Anglican Mainstream

By John Jalsevac, LifeSite News

After a grade 7-8 teacher in Toronto posted graphic “safe sex” pamphlets in his classroom, at least one of which was originally designed for “mature” venues like gay bath houses, the Toronto District School Board has put him on home assignment, but defended the teacher for having “good intentions.”

"They were put up by the teacher in an attempt to speak more directly to youth on what is a sensitive topic," TDSB spokesman Ryan Bird told Sun News.

Bird told LifeSiteNews that Vroom has been removed from the school and is "on home assignment pending a review," but would not give any more details.

One of the pamphlets depicted two men apparently engaged in a sex act and gives explicit advice on oral sex. The pamphlet was produced by the AIDS Committee of Toronto (ACT) and is intended primarily for distribution to homosexual bars and bathhouses across the city. It is not intended to be given to children, said an ACT spokesman.

"We do use explicit language because we're targeting a specific community where this kind of language is warranted and needed," ACT spokesman Andrew Brett said.

Other pamphlets in the classroom reportedly included an ad for female condoms and the morning-after pill.

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From The Guardian

Secondary school pupils should learn more about pornography and relationships, sexuality and staying safe, say inspectors

Many schools are failing to give pupils adequate sex and relationships lessons, which could leave them open to sexual exploitation or inappropriate behaviour, inspectors have warned.

Secondary school pupils should learn more about pornography, relationships, sexuality and staying safe, rather than just the "mechanics" of reproduction, Ofsted said.

It also criticised primary schools for spending too much time teaching pupils about friendships and relationships, leaving them ill-prepared for puberty.

In a damning report, the schools watchdog said that in a sizeable proportion of England's schools personal, social, health and economic (PSHE) education was still not good enough.

Sex and relationships education needs to be improved in more than a third of schools, Ofsted said.

"In primary schools this was because too much emphasis was placed on friendships and relationships, leaving pupils ill-prepared for physical and emotional changes during puberty, which many begin to experience before they reach secondary school," the report argues.

"In secondary schools it was because too much emphasis was placed on 'the mechanics' of reproduction and too little on relationships, sexuality, the influence of pornography on students' understanding of healthy sexual relationships, dealing with emotions and staying safe."

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By John Smeaton, SPUC

SPUC has criticised comments about sex education by Elizabeth Truss, the education and childcare minister. Mrs Truss said in a letter published in The Times yesterday (15 April) that just as much sex education will be included in the new National Curriculum for England. A draft new curriculum has been issued for consultation, which closes today. The Government's clumsy effort to appease the sex-education lobby threatens parental rights.

Responding to Mrs Truss, Antonia Tully of the SPUC’s Safe at School campaign told the media:

“Mrs Truss has prejudged the outcome of the consultation which only closes today. The National Curriculum for science contains no reference to sex and relationships, but only to ‘reproduction’ – including plants and animals.

“Sex education is not currently part of the mandatory science curriculum and is included only in the non-statutory suggestions for PSHE lessons. A consultation exercise about the National Curriculum has been in progress since February."

In a submission to the consultation (full text) SPUC Safe at School points out that references to 'reproduction' in the science curriculum are being abused. Explicit sex-education resources are being used in mandatory science lessons for primary school children. In some cases, resources have simply been transferred to science periods to thwart parents' rights to object to what some have called 'kiddie-porn'. Parents are entitled to withdraw children from sex lessons, but schools can force parents to submit their children to attend science classes.

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by Eric Metaxas, LifeSite News

These days, those of us seeking to speak up for biblical values in the culture are being told to tone down our rhetoric. And I agree that often we do ourselves and the cause of Christ few favors when we use overheated language, when we exaggerate, or verbally beat up our opponents. Speaking the truth in love is always a good policy, especially in our highly polarized times.

But I can’t help but feel enraged—righteously, I hope—when children are made the guinea pigs in social experiments. And unfortunately that’s just what’s happening every day through groups such as Planned Parenthood. And it’s happening with federal tax dollars adding to not just the budget deficit, but to a kind of moral deficit.

For example, the Affordable Care Act includes the provision of $75 million annually to fund so-called comprehensive sex-education programs. These programs are designed to indoctrinate young people in the kind of relativistic morality that creates so many problems in families, businesses, and schools.

Take just one example. The federal Personal Responsibility Education Program, or PREP, has given $20 million to a coalition of six Planned Parenthood affiliates in Montana, Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and Alaska. While the program claims that it teaches abstinence, it defines “abstinence” as avoiding activities that carry the risk of pregnancy or STDs. That is, abstinence has been redefined, at taxpayer expense, to mean something completely different from actual abstinence. And students are provided with cash incentives to encourage them to attend.

Paul Rondeau of the Washington Times is right when he says that these organizations are marketing “sex to our children in our schools under the guise of sex education, anti-bullying, diversity, and tolerance.” If they succeed in instilling their worldview, he adds, the children become their long-term customers looking for contraceptives, STD testing, and of course, abortions.

