School District Halts Decision on Planned Parenthood LGBT-Inclusive Sex Ed Curriculum

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AP/Vadim Ghirda
Dr. Susan Berry

School officials in the Spokane, Washington school district have halted a vote on a Planned Parenthood-designed middle school sex education curriculum that includes teaching children about LGBTQ sexuality and gender ideology.

The curriculum, titled Get Real, teaches children about LGBTQ issues and terminology, and meets the state of Washington’s new sex education requirements. The program was developed by Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts (PPLM) and published by ETR.

Get Real is a Comprehensive Sex Education (CSE) program that assumes young people will be sexually active.

In Grade 6, the Get Real curriculum says it introduces students to the “key Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) skills” they will supposedly need to be able to discuss sexual relationships and how to avoid pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections.

According to the program’s table of contents, in Grade 7, students also discuss sexual identity and “examine the myths and facts about sexual orientation.” They also learn how to use a condom and review the use of hormonal contraception, including emergency contraception after sexual intercourse.

In Grade 8, one of the Get Real activities is a presentation by someone who is living with HIV, and students are asked to write a thank-you letter to the speaker.

In a press release in 2014, Planned Parenthood announced that Get Real “helps kids wait until they are older to have sex.”

“We are extremely proud the research shows our Get Real curriculum works,” said Jen Slonaker, vice president of education and training at PPLM.  “Among students who received Get Real, 16% fewer boys and 15% fewer girls had sex compared to their peers who did not take Get Real.”

While Planned Parenthood touts the program has a focus on abstinence from sex and parental involvement, the abortion giant’s many other endeavors have been inconsistent with those stated aims.

For example, in 2014 – the same year Planned Parenthood boasted about its Get Real sex education program – when asked if “promiscuity is a bad thing,” the organization responded, “There’s no standard definition of what it means.”

Planned Parenthood continued its explanation by defending promiscuous women:

Unfortunately some “promiscuous” women are judged in a negative way by society. But “promiscuous” men are more accepted in society, which is totally unfair.

Why do I keep putting “promiscuous” in quotes? Because there’s no standard definition of what it means. Some people might think that a person is promiscuous if he or she is involved with multiple sexual partners at the same time. Other people think a person is promiscuous if they have a certain number of partners over the course of a few years or longer. And for some people, promiscuity doesn’t necessarily mean having sex – to them, a person who goes on a lot of dates or makes out with a lot of people might be “promiscuous,” too.

So “promiscuity” is a word that can refer to a whole variety of different sexual behaviors. But in general, it’s a word that’s used to judge or shame people. And, again, it’s a term that’s most often directed at women.

Since the number of sexual partners you’ve had doesn’t say anything about your character, your morals, or your personality – or about anything at all really– there’s nothing bad or unhealthy about having a big number of sexual partners.

Pro-life organization Live Action also produced a video in 2014 that highlights Planned Parenthood’s normalization of Bondage, Discipline, Sadism, Masochism (BDSM) for young people.

Similarly, in 2015, Alliance Defending Freedom prepared a summary of Planned Parenthood’s history of failing to report child sexual abuse.

More recently, in April Planned Parenthood released a video titled How to Tell Someone You Have an STD, in which the group minimizes the significance of sexually transmitted diseases.

“So, you’ve got an STD,” the narrator begins in the video. “Guess what? So do lots of other people. Half of all people will get an STD at some point in their life. Seriously. Not kidding – half. It’s OK.”

The narrator then goes on to say that “sex lives aren’t over” because someone has an STD, and encourages the young person with an STD to tell his “casual hook up” about his infection.

“Telling someone you have an STD might seem scary, but it’s important that you do,” the narrator says. “You can totally do this. It might be tempting to avoid a tough conversation with an ex or casual hook up.”

The video then switches to a scene in which a young man is texting his gay hook up partner about the fact he has chlamydia.

When the topic is herpes, the video depicts a lesbian hook up. One of them stops the sexual activity and tells her partner she has herpes and says, “It’s not a big deal.”

“Honestly the worst part about having herpes is listening to everybody talk about it like it’s the plague,” she continues. “Most of us who actually have it know that it’s not that bad.”

Ryan Bomberger, president of pro-life educational group the Radiance Foundation, writes at Townhall about why Planned Parenthood should not be invited into public schools:

Our nation is facing an STD epidemic. The 18 percent failure rate of condoms is alarming. Birth control pills, shots, implants, rings, and IUDs don’t prevent STDs at all. Abstinence is the only 100 percent effective way to avoid STDs, HIV, HPV and unintended pregnancy. Should a business that profits from selling abortions, birth control and STD treatments be teaching our teens that there’s nothing wrong with promiscuity?

Last year, the state of Washington released new health and physical education standards that promote gender fluid and transgender ideology throughout grades K-12. A “core idea” in the standards is that children in kindergarten need to “understand there are many ways to express gender.”

The standards name “self-identity” as a topic of the “core idea” of the K-12 curriculum, and define gender as a “social construct based on emotional, behavioral, and cultural characteristics attached to a person’s assigned biological sex.”

The Washington standards are based on the Whole School, Whole Community, Whole Child (WSCC) Model, which supposedly aims to “improve each child’s cognitive, physical, social, and emotional development.”

The state’s superintendent’s office says the state utilized the National Sexuality Education Standards, K-12 (NSES) as a resource for the new standards.

