Posted on 08/04/2009 6:25:56 AM PDT by Kaslin
The House of Representatives has approved an addition to the healthcare reform package. It calls for the creation of a Healthy Teen Initiative, and allocates $50 million to so-called comprehensive sex education.
This was a vote to bring science back into government, said James Wagoner, president of Advocates For Youth and a leader of the coalition that promoted the amendment. The committee, he continued, has taken an important step toward ensuring young people get the critical sexual health information they need to make responsible decisions about their lives.
Mr. Wagoners statement is astonishing, because Advocates for Youths sexual education curricula and websites are notable for their lack of scientific content.
Consider what this national group, one of the nations flagship sex ed organizations, teaches kids about being male or female. Gender identity, theyre told, is completely separate from anatomy. Your identity is a feeling something experienced internally. Others cant determine if youre male or female; only you know.
Newborns are designated male or female, wrapped in a blue or pink blanket, and socialized to fit cultural expectations. Messages from their environment teach them masculine or feminine behaviors, interests, and ways of relating.
Usually anatomy and feelings match, students learn, but sometimes they dont, and thats a normal variant. Sometimes a boy insists hes a girl or vice versa, and that should not be a concern, says AFY; it is as normal as being alive.
Furthermore, the premise that there are only two genders, male or female, is inaccurate. This traditional meaning of gender is wrong and does harm, says AFY, by restricting our freedom of gender expression. There are many genders, kids should know, including but not limited to: male, female, transgender, genderqueer, genderless and gender ambiguous.
Gender can also change. A ten-year-old might be certain shes a girl, but at twenty she might realize shes a man. People can realize their gender at any point in their lives, young people are told.
Is this the science Mr Wagoner referred to? Or perhaps instructing children that they could be male, female, both, or neither is an example of the critical sexual health information they need to make responsible decisions about their lives?
Advocates for Youths lesson plan on gender is not only unscientific, its a departure from reality. Heres what real science in this century says about being male or female.
Cell biology indicates the Y chromosome previously considered a genetic wasteland is teeming with units of DNA that are unique to males. There are distinct male and female blueprints from the moment of conception.
Embryology provides evidence of the earliest activity of those genes. At eight weeks post-conception, when the embryo is the size of a kidney bean, the Y chromosome directs the testes to produce and secrete testosterone. The hormone travels to the brain, enters the neurons, and propels the development of a distinct boy brain.
Neurobiology research is mapping out the structural and functional differences in male and female brains. Functional MRIs create color images that highlight distinct boy and girl patterns of thinking and feeling.
Infant Development studies reveal that at one day of age, presumably before children have been socialized to meet societys expectations, girls show a stronger interest in the face, while boys look longer at a mobile. At one year, girls are drawn to a video of a face moving; boys to a video of cars moving. And the typical toy preferences of children are also found in juvenile monkeys. The females like dolls and the males prefer vehicles and balls.
Male and female are culturally assigned? Gender is a feeling, separate from hormones and chromosomes? I dont think so. Advocates for Youths lesson plans are based on last centurys radical social movements. Anyone following this centurys hard science - whats observed under microscopes or on brain scans knows those moth-eaten theories have been discredited.
Mr. Wagoner and others in his coalition may choose to disregard advances in neuroscience, but when members of Congress endorse their attitude, thereby institutionalizing it, it is a sad day for the children of this country. The Healthy Teen Initiative, if based on the ideology of those groups that promoted it, will, as Mr Wagoner said, bring something back into government. It will bring extreme agendas like weve never seen before. It will bring groups who encourage young people to question what theyve been taught about sexuality at home and in church. It will introduce them to radical ideas that have no basis in reality. It will bring many things, but science is not one of them.
Theyre claiming the high ground in the science-based sex ed war.
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It should be considered a religion in its own right. The so called Sex Positive advocates call the Christian church "sex negative" thus they advocate a religious moral (or immoral) teaching system in our schools.
They seek to subvert the culture and undermine parental authority.
It has just become extremely clear that the point of health care reform has less to do with health care and more to do with societal re-organization. That will be the reason they will fight and we must fight as well.
Condoms in schools wasn’t about preventing disease and pregnancy. It was about forever ending the argument over IF kids should be having sex. Now the argument has been shifted to “when...”
I would like to read the rest of the article if there is more but everytime I click the link it takes me to http://townhall.com/columnists/ - I tried to copy and paste the link and Townhall redirected me there. What am I doing wrong?
Thanks many!
What they leave out was that this man was always confused about his gender and sexuality, and when he found out he was a man without genitalia, started living his life as a man.
There is an agenda behind this, not science.
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