Sex Education Changes are Coming to Red States, Too

NBC News featured an article from the Kaiser Health News, entitled, “How #MeToo is changing sex ed policies, even in red states,” and it described how many state legislatures are changing sex education curriculum. The key driver, according to the article, is the “Me Too” movement, which is a feminist movement to expose men who have sexually assaulted, harassed, or raped women.

According to the Guttmacher Institute, in the 2019 state legislative season at least 79 bills to reform sex education were introduced in 32 states and the District of Columbia. The Guttmacher Institute is the research arm of Planned Parenthood, an advocacy organization that supports legalized abortions in the U.S. and abroad and therefore, has a vested interest in sex education of tomorrow’s leaders. The article heavily leaned on Guttmacher for information, such the Institute’s claim that 26 states do not require sex education and “only 13” require it to be medically accurate.

For example, California’s Board of Education included medical accuracy and, as the article said, “sensitivity to diverse sexualities” in its sex education curriculum this year. Also, Colorado passed a law which requires medical accuracy in sex education and budgets $1 million for the changes. The article noted that “it wasn’t just socially liberal states” that have proposed reforms or changes in their sex education curriculum. Joining the likes of California and Colorado, Tennessee, Utah, and Virginia passed bills into law which changed the current curriculum in their states. Tennessee passed a bill which encouraged schools to provide sexual violence awareness education within its sex education curriculum, while Utah passed a law which allowed teachers to discuss contraception in public schools. Virginia now requires sex education to teach the subject of human trafficking in its schools. Legislators in Mississippi, Georgia, and Arkansas attempted to pass bills on sex education, but those bills did not pass.

The article criticized abstinence-only programs in schools and said abstinence programs have not decreased unwanted pregnancy rates or sexually-transmitted diseases (STDs) since their introduction. It also thanked the “Me Too” movement and liberal female lawmakers for blazing a trail on sex education changes, which illustrates significant media bias against traditional sex education curriculum.

But there have been multiple instances, at least in the blue political state of Maryland, where local counties have changed sex education curriculum despite protests and opposition from parents at board meetings. Based on this article, it appears that leftist sex education advocates will not stop until their goals are met and sex education curriculum is overhauled, state-by-state.

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