Great article in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch today about the Christian anti-abortion group, Thrive St. Louis, that has finagled its way into 75 public schools in the St. Louis area where it teaches a values-heavy version of sex education as part of a program titled Best Choice. I won’t go into the gory details – you can read them in the original article, but this snippet gives you an idea about how this group deals with the need to remain impartial when it goes about fulfilling the provisions of the Missouri law that mandate teaching abstinence (the Best Choice, get it?) as a preferred method of birth control:
Another activity to demonstrate the effects of having had sex with more than one person involves chewing cheese crackers and spitting them into a cup of water, which is then poured into another student’s cup. All the while, one student’s cup of water remains pure.
Slut-shaming, right? Which is not, as Leora Tanenbaum suggests, just “a catchy way to signify old-fashioned sexism,” but is a profoundly harmful approach to human sexuality for both boys and girls.
I know that there are lots of folks who might want their children to get this message along with the conservative Christian world-view that it reflects, but lots more don’t. Public school sex education must be factually correct and as neutral in its approach as is possible – even though ideologically driven legislators feel empowered to mandate the teaching of “preferred” sexual behaviors. Religious folks should be teaching their values at home.
Nor is the Thrive approach necessarily a very good way to insure adolescent abstinence. Parents who defend the program might want to take into consideration the fact that heavy-handed efforts to influence their children’s behavior might backfire. There are likely many reasons why abstinence programs don’t do much to dissuade kids from experimenting with sex, but trying to stack the deck in an obvious way definitely doesn’t help.
When I was in the sixth grade there was a law in my state (perhaps a federal law?) that mandated teaching about the evils of communism and the glories of capitalism. The result of the ham-fisted approach that was preferred? A few of my peers in the late sixties and early seventies ended up dedicated Maoists, quoting from the Chairman’s little Red Book. More of us, myself included, endorsed democratic socialism. I would probably never have become interested in the issues of distributive economics had lawmakers not decided that my little brain needed to be bent – hammered, actually – in what they believed to be the right direction. I should probably thank whoever was responsible for those inept educational modules.
Another example is provided by the efforts to combat drug abuse. All the overkill and false facts about how marijuana, for example, was the sure path to hard drugs and a life of squalor were obviously over the top – and all too often delivered by folks who had no qualms about several before-dinner martinis or a few too many beers on the weekend. Consequently, the ubiquitous anti-drug indoctrination programs only served to make even justified warnings about far more problematic drugs suspect to many young people. The final fillip: it now looks like marijuana will sooner or later become fully legal nationwide.
Get the point? Obvious propaganda rarely works and more often than not renders the purveyors of false or one-sided information suspect. To be effective you have to demonstrate that you deserve trust which means putting all the cards out on the table.
Of course there’s another dimension to the whole issue which is that while Missouri law mandates teaching abstinence as the preferred birth-control method, it doe not mandate that other methods be ignored. Quotes in the Post-Dispatch article imply that while Best Choice goes after the evils of unmarried sex like gangbusters, it does not deal with the full range of important sexual issues – the variety and relative effectiveness of birth control methods, gender identity issues, etc. Children in many St. Louis schools are being given incomplete, often harmful information that disrespects the values of many families. That’s not right.
And guess what? We’re paying with our tax dollars for this indoctrination program. Thrive can offer the Best Choice program to schools “free of charge” because it receives federal funding to do so. We’ve all heard about “faith-based” initiatives. Looks like maybe what we really need is a little more separation of church and state.
Jeriah Knox said:
What drives me nuts is belief systems like the authors and Planned Parenthood’s being forced on our children as if they weren’t belief systems. In my book that is a lie and very deceptive.
Why do you believe the baby isn’t a baby until first breath? Where does that belief system come from? Why do belief systems, which are fine with abortion, also preach the morality of promiscuity, homosexuality, pornography, prostitution, and trans gendering? It seems like some grand scheme to create a satanocracy, where women are used as sex toys and the children are murdered, sacrificed, traded for the material.
