VIEWPOINT: ‘Kindergartners Shouldn’t Be Taught Sex Ed’ — And Other Myths Endangering America’s Youth

“In case you missed it, Chicago public schools are set to begin teaching sex-ed to Kindergartners,” Family Research Council head Tony Perkins tweeted earlier this week. Adding his voice to a growing chorus of right-wing fearmongering, Perkins is referring to the fact that the city’s Department of Education approved a new policy requiring public schools to teach age-appropriate, LGBT-inclusive sexual health instruction at each grade level. The youngest students — the primary subjects of the recent concern trolling — will learn about anatomy, reproduction, healthy relationships, and personal safety.

It comes as no surprise that Perkins and his fellow conservatives, who are still stubbornly clinging to failed abstinence-only education policies, would be up in arms about comprehensive sex ed (especially when it acknowledges the existence of the LGBT community). But the thought of the country’s third largest school district teaching, in the school district’s words, “accurate information…[so students can] make healthy choices” still makes a lot of people outside of Tony Perkins’ circles squeamish. Mainstream media outlets were quick to raise alarm about 5-year-olds learning how to identify their genitalia, with headlines like “Chicago Passes Sex-Ed for Kindergartners,” “Sex Ed For Kindergarten Students,” and “What Age Should Kids Start Learning Sex Ed? In Chicago, It’s Kindergarten.” The popular parenting blog Babble quoted a mother who revealed the panic behind these headlines: she “just doesn’t think it’s appropriate.”

The unfounded fear that young children will somehow become “impure” if they learn about a dirty subject like sex is deeply rooted in American culture. Our society assumes that human sexuality is dark, dangerous, and shameful — something we need to protect teens from, rather than teach them about. Teens consistently learn that it’s not okay to talk about sex because it’s supposed to be totally off-limits to them, constrained to the bounds of a traditional marriage. But this attitude has led to disastrous consequences: damaging women and LGBT Americans’ sense of sexual self-worth, fueling the STD epidemic, and creating a moral environment where rape culture has flourished. Americans desperately need to overhaul our outdated approach to sexuality, replacing our puritanism with an open, honest, nonjudgmental, sex-positive attitude that we work to instill in our kids from a young age.

Today’s fights over what’s “appropriate” to teach our children about sex are largely symptoms of the United States’ long history of sexual conservatism, which can be traced back to our Puritan roots. There have been a few more sexually liberated periods in U.S. history, like the Progressive Era at the turn of the 20th century, but attitudes about sex remained largely conservative until the women’s and gay rights movements turned everything upside down. Those movements coincided in the 1970s to challenge preconceived ideas about heterosexuality and gender roles, working to normalize sex outside of marriage, sex outside of procreation, and homosexuality as equally valid human experiences.

Since then, social norms about sex have been rapidly evolving, but our sexual education hasn’t kept up — thanks in large part to the Religious Right. After the HIV/AIDS epidemic spurred schools to begin teaching information about sexually transmitted infections, religious conservatives spearheaded a hugely successful state-level campaign in the late 1990s to replace those sex ed classes with abstinence-only programs that lack any information about condoms, birth control, healthy sexual relationships, or sexual orientation. Now, the country is a patchwork of varying state-level sex ed policies, and the majority of states don’t hold the information in their public schools’ health classes to any kind of standards for medical accuracy.

Now, some lawmakers are attempting to combat the abstinence education programs that ballooned under former President George W. Bush by putting forth initiatives to expand comprehensive, medically accurate sex ed classes. But even the most well-intentioned sex ed legislation often remains somewhat stuck in our shame-based past. The Responsible Education About Life Act — a sweeping comprehensive sex ed policy that Democrats in both chambers of Congress have repeatedly pushed — still defines adequate sex education as a course that “stresses the value of abstinence.” Across the country, 37 states require that abstinence be taught in sex ed classes, and 26 states require that abstinence must be stressed as the best, safest option.

