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Suzzanne Bowdey, writing for The Stand, says, "Americans have been so busy fighting against radical gender ideology and critical race theory in schools that one of the Left’s favorite ways to undermine parents has fallen under the radar. But the Trump administration hasn’t lost sight of graphic sex education, and parents everywhere should be grateful for it. In a very underreported move, the president’s team went on the offensive this summer, zeroing out millions of taxpayer dollars for controversial 'Teen Pregnancy Prevention' programs in favor of solid curriculum that emphasizes abstinence and marriage."
Before we cast our first stone, let's remember we're talking about deeds---not words.
Trump does things; he doesn't just talk about doing things.
Be informed, not misled.
The New York Times picked up on the President's actions and had this to say:
"The administration canceled federal grants to organizations across the country, accusing them of encouraging premarital sex. New criteria say programs should stress abstinence."
A few weeks ago, Rena Dixon, the head of Fact Forward, a South Carolina nonprofit that offers adolescent health and sex education classes, got a letter from the Trump administration with crushing news. The government was terminating the organization’s $1.6 million grant from a federal program to reduce teen pregnancies, effective immediately.
The administration’s priorities, it said, do not align with “content that encourages, normalizes or promotes sexual activity for minors.”
The move is the latest in a campaign that began in the first Trump administration to defund or overhaul the 16-year-old, $100 million initiative. Courts blocked the effort in 2018, but this time the administration, which abruptly canceled 53 of the program’s 67 grants last month, has been taking steps to be on firmer legal ground.
The letter from the assistant secretary for health accused Fact Forward of including lessons with “advice on making condom use more pleasurable” and discussions that normalize “use of pornography.” A video, it said, contained a “scenario of adolescents engaging in sexual activity.”
Advocates for normalizing sexual activities to young students claim the President's Administration is lying. Of course.
The New York Times continues to make the case against Trump's actions.
If anything, the administration argued, the Biden and Obama-era sex ed models have only “normalize[ed] sexual activity for minors.”
Bowdey says, "Thanks to liberal ideologues masquerading as health experts, activists like Planned Parenthood have had unlimited access to America’s classrooms, knowing if they hook kids on sex, they’re grooming the next generation of abortion customers. It’s been a great down payment on future business — until now. The Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH) made it clear that the department is under new management where all of this is concerned, posting a list of priorities that should relieve every sane parent in America."
- First of all, the agency vows to ensure that adolescent program materials are “age-appropriate” and “do not promote harmful ideologies, such as gender ideology and discriminatory equity ideology. OASH will focus on programs that do not promote material that depicts, describes, exposes or presents obscene, indecent, or sexually explicit content,” the document notes, “including content that encourages, normalizes or promotes sexual activity for minors. OASH will prioritize OASH programs and funding that are in compliance with these priorities and applicable law.”
- Second, OASH promises to defend parental rights “to the fullest extent of its authority under the law … including parents’ right to protect their children from exposure to content that burdens the exercise of their religious beliefs.”
Under this new criterion, NYT complains, anyone applying for taxpayer dollars “must teach abstinence,” also known as sexual risk avoidance, “as the only means to prevent teen pregnancy. Courses must stress the importance of marriage and procreation and instruct young people how to safeguard their fertility. They make scant reference to preventing sexually transmitted infections and virtually none to lesbian, gay and transgender sexuality.”
As FRC’s Quena González pointed out to The Washington Stand, “The fact that some professional sex ed providers who receive millions of dollars in federal funds are complaining that these priorities are now required to continue receiving taxpayer dollars should alarm parents and enrage taxpayers. We shouldn’t be allowing, much less paying for, schools to tell students, ‘We know you’re going to experiment, wink wink, so here’s how to derive the most sexual pleasure from underage sex.’”
Valerie Huber, who’s spent decades fighting for this kind of principled approach to sex ed, had one reaction to the administration’s pivot: relief. “Mostly for the young people,” the president of The Institute for Women’s Health told TWS. “For years, sexual risk avoidance had to justify itself while the alternative was funded as though its results were settled. That was never a research question. It was a worldview question dressed up as one.” Now, thanks to Trump, “risk avoidance is being treated as a legitimate public health goal for adolescents, the way it already is for every other youth risk behavior. We do not teach teenagers to smoke carefully. We tell them the truth about risk, and we help them stay at no risk or move from high risk to low risk to no risk,” she emphasized. “Sexual health is the one place we abandoned that model, but now HHS is being consistent across all youth risk behaviors. Bravo!”
Huber looked back over the last several years, lamenting the damage that the Left’s “if-it-feels-good-do-it” message has done. “When adults in authority signal that sexual activity is expected of a 14-year-old, that is not neutral information,” she insisted. “It is permission, and for many students it is pressure.” Under Obama and Biden, she noted, “These programs routinely positioned outside providers, including organizations whose business model depends on abortion, as the trusted adult in a young person’s life — and treated parents as an obstacle to be managed. A curriculum that teaches a 15-year-old how to obtain services without telling her mother is not a health program,” Valerie argued.
America needs to stop believing that young people can only meet the low bars we set. “Hand a young person a high standard and tell them you believe they can meet it, and most of them rise to it,” Huber underscored. “What they resent instantly is the adult who tells them they cannot be expected to control themselves. They hear that for exactly what it is, which is a low opinion of them.” The Left’s model assumes “every teenager is sexually active,” she shook her head. “Most high school students are not."
Takeaway
Bowdey concludes, "At the end of the day, our schools were never meant to be a substitute for moms and dads, who have the ultimate responsibility to raise their children in a way that reflects their values. It’s not the job of teachers or outside “experts” to contradict those beliefs or commandeer a parent’s authority on topics that, in all honesty, don’t belong in classrooms in the first place. Now, instead of shipping off tens of millions of dollars to graphic programs that double as LGBT recruiting programs and abortion infomercials, the president is letting research, parents, and common sense dictate how America approaches sex ed. And we should all be thankful for it! "
Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Engaged. Be Bold. Be Prayerful.
