4) and must be able to define sexual orientation (H1.Se5.4). This indoctrination expands as the children grow older.
- Under the topic strand “Prevention,” seventh graders are to “Understand that all STDs are treatable and many are curable” (H3.Se4.7c) and “Identify medically accurate information about STDs” (H3.Se4.7). Such statements could lull students into believing that an STD is no big deal. Unfortunately, several STDs lack symptoms and can threaten their health by the time they realize they have one.
- In high school, students are to “Identify local youth-friendly sexual health services” (H3.Se4.HS) and “advocate for STD testing and treatment for sexually active youth” (H8.Se4.HS). Is youth-friend a code word for “You don’t need to tell your parents?” And why should students be encouraged to advocate for services, and from whom? Planned Parenthood, who economically benefits from the promoted promiscuity?
- The topic strand “Healthy Relationships” objective states that children should know the difference between healthy and unhealthy relationships starting in third grade (H1.Se6.3a), then introduces the idea of boundaries in sixth grade (H1.Se5.6), and the concept of sexual consent in eighth grade (H1.Se5.8b). Who defines what is healthy and unhealthy, what the boundaries are, and on what grounds consent may be given? Should children be making these decisions?
The very idea of engaging in sexual activity outside the bounds of traditional marriage is a recipe for disaster. But that is what CSE encourages youth to do: Have any kind of sex you want as long as you and your partner enjoy it, and you do it safely and legally.
Playing with Fire
A contained fire provides warmth from a fireplace. But fire “liberated” from the confines of a firebox becomes a destructive wildfire. In the same way, these education programs, rooted in the 1960s sexual revolution and its illusionary view of freedom, fan into flame sexual desire in young children. Now that our culture has rejected traditional marriage as the firebox designed to contain sexual passion, it has opened Pandora’s box of unrestrained sexual pleasure. As a result, America now has a vast population of victims burned by uncontrolled sexual appetites.
Numerous social pathologies have arisen from the “free” sex movement, which is now being introduced to even kindergartners. I will briefly discuss four of them.
Emotional Trauma
CSE’s focus on sexual pleasure sets up students for a life-long succession of heartbreaks. Every time a person engages in sexual activity, an emotional bond is formed. During sexual contact, the hormone oxytocin increases and provides the partners with a feeling of connection. When the couple separates, that emotional bond is torn. The tearing of this bond explains why a breakup is so painful.
Continually tearing this bond will damage a person’s heart: either it will break, and the person will fall into depression, or it will become cold and calloused. Both outcomes can cause an individual to develop a mental illness and/or engage in antisocial and risky behaviors. A heartbroken person will often attempt to soothe his emotional pain with addictive behaviors such as drugs and alcohol or other types such as overworking or maxing out credit cards.
In her book, Unprotected, Dr. Miriam Grossman discusses how many students come into her counseling office with depression caused by broken relationships and sexual promiscuity. No one told them about the emotional pain they would suffer from multiple sex partners. Our nation is writhing in pain due to the lies about human sexuality. Is there any we wonder why we have an opioid crisis?
Physical Health Risks
The increase of STDs among young people has reached epidemic levels in spite of classroom instruction on prevention. Some of these conditions will last a lifetime, render some women infertile, and, in the case of AIDS, may cause death. Condoms use offers minimal protection from some of these diseases. In addition, infected people often will not tell their partners that they carry a disease. In fact, many don’t even know they carry a virus because they have no symptoms.
Therefore, by telling tweens, teens, and young adults that having multiple sex partners is normal, CSE teaches them to play Russian roulette with their health.
Unplanned Pregnancy
Besides STDs, young women run the risk of unplanned pregnancies. Sexual intercourse was designed for procreation, and women are designed to conceive and bear children. No birth control works 100 percent of the time. The only sure prevention is abstinence, a topic frequently glossed over by CSE. What’s the fun in abstinence? The goal of CSE is sexual pleasure.
When a young woman finds herself with an unwanted pregnancy, she usually views abortion as the only choice because the instruction she gained from school skimmed over, or didn’t mention at all, the options of parenting or adoption.
By having an abortion, not only do young women expose themselves to possible medical complications, but they also must deal with the guilt of murdering their children. Several women today suffer from post-abortion syndrome (a condition that the pro-abortion crowd denies exists) from their regret of having terminated their pregnancy. Fortunately, many post-abortion support groups exist to offer healing from this trauma.
Trampling Parental Authority
CSE undermines parental guidance and authority by teaching a worldview that may run contrary to what parents teach at home. Some teach their children to delay sex until marriage, whereas the school teaches it’s normal to engage in sexual pleasure at any age. Often, schools teach this worldview of sexual freedom hand gender fluidity without the parents’ knowledge or consent.
Furthermore, in many states, students have access to birth control and abortion without parental consent. What’s a child to do with this conflicting instruction?
Elementary students and young teens lack the maturity and knowledge to question what public schools teach them. Teens easily succumb to peer pressure and raging hormones. They may know what the Bible says about sexual purity, but the evil tide of CSE is hard to swim against. Nowadays, even if they did object to the subject matter, they’d probably be called a politically incorrect bigot.
Thus, desiring a brave new world of “sexual freedom” and giving lip service to healthy relationships, CSE omits the truth: The hook-up culture causes young people to risk their emotional, relational, and physical health.
Stop the Culture of Death
Parents, grandparents, and community members have compassion for our children and fight against this plot to destroy them. We must promote abstinence until traditional marriage or life-long celibacy as a single. God designed us for life, and Jesus came that we might have it abundantly. Choose life for our young people.
God’s plan for sex is to be between one man and one woman in a life-long relationship. This plan leads to human flourishing. The devil has turned God’s plan upside down. For the “devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Peter 5:8b NASB). As an instrument of the devil, CSE brings death into the schools.
In conclusion, discover what your local schools teach. Speak out against instruction that sexualizes kindergartners and uses pornographic texts that spoil the innocence of youth. In addition to seat belts, bike helmets, and smoke detectors, protect children with abstinence instruction. Don’t let the wildfire of unbridled sex, encouraged by CSE, consume them.
Lorinda's Ponderings 