Remember when sex ed in high school was a short film starring a T-shaped egg highway and a V- shaped bedroom where a sperm and an egg got friendly? That was a long time ago, before sex ed classes showed teens the proper placement of a condom on a banana. Today, there’s a new flavor of sex ed called “comprehensive.”
In Colorado where Democrats now rule the legislature, HB19-1320 mandates that new “comprehensive sex ed” classes must include “the relational or sexual experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender individuals.” So will classes include videos (in yesteryear known as pornography) on how lesbians and homosexuals have sex? Will kids be taken on field trips to parks where gay men hook up, or to gay bars? These, after all, are “relational” and “sexual” experiences of the LGBTQ community. Is anything forbidden? Well yes. The bill forbids teaching “gender norms or gender stereotypes” – that is, the one man/one woman heterosexuality embraced by about 95 percent of Americans, to the horror of the LGBT lobby.
Though such speculation may sound outrageous, parents in California, where similar legislation passed in 2016, are finding out just what those “relational or sexual experiences” mean. In Cupertino, California, parents rallied to protest the proposed sex curriculum’s descriptions of vaginal, oral and anal sex, along with graphic material on homosexuality. Said one parent at the Cupertino protest, “It’s too graphic and too descriptive, and it’s leading kids in a certain way… My best question to them is, are we teaching to perform or inform?” At another demonstration in San Diego against the sex curriculum, shocked parents told a reporter the classes included “self-pleasuring.”
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So we know what’s coming to Colorado. Like California’s sex ed bill, the “2015 California Healthy Youth Act,” the Colorado bill mandates comprehensive sex education for grades 4-12, teaching kids “about gender, gender expression, gender identity” etc. The California County of Superintendents defines gender identity as being entirely separate from biology – and that; s based on their “science.” Gender identity is ”one’s internal, deeply-held sense of being male, female, neither of these, both, or other gender(s)." Let’s think about that a minute.
Colorado’s Democrats aim to out-Californicate California by starting gender-morphing sex ed in preschool because, just like California, “The Colorado Youth Wellness Act” pretends to be about keeping kids healthy. And thinking you’re a boy when you’re a girl is so very healthy.
The concerns of the 500-600 parents and grandparents who rallied at the Capitol in Denver at the end of February to protest the bill mirrored the worries of California parents with their sea of posters: “Our Kids Aren’t Your Political Pawns,""Don’t Mess With Our Kids” and “Stop Sexualizing Our Kids!”
Perhaps the most alarming symptom of the new gender-whatever orthodoxy is an Oregon law that since 2015 has allowed 15-year-olds to get puberty-suppressing drugs and sex-change operations without their parents’ permission. And the state will even subsidize the cost through the generosity of Oregon’s Medicaid Plan. So your son may come home one day transformed into your daughter! Watch for this insanity to spread too, in the name of “children’s rights” and “inclusivity.”
Leftists literally want the family to disintegrate. In a shocking harbinger of what is to come, an Ohio judge last year nullified parental rights because the parents didn’t agree with their 17-year-old daughter’s decision to undergo “transition” to male by using irreversible hormone therapy. The parents questioned the girl’s judgment because of her history of mental health problems and the fact she had shown no interest in switching genders until quite recently. They also had religious objections. In short, her parents thought she was going through a phase and that making a permanent life-altering decision was unwise. But the judge ignored their concerns and awarded custody to the girl’s grandparents, who agreed that she could start “transitioning.”
The dogma of the left is everywhere sacrificing parental authority on the altrr of “gender fluidity” and “inclusiveness.” Children who have trouble remembering where their schoolbooks are, or often forget to feed the parakeet, are being empowered to make decisions to permanently mutilate their bodies with surgery and chemicals that will forever change their lives.