Advisory members of the NSES include Robert McGarry, Ed.D., director of training and curriculum development of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN); Monica Rodriguez, MS, president of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS); Jennifer Heitel Yakush, public policy director of SIECUS; and Leslie M. Kantor, MPH, director of national education initiatives of Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

GLSEN was founded by gay activist and former Obama administration “Safe Schools Czar,” Kevin Jennings.

According to its website, GLSEN says its goal is to “ensure that every member of every school community is valued and respected regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.” The activist organization also states it seeks to build a “global movement.”

In December of 2015, Planned Parenthood announced that it was working with GLSEN, the Human Rights Campaign, and SIECUS for LGBT-inclusive sex education programs in schools:

Leftwing organization SIECUS expressed its anger earlier this month when President Donald Trump appointed Valerie Huber, an abstinence sex education advocate, to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

“The Trump Administration continues to demonstrate their complete disregard and disdain for science and human rights with the appointment of an individual who has an ethically questionable history and ties to anti-LGBTQ advocates in a leadership position within HHS,” said Chitra Panjabi, SIECUS president and CEO, adding:

Valerie Huber pushed a religiously motivated agenda to promote false and misleading information about sexual health and deny young people the education and skills they need to lead healthy lives. The people served by the programs within the HHS Office of the Assistant Secretary deserve more than a science-denialist who has built a career on perpetuating fear, shame, and stigma of sexuality for our nation’s young people.

Huber’s appointment came just weeks after the release of Trump’s Fiscal year 2018 budget, which, Ascend, the organization Huber previously led, says, calls for “a dramatic change in federal sex education policy.”

Trump’s budget proposes maintaining funding for Sexual Risk Avoidance (SRA) education – a public health term Huber prefers over “abstinence” –and eliminating the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program (TPP), a CSE approach that was initiated early on in the Obama administration.

In his proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2017, former President Barack Obama eliminated all funding for abstinence education.

Upon Huber’s appointment, Planned Parenthood – which receives federal grants for teaching sex education in schools – tweeted its disapproval:

Last year, more than 60 leaders expressed concern about the mental health of American children forced to cope with the former Obama administration’s transgender bathroom policy, which was recently reversed by the Trump administration and sent back to the states.

Among those concerned was the American College of Pediatricians, which has asserted that gender ideology is harmful to children and that, by promoting gender fluidity, the Obama administration was complicit in masking serious mental health issues in children.

The College says:

No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one…

A person’s belief that he or she is something they are not is, at best, a sign of confused thinking. When an otherwise healthy biological boy believes he is a girl, or an otherwise healthy biological girl believes she is a boy, an objective psychological problem exists that lies in the mind not the body, and it should be treated as such. These children suffer from gender dysphoria. Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V)…

“According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty,” the College asserts. “Conditioning children into believing that a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse.”

Similarly, Youth Trans Critical Professionals – a group of self-described “left-leaning, open-minded, and pro-gay rights” professionals – say it is risky to affirm young people who claim to be transgender and provide them with hormonal and surgical treatments to change their bodies.

“Our concern is with medical transition for children and youth,” say Youth Trans Critical Professionals on their website. “We feel that unnecessary surgeries and/or hormonal treatments which have not been proven safe in the long-term represent significant risks for young people.”

“Policies that encourage — either directly or indirectly — such medical treatment for young people who may not be able to evaluate the risks and benefits are highly suspect, in our opinion,” says the organization, which is composed of psychologists, social workers, doctors, and other professionals.

The professionals express “alarm” that, because of the current trendiness of being transgendered, many young people have decided they are a member of the opposite sex simply as a result of “binges” on social media sites. They describe a process of transgender activists recruiting these young people for their “cult.”

“There is evidence that vulnerable young people are being actively recruited and coached on such sites to believe that they are trans,” the professionals say.

Despite such potential mental health problems associated with gender confusion, children who claim to be the opposite sex are no longer legally permitted to see a therapist to engage in “conversion therapy” in some states. Youth Trans Critical Professionals sees such state prohibitions as dangerous since they may block the process of critical thinking and evaluation of the young person regarding the reasons why he or she desires to become a transgender member of the opposite sex.

“While the sentiment behind this legislation is laudable, in some cases, it is being interpreted to mean that therapists cannot explore gender identity with a youth who is professing to be trans,” argue the professionals. “This would mean we can’t ask why; we can’t explore underlying mental health issues; we can’t consider the symbolic nature of the gender dysphoria; and we can’t look at possible confounding issues such as social media use or social contagion.”

The Get Real sex education curriculum was expected to replace the Spokane school district’s current human growth and development program, reports the Union-Bulletin. The Spokane Public Schools board was scheduled to vote on the issue last Wednesday, but one of the 15 members of the Human Growth and Development Citizen Advisory Committee rescinded support of the Planned Parenthood curriculum.

Additionally, two other committee members were not present for the vote, said Pastor John Repsold, who plans to vote against the new curriculum. Repsold added he believes the delayed vote is a strategy “to assuage a little bit of angst that’s in the community about this.”

The Human Growth committee is expected to reconvene in the fall and review the Get Real curriculum again.

“PPFA (Planned Parenthood Federation of America) perpetuates the need for their ‘services,’” writes Bomberger. “They target our young, and public schools are more than willing to expose students to the medical malfeasance. Our teens deserve much better protection than this.”

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