Catholic Citizenship

Earlier this month, a coalition of health and education groups released new recommended guidelines for sex education in schools, which address topics including sexual orientation, birth control and bullying. The non-binding recommendations have not, unsurprisingly, been popular among the talking heads of the Religious Right.

On Wednesday, Candi Cushman of CitizenLink, Focus on the Familiy's political arm, joined Janet Mefferd to discuss the new guidelines and her displeasure that, among other things, they recommend teaching young children to “demonstrate respect for these different types of families,” a notion that Cushman insists is “undemocratic.”

Cushman: The important things for parents to understand is that these standards are supposed to start in kindergarten so at the elementary level students are going to start to be taught to ‘identify different types of family structures.’

Mefferd: Ugh.

Cushman: And then demonstrate respect for these different types of families. That’s basically codes for, ‘We’re going to teach your kids about same-sex marriage and homosexual relationships and this is an option worthy of being embraced just like heterosexual marriages and relationships.’ Not only are they going to be willing to embrace it but they’re going to respect it and they’re going to get that down by the second grade. So they will need to start that probably around kindergarten so they’ll have it down in their heads by second grade. That’s just one example of them dealing with the homosexuality topic.

Mefferd: Well and in most states we don’t have same-sex marriage, so why the need for that?

Cushman: Right, it’s totally undemocratic.

Mefferd and Cushman went on to discuss the recommendations for older students, including discussions of the proper use of contraception, which Cushman claims were designed by “left-wing, casual-sex activist groups,” and are not intended to promote public health.

As for the inclusion of discussions about bullying, Cushman insists bullying prevention is a Trojan Horse for gay rights groups: “They do have this agenda of inserting homosexuality promotion under the category of bullying and this is one way they go about that with these sexuality standards.”

Cushman has been the voice of CitizenLink's opposition to anti-bullying programs, which we wrote about in detail in a report last year.

Mefferd: I thought the whole purpose of sex-ed originally was to tell kids the birds and the bees, but now it’s flat-out indoctrination.

Cushman: Right, if you look at the material that the groups who did these standards put out it’s all about students’ sexual rights, their rights. The emphasis is not on prevention, avoiding disease and harm, it’s about ‘Oh let’s just reduce the risk, what are their rights?’ Its activism, it’s not about health. That’s why we shouldn’t just surrender our schools to left-wing, casual-sex activist groups.

Mefferd: I agree. I’m sure from what I read there’s this aspect of bullying. They love throwing that around, ‘We need to deal with the bullying issue and the gay bullying issue,’ even though bullying has been around since time immemorial for kids, from kids, for all sorts of reasons, not just the homosexual issue. But do they talk much about that? Are they framing it in terms of, ‘We got to talk about this stuff to stop the gay bullying’?

Cushman: Yes they do. In fact, I found that very interesting that they were titled sexually standards but they address bullying. I thought, now we’re just saying that bullying is sexualized now.

Mefferd: Wow.

Cushman: I really think that bullying should be its own category, not in sex-education. Bullying should be addressed as prevention, protecting all students no matter how they identify because they’re human beings, as I’ve explained many times before. So yeah, I found that an interesting part that they’re trying to mix those two, sex-education and bullying. But I think the reason they are mixing them is because they do have this agenda of inserting homosexuality promotion under the category of bullying and this is one way they go about that with these sexuality standards.