Several hundred citizens testified recently at the sex ed bill’s hearing in a Colorado Senate Committee. Some parents revealed what’s going on at Superior Elementary, where kindergartners and middle schoolers were herded into the school auditorium to be serenaded by a transgender choir and watch films celebrating the gender-free lifestyle that is the dream of leftism. The school’s principal, Jenn Bedford, had sent out an email telling parents to “Save the Date!” for this unique musical performance and luckily parents got a preview of the “anti-bullying” videos to be shown in the program.
They included three videos from an outfit called Queer Kids Stuff in which a cute teddy bear tells kids : “No More Gender Roles," “He, She, and They – What is Gender,” and “Expressing Myself, My Way.”
Parents are still fighting the curriculum which is the brainchild of an educational initiative called “A Queer Endeavor,” started several years ago by two Ph.D.s in partnership with the School of Education at the University of Colorado, which, of course, is a taxpayer-supported institution. These “educators” train teachers to teach kids the LGBT and gender-fluid agenda in any class, and have trained about 5,000 Colorado teachers so far. They receive “generous” support and grants from the Twisted Foundation another LGBTQ group that promotes the same agenda. Twisted, indeed.
Amid this wholesale school and indoctrination of our kids, unsurprisingly more kids are questioning their bodily identity and deciding they must be the opposite gender because they “feel” different and confused. What teenager doesn’t? The feeling of being different and not quite at home in your own skin has been common to kids going through puberty since before Moses grew a mustache. The LGBTQ activists are cynically exploiting the normal bewilderment and confusion of the hormone-raging years to convince kids all their problems stem from being a boy in a girl’s body, or a girl in a boy’s body.
A friend’s 11-year-old daughter came home from school the other day and asked her, "Mom, am I a lesbian?" Most kids from toddlerhood have a same-sex best friend to whom they tell everything. But these days they are often mistaking friendship for homosexuality when it’s entirely natural.
A boy who decides he wants to wear dresses will find an ally in the school counselor who will agree with him, and fight his parents whose religious faith has taught him from a toddler that God created us male and female. Even though 75 to 85 percent of Americans identify as Christian or Jewish and less than 5 percent are LGBTQ, now the God-believing majority are labeled as haters.
This sets up a tragic family conflict between a child’s traditional religious upbringing and the sex ed teacher who says God is sooo retro about sex; He doesn’t get there are a host of genders and it’s up to you to decide which team you are on. The child is caught between the natural respect for a teacher who insists that gender is fluid and can change from day-to-day or year-to-year, and his/her family who brought him up as whatever gender matches his or her body. At the very time when kids need the love of family to navigate the storms of adolescence, the LGBTQ lobby is actively working to sever family ties and leave the youngster adrift except for his/her new best friends: the LGBTQ activists and the school counselors who support them.
In California, gender-confusion has reached such a fever pitch that fully 20 percent of youth 12 to 17 are so sexually mixed up that they consider themselves androgynous according to a new UCLA study. Teens awash in hormones and all that California sun and surf – sexless? And that’s “healthy?”
It’s parents’ sacred duty to protect their children from the psychological trauma of being exposed to raw sexual topics they are not prepared to deal with. Only a parent knows when, how, and even if their child is ready for “the talk.” The government and its “diversity” agenda is using kids as experimental mice for breaking apart the family that has formed the basis of civilization for all of human history. But why?
The left has always been fiercely anti-family, anti-religion, and anti-God. When kids are taught that God is wrong about gender and sex ed is right, when parental authority is overruled by teachers, and when morality is ridiculed, the Almighty State becomes the authority. When pre-teens and teens are shown the most graphic how-to lessons in class, their teachers know they’re at the experimental age of acting out that how-to. And why not? It’s an anything-goes utopia the left is selling in their determined campaign to fundamentally transform society.
Parents need to become totally informed, reclaim their authority, and protest the radical ideology schools are teaching their kids about sex and gender. Lenin was right when he said, “Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”
Joy Overbeck is a Colorado journalist, author and Townhall columnist who has also contributed to The Washington Times, The Daily Caller, American Thinker, BarbWire and elsewhere. More columns: https://www.facebook.com/JoyOverbeckColumnist Follow her on Twitter @JoyOverbeck1
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