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by Chine Mbubaegbu,Lapido Media

Sex education must be removed from the school curriculum and handed back to parents, philosopher Roger Scruton has told Lapido.

From The Christian Institute

By Rebecca Oas, LifeSite News

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By Bethany Monk, Citizen Link

By John Smeaton, SPUC

Maria Miller, the government's equalities minister, blogged on Friday on the government's assurances regarding conscientious objection to same-sex marriage. Here is what she wrote about schools:

"There has been some debate about how this Bill will affect teachers and teaching about marriage in schools. Let me make it absolutely clear, that teachers will continue to have the clear right to express in a professional way their own beliefs, or that of their faith, such as that marriage should be between a man and a woman. No teacher will be required to promote or endorse views which go against their beliefs. As with any area of the curriculum, teachers will of course be required to teach the factual position that under the law, marriage can be between opposite-sex couples and same-sex couples. But, of course they will not be required to promote same-sex marriage, and neither will we be bringing in new powers to sack teachers who disagree with same-sex marriage. There are already many subjects which need to be taught carefully, particularly in faith schools – divorce, for example. The guidance governing these issues is the same guidance that will govern how same sex-marriage is handled. And equally, parents will continue to have the right to withdraw their children from sex education lessons that they do not consider appropriate."

SPUC is continuing to respond to the detail of the government's assurances, such as in our letter to headteachers and in forthcoming documents. What is also needed, however, is a historical perspective on the reliability of assurances given to Parliament. Here are but three examples:

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In discussion on Newsnight on Wednesday December 19 Professor David Paton questioned many assumptions underlying current sex education policy with reference to teenage pregnancies. In the short time available it was not possible for him to set out much of the evidence so we reproduce here a presentation he made earlier in the year. (From SPUC)

What is the best way to reduce teenage pregnancy, abortion and sexually transmitted infections (STIs)? What does the evidence reveal?

One approach to address these questions is to compare jurisdictions that differ in their strategies yet are otherwise similar. For example, compared with England, Northern Ireland has restrictive abortion laws, lower provision of family planning services, and a stated goal to decrease the rate of teenage sexual activity. The results? Teenage pregnancy in NI (abortion plus births for U16s) is less than a third of that in England, and STIs for the same age group are also about one third. Diagnoses for gonorrhea, considered the best marker of sexual health, are strikingly lower in NI where there have been 4 diagnoses among U16s in the past 10 years compared with 160-200 each year in England.

In the last decade or so, NI has started to go the way of England, introducing better access to family planning services, sex education, and emergency birth control (EBC, the ‘morning after pill’). But a careful analysis of the data reveals that none of these appears to have had any positive effect at all. Teenage birth rates remain unchanged, and rather than improve, rates of diagnoses of STIs have steadily increased throughout the 2000s. For NI, going the way of England is very unappealing.

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By John Smeaton, SPUC

Parents in Tower Hamlets are unhappy with sex education in the borough's primary schools. SPUC Safe at School and SRE Islamic have released a report today which contains statements from 20 local parents on their poor experiences with sex and relationships education (SRE). The report can be read here.

Antonia Tully of Safe at School told the media today:

"I am supporting parents in this area to protect their children from explicit sex education. I encourage the parents who contact me from across the country to try to work with their child's school to eliminate inappropriate sex education which is harmful to children. Sadly many parents in Tower Hamlets feel that the schools are not listening to them sufficiently.

"Parents are worried that although some schools are removing the most graphic elements from the SRE lessons, the sex education programmes in use are fundamentally flawed. These programmes are based on the Alfred Kinsey premise that children are sexual from birth. Parents know this is not true."

The report on SRE in Tower Hamlets includes the results of a questionnaire sent to all the borough's primary schools under the Freedom of Information Act and shows that many schools use highly explicit materials.

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By Mark Dooley, Mailonline

Isn’t it bizarre how liberals like to lecture us on safeguarding children, while simultaneously depriving them of their moral safeguards? A stunning example of this is a new website designed by the NHS and partly funded by the EU. Respect Yourself is aimed at children from 13 upwards and was recently rolled out across secondary schools in Warwickshire and Coventry.

Of course, once you open the site you quickly realise it has more to do with pollution than respect. Based on a Dutch sex education programme, Respect Yourself aims at ‘helping you understand your body a bit better, and the body of someone who’s got different dangly bits than you’. According to the site’s campaign manager, ‘we have completed the young people’s wish list. They asked for the sextionary, pleasure zones, and the opportunity to ask questions and have them answered honestly’.

And what, you might ask, is a ‘sextionary’? Ostensibly, it is a glossary of technical and slang sexual terms. In reality, it is an explicit guide to all manner of sexual activity, including acts most of us would regard as perverted.

The ‘pleasure zones’ page features computer generated male and female figures, each with buttons on what we used call the ‘private parts’. Click the buttons and you get computerised images of the genitals. Scroll down, however, and you get photos of the real thing.