Maybe men will keep abortion and pornography around as long as they want their women cheap, accessible, and exchangeable. What we need is a complete recognition of the belief systems we have embraced and have become completely dependent on. Belief systems enslave the masses. People need to stop pretending they don’t believe and recognize what they have already believed and the gods they serve.
willykay said:
Presenting factual information about facts of physiology, sexual orientation, verifiable claims about available methods of birth control, their pros and cons without favoring anyone’s value system does not constitute an unacknowledged “belief system.” It in fact lies behind the demand of many of the parents who have been trying without success to get the Best Choice program to make its lessons sources available for evaluation.
As for my personal beliefs regarding abortion, I believe that until a fetus achieves sentience – after the full development of the cerebral cortex at around 23-24 weeks – it is a potential human and whether or not to continue to allow it to develop is the choice of the mother. Even after it becomes a sentient being, though, its existence is not more privileged than that of the mother upon whom it depends – if it puts her life in danger she has the right to exercise her choice to cease maintaining the fetal life.
But I emphasize that these are my personal beliefs. I understand that many people believe that a fetus is “ensouled” at conception – a core belief of the Catholic chuch – or hold other beliefs about the sanctity of zygotic, embryonic or fetal human life – or even just an emotional response to the idea of “preborn” babies – and I would always defend their right to live in accordance with those beliefs and pass them along to their children – just not to impose them on me or others who do not share them. Especially via stealth programs in the public schools.
I do believe that it could be acceptable for both points of view to be brought up and argued in sex education classes if done so using verifiable facts – not the “junk science” often dredged up by anti-abortion advocates – and as long as there was no institutional presumption of the “correct” conclusion. Sadly, I don’t think we, as a deeply divided society, are able to do this, so I would be content with a neutral, values free presentation of factual information.
I also understand that accurate information may be disturbing to many who prefer to view the emotionally fraught topic of human sexuality through the miasma of bias and “junk” science that has been formulated by interested parties specifically to justify this bias. This is another reason that parents objecting to Best Choice want access to the sources of its curriculum.
As for your beliefs about relations between men and women and what you seem to believe is the essentially exploitative nature of sexuality – it is your right to believe whatever you want. But again many of us not only do not agree but find such views sad – and we certainly do not want what we regard as a narrow and limiting approach to life taught to our children.
Sally Hunt said:
Thank you for writing about this issue! I am an organizer behind the “Expose Thrive” movement, and having Thrive, a fundamentalist Christian, anti-abortion group, teaching their non-medical, narrow view of morality in our public schools and pretending it’s sexuality education is incredibly frustrating! We have been lucky to get the media attention that we have, and it has helped us make progress. But Thrive’s unscientific, inaccurate, non-transparent abstinence-until-marriage program, “Best Choice” is still in many public schools.
Thrive is currently teaching students in Fort Zumwalt, St. Charles, Bayless, Lindbergh, Hancock Place, as well as several charter schools.
This movement against Thrive Best Choice is all about us parents, students, and local taxpayers asking school district administrators the following important questions:
-Who wrote the Thrive Best Choice curriculum?
-What sources did they use to get the information they tell students?
-Is it 100% based in scientific fact that has been peer-reviewed and proven as accurate?
-Why is it that no legitimate, unbiased medical agencies have approved and endorsed the Thrive Best Choice curriculum? (None have accredited or endorsed the Thrive organization, either)
We all want to have assurance that 100% of the curriculum is factual and accurate. But we currently do not have any proof of this. Thrive is not transparent and is not accountable. They can change their curriculum at any time. The students and the public deserve better.
Thrive has been smearing us as nothing but “radicals” and “extremists” with a “pro-abortion agenda.” But this issue has nothing to do with abortion. We are legitimate parents, students, and taxpayers who merely want a fully scientific, factual, and transparent curriculum that has been vetted and approved like all other curricula taught to students. We demand accountability.
I appreciate your help by writing about this. Here are a few more news stories since this one in the Post: http://www.riverfronttimes.com/newsblog/2017/03/13/thrive-sex-ed-program-draws-ire-over-shame-based-curriculum-secrecy
http://fox2now.com/2017/03/08/abstinence-based-sex-ed-program-shows-deep-divide-in-parkway-school-district-parents/
http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/the-platform/editorial-if-thrive-s-sex-education-program-is-effective-parents/article_3c6a3aa7-e3a8-5a3c-bfa7-75470357aadd.html
http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/education/more-schools-cancel-christian-sex-ed-program-emotions-run-high/article_9d69f8c2-1c92-55f4-ae62-03916f236b55.html
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