Catholic League president Bill Donohue comments on the news that New York City public schools will require all middle and high school students to take sex-education classes this fall:
We’ve had de facto sex-education in New York City for decades—that’s how long we’ve been shelling out condoms to students. And what has it gotten us? Moreover, under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, literally tens of millions of condoms have been promiscuously distributed all over the city to anyone who wants them. And yet the rate of sexually transmitted diseases continues to skyrocket.
There is a sex-education program that could work, and it is one that is similar to the approach being used to discuss smoking. We don’t tell kids not to smoke and then instruct them on the proper way to inhale. No, we show them horrifying pictures of a smoker’s lungs. We tell them of the physical pain they are likely to endure by smoking. We tell them how it will shorten their life expectancy.
We could do the same when discussing sexual experimentation at a young age. We could discuss how abortion affects the psyche of the mother who elects to terminate her baby. We could show pictures of what abortion does to the child being cut up into pieces. We could instruct them on the link between unwed motherhood and poverty. We could inform them of the greater likelihood of acquiring a sexually transmitted disease. In other words, we could teach the negative real-life consequences of sexual experimentation at a young age.
There are two other problems. Who gave Bloomberg the authority to decide what should be taught in the classroom? If he’s not telling us how much salt to put on french fries, or what soft drinks we can have, he’s telling us what to teach pre-teens about sex. To top things off, no one in his administration will release to the media either the curriculum or the assigned textbooks. The imperial mayor is out of control. It’s time parents staged a revolt.
Contact Bloomberg’s Press Secretary, Stu Loeser: sloeser@cityhall.nyc.gov
