School District's Sex Ed Curriculum Ignore Parents' Values
by Jim Brown
November 30, 2004
(AgapePress) - A leading researcher of sexual orientation change says a Maryland school board should have learned some lessons from the 2004 presidential election.The Montgomery County School Board in Maryland recently adopted new health education standards and a new curriculum that includes in-depth discussion of sexuality and gender identity, refers to same-sex parents as "kinds of families," and teaches that sexual orientation is not a choice. The sex ed program also promotes the idea of "safe sex" through resources such as a video that shows a teenage girl applying a condom to a cucumber.
Dr. Warren Throckmorton is a conservative columnist and also serves as director of college counseling at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. He says the Montgomery School Board's actions have led to moral outrage among parents, with many of the district's mothers and fathers objecting not only to the content of the school health program adopted by the board, but also to its advisory committee's rejection of a curriculum stressing abstinence.
Throckmorton says the parents are "feeling as though their schools are not a help to them in instilling the family values that they want to instill." Moreover, he points out, "they feel that they've been stonewalled in many cases as they've tried to bring these views to the school board."
Also, the researcher notes that this morally conservative reaction has been widespread, even in the mostly Democratic county of Montgomery, which voted 66 to 33 percent in favor of John Kerry in the recent national election. Some parents, upset over the board's disregard for their pro-family values, have even started a website titled, "RecallMontgomerySchoolBoard.com" to express their outrage and demand changes.
Clearly, Throckmorton says, issues of morality and sexuality cut across party lines. "Many parents who are upset about this are not necessarily Bush voters," he asserts. "They're upset about the school taking a very left, very liberal orientation to presenting sexual information to their kids."
The counselor and columnist believes the majority of the parents, regardless of their politics, tend to have conservative values when it comes to child-rearing and family issues. And, he adds, "Most parents don't want the schools telling their kids how to use a condom."
What the school board members failed to realize, Throckmorton says, is that even parents in an overwhelmingly Democratic area still want schools to teach the moral values they teach at home. He thinks the Maryland school board members will likely come to regret their decision to ignore the "values voters" in their midst who strongly oppose the district's new health education standards.
