Since 24 states have mandated AIDS education in the public schools, and since AIDS education starts as early as kindergarten in nine states, in behooves parents to find out what is being taught. Parents should exercise their preeminent parental authority and First Amendment right to protected their children against indoctrination in ideologies and practices that may be contrary to their beliefs.
What should be taught in these sex education courses? If sexuality courses are given, all classroom materials should be required to meet a fourfold test: they should be constitutional, legal, healthy, and safe. Only one type of teaching about sex meets all four tests, namely, the advisability of sexual abstinence until marriage.
Several states, notably Illinois and Indiana, have mandated that the schools teach sexual abstinence until marriage. Those bills have passed the legislatures by large bipartisan majorities.
However, powerful opposition to abstinence education has emerged from that premier organ of liberalism, the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU’s California Legislative Office in Sacramento sent a letter this year to state legislators which read as follows:
“It is our position that teaching that monogamous, heterosexual intercourse within marriage is a traditional American value is an unconstitutional establishment of a religious doctrine in public schools. There are various religions which hold contrary beliefs with respect to marriage and monogamy.”
On the other hand, there is no indication that the ACLU objects to a high school program in the Los Angeles Unified School District called “Project 10,” which teaches students to accept homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle. The literature for the program describes is as being merely for students “who identify themselves as lesbian, gay or bisexual or who want accurate information.”
But Sand Fernando High School inflicted a lesbian teacher on a class of students who had made no such identification or request, and this was done without notification or parental consent. The 16-year-old girl who blew the whistle on this course had expected to take a history test in her fourth-period class, but instead she was taken to the library with other students to hear the lesbian teacher tell them she practices “safe sex,” that it is OK for them to have sexual feelings for others of the same sex, and that 10 percent of the students are probably gay.
The teacher, Virginia Uribe, gave the students telephone numbers for additional homosexual and lesbian information, and she distributed sexually explicit materials. One book graphically and favorably describes the seduction of a minor girl by her lesbian dance teacher.
Uribe told the press that she has already visited about 40 schools and has been given board approval to visit all 121 junior and senior high schools in the district. She has been a science teacher at Fairfax High School in Los Angeles for more than 30 years. The principal refused to answer calls from the press.
The Project 10 program was a violation of the California Education Code Section 51550, which provides in part that, “No governing board of a public elementary or secondary school may require pupils to attend any class in which human reproductive organs and functions and processes are described, illustrated or discussed, whether such class be part of a course designated ‘sex education’ or ‘family life education’ or by some similar term, or part of any other course which pupils are required to attend.”
The law goes on to say that, if such classes are offered, parents must be notified in writing and an opportunity provided to make sure that the child is not required to attend the class. Since parents don’t have any powerful network of litigating lawyers (such as the ACLU) to defend their rights and demand that school personnel obey the law, the California Pro-Life Medical Association has developed a form letter that parents can fill out and submit to the schools. The form sets forth the pertinent passages of the California Education Code and, in the exercise of parental rights under the law, serves notice that the child is to be excused from all sex education.
The Association recommends that several or many parents as a group present these forms to their school boards at a regular meeting, with a spokesman making the presentation.
California is often the trendy pacesetter for social, political, and economic trends, Parents who care about what is being taught to their children had better investigate the teachers and the curriculum in their local public schools.