This backward approach to sexual education means that American sexual attitudes, particularly as they relate to teens, retain our puritanical past’s unhealthy emphasis on abstinence. Teens are divided into two moral camps: the “good” ones who are abstaining from sex, and the “bad” ones who aren’t (and are shamed for it). Feminist author Jessica Valenti, who’s written a book on the topic, calls it our society’s “purity fetish.” Valenti argues that this preoccupation with purity is especially harmful to young girls, who are held to different “virginal” expectations than boys are. “Virginity and chastity are reemerging as a trend in pop culture, in our schools, in the media, and even in legislation. So while young women are subject to overt sexual messages every day, they’re simultaneously being taught — by the people who are supposed to care for their personal and moral development, no less — that their only real worth is their virginity and ability to remain ‘pure,’” she writes.

Tying young girls’ worth to their purity ultimately teaches them, as Valenti explains, that “their ability to be moral actors is absolutely dependent on their sexuality.” Equally problematically, telling teens to “save their virginity for marriage” is a concept that totally fails to acknowledge some important realities of the LGBT community — since many of those individuals have no context for society’s heteronormative concept of “virginity,” and continue to be denied marriage equality in many parts of the country. Four decades ago, gay rights and women’s liberation activists worked to move us beyond these limited approaches to sexuality. Nonetheless, our obsession with abstinence endures.

But whether or not we teach young adults that their worth is dependent on their ability to remain abstinent, they’ve proven that they’re still going to experiment with their sexuality. By their 19th birthday, seven in ten American teens will have had sex — very similar to the rates in Europe. The only difference is that European teenagers have higher rates of contraceptive use, partly because they’ve grown up in a culture that doesn’t have the same qualms about giving young adults the resources they need to have safer sex. Of course, it isn’t hard to see some of the direct consequences of our tendency to simply “look the other way” and pretend teens aren’t sexual beings: compared to the rest of the developed world, the United States has particularly high rates of both unintended teenage pregnancies and STDs.

And that’s not the only potential consequence of our misguided approach to teenage sexuality. As the American Prospect’s E. J Graff points out, purity culture is also rape culture — a societal construction that devalues consensual sex and blames rape victims for the sexual violence perpetrated against them. As Graff puts it, rape culture “lives anywhere that has a ‘traditional’ vision of women’s sexuality. A culture in which women are expected to remain virgins until marriage is a rape culture. In that vision, women’s bodies are for use primarily for procreation or male pleasure. They must be kept pure.”

The moral divide between the “pure” and the “impure,” the same messages we’ve been feeding to young adults in health classes all over the country, pops up again. Purity culture teaches youth that, once young women have defiled themselves by engaging in the depraved act of sex, there’s nothing else they won’t consent to. An “impure” woman is an active participant in whatever assaults may be committed against her; she “asked for it”; she deserves what she got; she drank too much alcohol and wore too short of a skirt; she’s already had sex with so many guys on the football team, how could she object to another one forcing himself on her? When we think of rape, we don’t think of that girl. When an emphasis on purity remains inextricably tied to attitudes about sex, the only violations that count as “real” crimes are the ones committed against sweet, pure, virginal girls.

Just like we haven’t been able to escape purity, we also haven’t escaped rape culture. This is a country where a Fox News commentator received racist rape and death threats after suggesting that our society should play a role in teaching men to not rape, where high school football players can hire a lawyer to argue that an unconscious girl consented to her rape and abuse because she “didn’t affirmatively say no,” where prestigious universities do everything they can to sweep sexual assault under the rug, where a rape survivor might be expelled from college for speaking about her case, where many local law enforcement offices don’t handle sexual assault cases correctly and can even dissuade survivors from reporting crimes, where elected officials have made so many offensive comments about rape that they were required to undergo a PR training on the subject.

Obviously, these deeply-rooted issues don’t come with easy answers. But as our society marches forward, we don’t want to keep leaving our children’s sex education behind. National policies to standardize comprehensive sexual health information across every state — and to prevent school districts from using instruction materials that “stress” harmful messages about abstinence, contain medically inaccurate information, and ignore or stigmatize LGBT experiences — would be a good start. If our children grew up in a world where discussions of sex were honest and open, rather than learning about their sexuality solely within the context of shame, they might come to understand that they are more than their bodies. In grade school, that doesn’t have to be the type of “inappropriate” sex ed that parents are so worried about. It could be as simple as making sure authority figures explain that kids have nothing to be ashamed about, that they should never be scared to ask questions about their bodies because no information is off-limits, and that they — and only they — have the right to decide how they want to be touched.

