Opinion:    “Public schools will teach young children that same-sex relationships are normal, and sex education classes will include explicit same-sex instruction.



Fact:   Though civil rights should never be decided based on what might, hypothetically, ever be taught to children, nothing inherent in any future legalization of same-sex marriages leads necessarily to any curriculum content whatsoever. Parents and concerned citizens are always free to argue for or against requirements to instruct about any sort of relationships or sexuality. For citizens still unsatisfied, our state has created opt-out laws allowing parents to review curriculum and exempt their children accordingly. In Massachusetts, legal battles are still being fought over school curriculum - and those battles rage independently of the state’s laws on marriage. In fact, some curriculum changes promoted by groups opposed to same-sex marriage have recently been enacted.

Independent of our state’s evolving curriculum standards, there is no exclusively “same-sex intimacy” to instruct about. If extensive surveys are to be believed, every conceivable sexual act is engaged in by members of every sexual orientation group, worldwide. Because our state’s General Statute 115C-81 on curriculum requires that “information conveyed during the instruction shall be objective and based upon scientific research that is peer reviewed and accepted by professionals and credentialed experts in the field of sexual health education,” it would not meet curriculum standards to teach that there are any ‘homosexual acts’ which are not also engaged in by heterosexuals. That would be unscientific, and quite significantly, untrue.

In our state, if you don’t like the curriculum, you should advocate to have it changed. In terms of public sentiment, however, and evolving ideas about what constitutes good sex-education, parents and teachers have been hugely supportive of North Carolina’s Healthy Youth Act of 2009, requiring schools to teach comprehensive sex education as opposed to the abstinence-only curriculum in place for 15 years. This may be a response to the same imperatives which caused the state to require all education to reflect scientific, peer-reviewed knowledge. Abstinence-only programs have been shown, by science, to be largely unsuccessful.

It is possible that some states where same-sex unions are legal may coincidentally require school instruction about the concept of variation of sexual orientation. The two policy arenas aren’t linked, but the same citizenry for which the former is important probably also thinks the latter is important. These citizens are likely responding to the science which says that some school children are gay, and may benefit from a neutral education about sexual orientation.

This particular concern about sex education seems to have originated with the National Organization for Marriage in its battles against legal same-sex unions. NOM refers often to a story on National Public Radio about how current sex-education curriculum might change in states allowing same-sex unions. The story unfortunately confused “sex education” with “sexual orientation education” and may have left listeners believing that discussions of sexual orientation were equivalent to discussions of sexual behaviors. They are not. Nothing in the NPR story points to any connection between legalized same-sex unions and changes in curriculum on sexual behaviors.

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National Public Radio, All Things Considered, 9/13/04.