Holding the Sex Educators Accountable

• Post by: Susan Orr
• June 12, 2010

You’re Teaching My Child What? A Physician Exposes the Lies of Sex Education and How They Harm Your Child Miriam Grossman, M.D.Regnery, 2009; 246 pages, $24.95 It used to be that with spring’s herald, a young man’s fancy turned to love. Now, he can celebrate April as STD Awareness Month. Clicking on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, he will find that there are “approximately 19 million new cases of STDs each year in the United States, almost half of them among young people ages 15 to 24.” His fancy thus crushed, he turns away in disgust. The young man’s disillusionment is even more likely if he has been schooled in the kind of sex education that has been standard in most American public schools since the 1970s, the kind written by Alfred Kinsey’s disciples, who champion a faux science of sexuality that pretends to be both morally neutral and safe. Indeed, that faux science treats all human beings as simply animals, entirely controlled by their biological urges. In that context, our young man would have been taught that he ought to indulge in any behavior that crosses his mind. He’d find further reinforcements for this do-what-you-will impulse at websites recommended by those same textbooks and earnest educators. The only ground rules given are that, wherever his fancy takes him, he ought to wear a condom. Most likely he would have received that instruction without his parents’ awareness of what this education contains. His world is the one that Miriam Grossman portrayed so brilliantly in her first book, Unprotected, based on her experience as a psychiatrist at a college health center. In her twenty years of treating students, she encountered young men and young women who believed without question what the sex educators taught them. Heartache, disease, infertility, psychological instability, and an inability to form lasting relationships were the inevitable result. She demonstrated clearly and concisely the emotiona