We need to go back to the beginning and find a way to totally reorient our approach to human sexuality. Ideally, our citizens should grow up learning about healthy relationships, about self-respect and respecting others, about their bodily autonomy and their right to consent, about taking steps to perserve their sexual health — and especially about their value as a human being regardless of their sexuality. We might want to start in kindergarten.

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VIEWPOINT: How A Very Smart Senator Showed Us Everything Wrong With The Modern GOP In One Week

It shouldn’t have been this way.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is an undeniably smart man. Cruz is by all accounts a brilliant litigator, one talented enough in the courtroom to clerk for a Supreme Court justice and win a number of difficult cases as Texas’ Solicitor General. It wouldn’t have been crazy to expect that Cruz would bring a degree of argumentative rigor into the Senate after his victory in the 2012 election.

Well, Cruz had two golden opportunities to showcase his keen analytical mind, as he sits on both Senate committees that held high profile hearings last week, one on gun violence prevention, the other on Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE)’s nomination to be Secretary of Defense. And Cruz distinguished himself alright. Just not in the way one might have hoped.

The Senator misrepresented official documents to the point of falsehood, placed the words of an raving call-in viewer on a television show in Hagel’s mouth, and played “six degrees of guilt by association” with Hagel’s record in a manner that would make Sen. Joe McCarthy blush. And yet, Cruz’ behavior, embarrassing as it was, was by no means irrational. Rather, it’s a perfect illustration of how the Republican Party’s internal structure, particularly its allied media and electoral base, incentivizes the replacement of real policy thinking with fact-free paranoic fantasism.

Let’s begin with Cruz’ monologue at the gun hearing. The proposed assault weapons ban bore the brunt of his ire. He leaned heavily what he claimed were two Department of Justice papers — one from what he sneeringly characterized as the “Janet Reno Department of Justice under President Clinton” — that had proven the 1994 ban failed to reduce gun violence. In his words, the Senate was about “to reenact a law that, according to the Department of Justice, did absolutely nothing to reduce gun violence.”

Literally every claim in that sentence is false.

First, the Senate is not “reenacting” the 1994 ban. The law proposed by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) closes a series of loopholes that even gun regulation proponents admit limited the first ban’s effectiveness. Second, the studies in question were not official judgments of the Department of Justice, as Cruz says, but research by Professor Christopher S. Koper supported by the Department.

Which brings to the third, and most important, point: any fair reading of Koper’s work suggests Cruz has entirely mischaracterized its findings about the ban – a reading shared by Prof. Koper himself. Koper’s research found, among other things, clear evidence that the 1994 ban limited criminal access to assault weapons as well more tentative evidence that assault weapon shootings were more deadly. While it’s true the studies didn’t find evidence that the bans reduced the homicide rate, they didn’t, as Cruz suggests, conclude from that that the ban didn’t work. Rather, Koper said that he didn’t have enough data, given that the ban was only in effect for ten years, to prove for one way or another. That’s why Koper, in a 2004 op-ed, referred to the then-expiring ban as a “work in progress” rather than, as Cruz suggested, a failure. And the assault weapons ban is far from the only issue on which Cruz did violence to the facts in the gun hearing.

As fact-free as Cruz’ diatribe during the guns hearing was, it had nothing on his performance the following day during Senator Hagel’s confirmation. During the excruciatingly long proceedings, Cruz had three chances to interrogate Hagel, each time resorting to grosser distortions of the former Senator’s statements to prove that Hagel was every Israeli’s worst nightmare.

In round one, Cruz played a tape of a rather concerned man calling into a talk show on which Hagel was a guest. The video was spliced to make it appear Hagel agreed with the ranter’s accusation of “war crimes in Palestine.” In reality, Hagel was endorsing, on the program host’s instruction, the need for “moral leadership” by the United States and Russia on nuclear arms reduction, a point made clear by his reference in the full clip to President Obama and then-President Medvedev. After Hagel said he did not believe Israel was committing war crimes, and asked for the full context of the clip, Cruz lied, saying “that was the full context.”