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By Peter Hitchens, Mailonline

How much easier it is to go after the corpse of a dead villain than to fight a real live one.

If we are all so disgusted by the Savile affair, which is over, why are we not much more revolted by the schools and clinics which, during next week, will be giving contraceptive jabs and implants to underage girls, so they can have underage sex?

If you want to know what a society is really like, you should not judge it by the sort of thing that becomes a scandal. You should judge it by the sort of thing that does not become a scandal.

The almighty authorities of this country, backed by Parliament, and ultimately by the force of fines, police and prisons, are now forcing their tawdry sexual standards on an entire generation.

These policies take us back to an age of great cruelty to women, and of dreadful sexual exploitation of the young of both sexes. They are closely linked with the growing number of young people who have no stable family, and the growing number of old people trapped in solitude.

They involve the deliberate violation of innocence, the undermining of family life, and the subversion of parental authority. Schoolgirls as young as 13 are being given contraceptive injections and implants without their parents’ knowledge, hundreds of them actually in schools, thousands more in ‘clinics’.

Aren’t our children supposed to be safe from predators in schools? Not when the State is the predator, cynically grooming vulnerable children for illegal sex.

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By Matt Barber, World Net Daily

By Bel Mooney, Mailonline

No doubt they are well-meaning people: liberal, well-educated, proud to be open-minded. The men and women who have created Respect Yourself – a new sex education website for teenagers – certainly have a mission to explain.

Nothing, not even the grossest sexual practice, is beyond the pale, even though the site is designed for teenagers as young as 13 and will certainly be viewed by children much younger.

Funded by the NHS (to the tune of £24,000) and the European Union (£32,000), these educators have no problem in getting down and dirty in order to tell it like it is.

Choosing slang whenever possible, they even seem to snigger over some of the words they use — all under the guise of talking to young people in language they can understand.

The overall philosophy behind this tacky exercise is as cheap as it is cheerful: when it comes to having sex you can do pretty well what you like, and no one should judge. Having taken the time to read through all the material on Respect Yourself, I was left feeling pretty depressed.

Of course, we all know that sex becomes very important in adolescence, and is also a source of great angst. ‘What’s going on with my body? How will I know what to do? Am I attractive? How do I say no?’

These are just some of the questions that teenagers have asked themselves (and their friends) for generations. While there is nothing new in being interested, worried, and excited by sexuality, now there’s a crucial difference.

Once, sensible sex education in school meant learning about where babies come from, and putting an end to the sad ignorance which left some young couples wondering how to face their wedding night.

Nowadays, though, sex is peddled as the number one recreation. Never mind the old cycle of falling in love, getting married and having babies: in this brave new world, you try new sexual positions with as much enthusiasm as you follow fashion and football.

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From The Christian Institute

A third of gonorrhoea cases are repeat infections showing that ‘safer sex’ messages are not working, a critic says.

But the Government agency which published the findings has vowed to press on with the failed approach.

Earlier this year it was reported that new diagnoses for gonorrhoea in 2011 had jumped 25 per cent compared to the previous year.

New findings from the Health Protection Agency (HPA) show nearly a third of the diagnoses considered were repeat cases and a third were diagnosed alongside another sexually transmitted infection (STI).

Dr Gwenda Hughes, head of STI surveillance at the HPA, said: “The 25 per cent increase in new gonorrhoea diagnoses in 2011, plus high rates of repeat infection and co-infection with other STIs, shows more must be done to encourage safer sexual behaviour through health promotion and ensuring easy access to sexual health services and screening.”

But Prof David Paton, a long-standing critic of ‘safer sex’ policies, said the advice was lacking.

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By Peter Baklinski, LifeSite News

School-aged youths in Toronto who identify themselves with the homosexual lifestyle are about to be given a LGBTTIQQ2S sex-ed resource called “Queering Sex ed,” thanks to Planned Parenthood. The resource, when complete, will “have gay and lesbian sex properly explained” and will be offered to schools as part of Planned Parenthood’s sex education package.

By Stephen Adams, Telegraph

Sex education lessons and freely handing out contraception to young people has little impact on teenage pregnancy rates, according to a controversial study.

Unwanted pregnancies have proved “remarkably resilient to policy initiatives”, according to David Paton, professor of industrial economics at Nottingham University, who says the under 16 pregnancy rate in England and Wales has remained virtually static for 40 years.

Between 1969 and 2009 the rate has risen and fallen, he said, but not in time with national efforts to bring it down.

Family planning groups strongly dispute his findings, arguing that the evidence actually shows initiatives do work if given time. Drops since 2009 mean the rate is now the lowest since the end of the 60s, and they say credit should be given to governments that have adopted a more liberal approach.

Writing in the journal Education and Health, Prof Paton said: “Millions of pounds have been spent by policymakers on numerous initiatives aimed at cutting teenage pregnancy rates.

“However, identifying the impact of policy interventions … presents something of a challenge.”

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