Calif. School District Forbids Parents to Remove Kids From Graphic Sex Ed Class
California passed a law in 2015 known as the California Healthy Youth Act, part of which expanded and overhauled sexual education classes to include information about homosexuality, gender identity issues and abortion, and which is just now being implemented in schools across the state.
The new sex ed course is intended to help students develop “healthy attitudes” with regard to such issues as “gender (and) sexual orientation” while also informing students about the effectiveness of various contraceptives and spurring an “objective discussion” about “parenting, adoption, and abortion.”
According to LifeSite News, there are some parents who don’t want their children being exposed to everything the curriculum offers.
There’s plenty to object to.
The curriculum includes a study guide about transgender issues and a “sexual health toolkit,” which teaches young students about such things as sex toys and anal intercourse, downplays such quaint notions as “abstinence” and “virginity” and relies heavily upon left-wing organizations such as Planned Parenthood and Advocates for Youth — which are pro-homosexuality and pro-abortion — as resources.
The 2015 law recognized that “parents and guardians have the ultimate responsibility for imparting values regarding human sexuality to their children,” and as such had expressly allowed for parents and guardians to “excuse their children from participation” in the courses as a whole without any sort of penalty.
However, if parents allow their children to take the course at all, they can only keep their children from some aspects, specifically dealing with the physical organs. Otherwise, the children must be exposed to every part of it, including sex toys, anal sex and homosexuality. And parents will be in no position to object.
So, having a kid learn about sexual health means having the kids learn about homexuality and anal sex, too?
That’s the intepretation the Orange County Board of Education — more specifically Orange County Department of Education general counsel Ronald Wenkart — has reached anyway.
That’s because a statement in the law specifically exempts from the parents’ opt-out power “instruction, materials, presentations, or programming that discuss gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, discrimination, harassment, bullying, intimidation, relationships, or family and do not discuss human reproductive organs and their functions.”
In a memo published in full by the San Juan Capistrano Patch, Wenkart indicated that students could only be excused from the portions of the courses that dealt directly with human reproductive organs, and all other information imparted by the courses was mandatory.
Wenkart did, however, suggest that parents retained the right to “advise their children that they disagree with some or all of the information” put forward in the courses and were permitted to “express their views on these subjects to their children.” Gee, thanks for the permission.
The attorney also cited judicial precedents at the conclusion of his four-page memo that claimed “parents do not have a constitutional right to excuse their children from portions of the school curriculum that they find objectionable.”
Needless to say, there are rumblings of pushback brewing among parents .
According to LifeSite News, Heidi St. John, an author who runs a Facebook site called The Busy Mom, advised that parents in California raise the issue with their local school boards, as well as contact their local political representatives in order to make their displeasure at the decision known.
“These are our children!” she wrote in a Facebook post in April. “They do not belong to the schools.”
This episode is just the latest example of how public schools have become little more than indoctrination centers designed to cram as much of the progressive agenda and beliefs into students’ heads as possible, indoctrination that is increasingly being made mandatory.
This also serves as a glaring example of the notion held by far too many progressive leftists that they know what is best for everybody else, even more so than parents know about their own children, and everyone should just be quiet and accept their great wisdom, even if we wholeheartedly disagree.
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