Cruz’ second attempt to cast Hagel as Israeli Public Enemy #1 was equally dishonest. Cruz ventriloquized the claim that Israel had committed a “sickening slaughter” in Lebanon into Hagel’s mouth, even though, as Dave Weigel points out, Hagel was condemning deaths in war themselves rather than Israel’s behavior. And his third sally, a failed attempt to tar Hagel with the views on Israel of someone on the board of an organization he chairs (yes, it’s that remote), struck The New Republic‘s John Judis as “classic McCarthy tactics.”

Judged kindly, Cruz’ performance in each of these two hearings was aggressively inaccurate. Judged more harshly (and accurately), it was mendacious demagoguery at its finest.

So why would Cruz, an intelligent man, resort to such dishonest tactics? There are certainly no shortage of ways to make the case against gun regulation or Chuck Hagel without mischaracterizing research or wrenching stray comments out of context.

But that’s not nearly as fun.

Guns and Israel are two issues of paramount importance to staple GOP voting blocs. These voters don’t want mealy-mouthed, hedged defenses of their positions — as evidenced by the Great RINO Purge of the past few election cycles. Rather, these voters want Republicans who see the world as they do: President Obama and the Democrats are attempting to attack their fundamental liberties and eliminate America’s “exceptional” global role, most prominently by “throwing Israel under the bus.” For these voters, the Assault Weapons Ban isn’t just bad policy; it’s a nefarious, unconstitutional gun grab that strikes at the heart of American liberty. Chuck Hagel hasn’t been more qualified in his support for Israel than Republicans would like; he’s an anti-Semite.

Cruz rode this apocalyptic mood to power, pairing a worldview extreme enough to please the base with packaging just well enough to make him acceptable to more establishment folks. As Mother Jones‘ Tim Murphy writes in a profile of the Senator, “Cruz’s greatest asset is that he lives in both worlds;” he’s “an intellectual face on a movement and ideology that have long simmered beneath the Republican mainstream.” Cruz pioneered a marriage between extreme ideas with a manner of expression that allows the party’s “respectable” thought leaders to support it.

Understanding the central dynamic of Cruz’ political strategy is the key to unlocking his intellectually abysmal outings at the Senate last week. His base wants the fireworks, but straight-up calling Hagel an anti-Semite on the Senate floor might be a bit much. So Cruz wraps up more extreme versions of his arguments in intellectual-sounding garb, citing studies and TV clips that are just good enough to justify his firebreathing.

Now, this strategy would fail if the conservative media said base relies on weren’t interested in playing along to Cruz’ tune. But the writers who are supposed to serve as conservatism’s intellectual gatekeepers lapped it up. “It would be hard to do much better,” National Review‘s Peter Kirsanow wrote, “than one of Hagel’s interlocutors — Senator Ted Cruz.” In response to criticism of Cruz’s arguments as, well, totally made up, Kirsanow scoffed. “Cruz should be pleased to be the subject of such scorn. Smart, principled, aggressive, conservative Republicans are subject to special opprobrium from Beltway elites.”

Kirsanow was far from the only one. “Sorry I missed @tedcruz carving up Chuck Hagel on TV like a roast,” tweeted RedState editor and Fox News contributor Erick Erickson. “Cruz showed what happens when preparation, talent, and discipline come together,” gushed Pete Spiliakos at the theoconservative journal First Things. Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin enthused that “tough questioning” from Cruz and other Republicans exposed “Hagel’s pose as a consistent and ardent friend of Israel and foe of Iran…to be nothing but a hastily constructed façade that doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.” These are but a few examples from a vast ocean.

This adulation illustrates just how deeply rooted GOP dysfunction is. The Republican base elects someone like Cruz, who’s extreme enough to have suggested the United Nations was coming for America’s golf courses. Cruz, who’s not only a ideological member of the base but beholden to it, brings its unsupportable ideas and implacably hostile attitude to the center of the Republican party. And he’s rewarded not just by adulation from his supporters, but widespread praise from the ostensibly serious conservative commentariat. There’s just no incentive for any Republican to speak out against the party’s descent into paranoia, and every reason to believe you’ll be rewarded by giving into it.

So if you want to know why the Republican Party will remain broken for the foreseeable future, go watch the Ted Cruz game tape from this week. And try to think how it could have been otherwise.

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