By Larry Craig

Our federal government created standards for sex education for the public schools in our country. States get to decide if they want to implement them. Illinois passed the legislation to do that, but it seems that the governor has not yet signed it.

I believe this curriculum not only fails our kids but is harmful to them in three major ways:

1) It claims to be medically accurate, yet it ignores basic biology.

Human beings have what we may call sex organs, but most of them biologically are considered to be reproductive organs. They are all part of an intricate reproductive system that the species needs to continue existence. According to modern biology, life — all life — is driven by the need for its species to survive, and this curriculum sees reproduction merely as an adverse side effect, a condition that people need to know how to treat, like catching a cold.

The curriculum treats these organs as built-in sex toys that exist solely to provide pleasure to the owner. There are risks involved, such as disease and pregnancy, but the student learns what to do to treat those conditions, where to go, and how to prevent them.

This curriculum sees no normative function of this reproductive system such that its use is a totally arbitrary decision of the owner. This is like teaching digestion without teaching nutrition, such that ice cream has the same practical value as vegetables, and is even more desirable, because it tastes better. It’s entirely your choice whether to eat ice cream or vegetables. One has no more inherent value than the other, and no one has the right to say that one is better than the other.

What modern lingo calls cisgenderism is simply humans using their sexual organs in the way that they are designed to work. Obviously, the activity that actually reproduces the species has results and satisfactions that have nothing to do with reproduction. This curriculum insists that humans should treat this basic biological function as unimportant and secondary to the goal of achieving pleasure, such that a person contemplating their future and how they want to live their life need not and should not even take that into consideration. It’s all about what you feel comfortable with at the time, meaning, what you feel now.

And obviously, they are asking this question to children who may not even know what this all even feels like, yet alone asking and deciding questions that only adults can answer, like whether to get married and have children.

2) This curriculum treats sexual activity entirely on mechanical functioning rather than on its purpose and value. Like teaching firearms in middle school.

We teach our kids what guns are, how they work, how to maintain them. We would give them target practice in school, but we are essentially telling our kids to practice sex on their own, to see what kind they like best. No thought is given to whether, as an adult, they might not want to marry somebody who has already had sex with half their class or who might want to present themselves to their spouse as one who saved themselves for them.

Kids don’t ask these kinds of questions, and the adults in the room here don’t want the kids to know that they might have those questions later on. That’s highly irresponsible teaching. And even abusive to children. You know something is good for them, but you withhold it?

What is sex? Is it merely a form of mutual masturbation, something that exists merely to provide pleasure to ourselves, and having someone do it with us only makes it more pleasurable?

These are questions far beyond the realms of science and medicine. Science and medicine don’t give us enough information to make these kinds of life choices. Like studying love and only measuring physiological changes to our heart and brains and thinking we understand it. We won’t know what came first, the feelings or the love, or whether love is just feelings or something apart from it that creates the feelings.

Science and medicine cannot tell us what sex is, what it means, and what its value is. That requires, I could say, psychology, but that still approaches life without consideration of God, which many people still believe in and use to guide their lives.

This curriculum tries to teach values by saying that there are no normative values, none that correspond best with your physiology or psychology, let alone religious ones. That is beyond the purview of a public school. If they want to present the natural worldview in a public school as an alternative to a religious worldview, they can do that, but they don’t. They use the words “medicine” and “science” to present this as the only viable way to look at this.

3) Lastly, this curriculum simply encourages our kids to experiment on all the sexual possibilities so they can figure out which one they like best. All apart from being married or even loving the person you’re having this intimacy with. This curriculum divorces sex from commitment, marriage, and even love. It’s just an act for the sake of pleasure that can lead to pregnancy which you should know how to terminate. And they will judge its value entirely on how much pleasure they get from it.

This curriculum is not in the best interest of our children, because it is taking one small part of life and teaching it as if it exists or is meant to exist by itself. This is at best irresponsible and at worst abusive to our children.