Post by benson on May 29, 2022 11:04:41 GMT
Republicans want sex ed out of schools. That's a huge mistake.
For someone who has been repeatedly accused of sexual harassment, Charles Herbster sure has a lot of thoughts about how to teach proper sexual behavior. “We’re going to take sex education out of the schools and put it back in the homes where it belongs,” Herbster, who failed to win the GOP nomination for governor in Nebraska on Tuesday, declared at a rally with former President Donald Trump this month.
Herbster may have lost, but judging by the cheers in that video, his was clearly a message that resonates with supporters. That isn’t entirely surprising. Herbster’s attack on sex education in schools joins a snowball that’s been gaining in size and speed as conservatives draw disparate areas of fearmongering into one giant moral panic.
Like so many elements of that panic, the attacks on sex education are framed as an issue of parental choice. Though Herbster’s comments got the most attention, they are pretty much in sync with the views of his opponents. Agribusiness owner Jim Pillen, who won Tuesday’s primary election against Herbster, wrote on Facebook last year that “Nebraska should have no state sex education standards — these are decisions that should be made by parents, not bureaucrats.” Earlier this month, his campaign told Omaha’s KMTV that Pillen “believes sex education should be up to parents, not the government.”
That isn’t to say that this conservative strategy is new in the way that attacks on critical race theory are. The war against sex education has roots in the 1960s when the fringe-right seized on it as yet more proof of the communist threat lurking in America’s schools. In 1990, the American Civil Liberties Union warned about right-wing groups “opposed in principle to comprehensive sexuality education in public schools. They argue that such education usurps parental rights and encourages ‘immoral’ premarital sexual promiscuity in the young.”
Despite their ongoing efforts, as of 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “most teenagers received formal sex education before they were 18 (96 percent of female and 97 percent of male teenagers.)” This leads us to three major issues with the demand that schools leave the teaching of sex education to parents.
www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/sex-education-belongs-schools-republicans-want-it-out-n1295332
For someone who has been repeatedly accused of sexual harassment, Charles Herbster sure has a lot of thoughts about how to teach proper sexual behavior. “We’re going to take sex education out of the schools and put it back in the homes where it belongs,” Herbster, who failed to win the GOP nomination for governor in Nebraska on Tuesday, declared at a rally with former President Donald Trump this month.
Herbster may have lost, but judging by the cheers in that video, his was clearly a message that resonates with supporters. That isn’t entirely surprising. Herbster’s attack on sex education in schools joins a snowball that’s been gaining in size and speed as conservatives draw disparate areas of fearmongering into one giant moral panic.
Like so many elements of that panic, the attacks on sex education are framed as an issue of parental choice. Though Herbster’s comments got the most attention, they are pretty much in sync with the views of his opponents. Agribusiness owner Jim Pillen, who won Tuesday’s primary election against Herbster, wrote on Facebook last year that “Nebraska should have no state sex education standards — these are decisions that should be made by parents, not bureaucrats.” Earlier this month, his campaign told Omaha’s KMTV that Pillen “believes sex education should be up to parents, not the government.”
That isn’t to say that this conservative strategy is new in the way that attacks on critical race theory are. The war against sex education has roots in the 1960s when the fringe-right seized on it as yet more proof of the communist threat lurking in America’s schools. In 1990, the American Civil Liberties Union warned about right-wing groups “opposed in principle to comprehensive sexuality education in public schools. They argue that such education usurps parental rights and encourages ‘immoral’ premarital sexual promiscuity in the young.”
Despite their ongoing efforts, as of 2010, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “most teenagers received formal sex education before they were 18 (96 percent of female and 97 percent of male teenagers.)” This leads us to three major issues with the demand that schools leave the teaching of sex education to parents.
www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/sex-education-belongs-schools-republicans-want-it-out-n1295332