Utah poised to ban sex education

The bill has passed the state House cand Senate, and now goes to the Governor, who’s up for re-election.

http://news.yahoo.com/utah-lawmakers-pass-bill-curb-sex-education-schools-045319709.html

Having lived in the Beehive State, I can easily believe this. Church-run KBYU, a PBS affiliate, regularly censored PBS offerings. Pioneer Memorial Theater, which was actually at a State-run university, regularly cleaned up the plays they showed (including Amadeus, which seemed particularly pointless). Until recently, a Utah company re-recorded major movies on DVd with all the objectionable bits removed.

What’s this about beehives?

Don’t let this be a derailing of the thread, but you can look up “beehive state” easily enough:

Sorry, embarrassingly I had no clue.

They are right - in an *ideal *world, sex education should be the job of parents. Unfortunately, some parents are too lazy, some are too embarrassed, some are too stupid. I suppose the kids can just learn it all on the streets, right?

Why should it be the job of the parents? It’s basic biology. If girls are old enough to get their periods, and boys are old enough to have wet dreams, then they’re old enough to know what’s going on with their bodies and what the implications are for the future. It should be part of every biology class from middle school onward.

I dunno - silly me, wanting to teach my own kid stuff, hoping that when she has questions, she comes to me, since I just *might *have answers for her… Schools aren’t the only places where you learn.

It isn’t a question about whether you want to teach your kids about sex or not, but why is it “ideal” that kids learn all they know about sex from their parents? Even in the ideal world where parents don’t shy away from that discussion, it is apparent that many people are rather ill-informed about the biological aspects of sex and passing that information along to their children is not going to make the situation any better.

So why not have sex education at home and at school?

The more education the better, especially for something as fundamental as sex.

It doesn’t have to be an either / or situation.

Err… unless you live in Utah, I guess.

Is anybody advocating that sex ed be banned at home? No? Then I’m not sure what you’re on about.

Why isn’t it called ‘Relationship Education’?

‘Sex education’ sounds as unbalanced as some other bogus phrase, maybe like ‘socialized medicine’.

No - but it’s pretty stupid to have schools where learning is forbidden.

If, in an ideal world, parents should be teaching their kids about sex, why do we not hear, “In an ideal world, parents should be teaching their kids calculus!”?

The answer to both is that most parents are unwilling and unqualified to teach either. “I want to be the one to teach my kid about sex!” most often means, “…but I’m not going to bring it up until she’s 14, if then!”

No one’s stopping you from adding your 2 cents and teaching morals and religious precepts at home. But in a day and age when an alarming number of people don’t know women have three holes in their nether regions, leaving biology education to the laypeople is stupid and dangerous.

Surely people understand it’s not really about sex - if it was about sex the entire curriculum would last about 10 minutes ‘This goes there, you leave it in too long you get a baby. Any questions? Good, lesson over’.

People do get the importance of kids discussing and reflecting on all the kinds of relationships they have, obligations and responsibilities, about morality, decency, etc?

I’m more interested in menstruation, learning about fertility cycles, birth control, STI prevention, pregnancy development and infant care and yes, a bit about self-empowerment, thinking for yourself, realizing that your friends who are talking about sex the most are probably doing it the least and resisting peer and date pressure to have sex before you feel ready. Me being me, I tend to throw in a bit about how yeah, sex is really really good, but not generally for your first or second time, because elbows get in the way until you have some practice.

But yeah, even the nuts (snicker) and bolts of a woman’s monthly cycle can take a few hours, if you’re being thorough. With my kids, I start small and slow, and we have many conversations over many years, totaling probably 30 hours or more. When I teach it in workshop settings, I have a 1.5 hour version and a 6 hour version. If I was going to do it in a Health Class, I could easily fill 45 minutes a day for 10 weeks. About three quarters of that would be pure biology, contraception and STI prevention.

So while it’s not ONLY about sex, it’s a lot about sex, and the ramifications of sex, and the consequences of sex to your body and safer sex. Even if we take out all the stuff that could be construed as “morals”, even if we take out the strategies to withstand peer pressure, even if we take out the “sex can be wonderful, with the right person at the right time” parts and other things that can be politicized into “encouraging” kids to have sex…there’s still a lot of biology and health to cover.

The Salt Lake Tribute has a great take on this.

Good lord, if it had been up to my parents to teach me about sex, I’d still be wondering where babies come from. When I started my periods (the summer between sixth and seventh grade - seventh being when we got the talk in school), I honestly had no idea at all what was happening. If my aunt hadn’t been visiting I don’t know how long it would have taken me to find out. I was way too embarassed and mortified to ask my mother.

When my younger sister had questions, my mother sent her to me for information.

The bill in question is not talking about adding a relationship class to the curriculum. It’s talking about preventing reproduction - a major biological topic - from being covered in biology class.

That said, I don’t actually think it’s a public school’s job to teach morality and decency, unless the school in question is prepared to hear from all of the public on the subject.

Bingo. My mom came to my 5th-grade class on the subject to see what exactly they were teaching, and told me she actually learned quite a bit. It’s basic biology, but that was not her strong point. I’m glad she let me be taught by someone who actually knew the subject matter.

That’s not to say that my 5th-grade instruction (or, later on, my high school instruction, which was much more detailed and graphic, as it should have been) were everything I have ever learned about sex and relationships. Mom certainly supplemented on that front. Which is as it should be.

Was her first name Florence by any chance?