The Battle Over Sex Ed

IT MEANS A LOT to Jack Teter that Christians are getting involved in the fight for better sex education. “A lot of folks in my generation got shame-based sex ed,” said Teter, the regional director of government affairs for Planned Parenthood of the Rocky Mountains. “So, it’s really cool to see these groups talking about the morals of consent, love, and communication.”

For Candace Woods, it’s a spiritual issue. Woods, who is in the ordination process with the United Church of Christ and a facilitator for the Our Whole Lives sex education curriculum developed by the UCC and the Unitarian Universalist Association, was brought up in so-called purity culture, and the most guidance she had from her church and community growing up was “Don’t have sex.” As a consequence, when she married a man 14 years her senior, she said that she “was very unprepared for a sexual relationship.”

As that relationship was ending in divorce, Woods encountered the Our Whole Lives curriculum through a UCC congregation. That curriculum, which is written for secular as well as faith-based education for kindergarteners through adults, emphasizes self-worth, responsibility, sexual health, justice, and inclusivity—values Woods held spiritually but until then had never heard applied to sexuality. “I found myself being incredibly healed by this work,” Woods told Sojourners, and as a result she has felt called to advocate for more kids to have access to curricula such as Our Whole Lives.

Woods joined others in advocating for Colorado’s HB19-1032, which made a minor adjustment to an existing law: It added teaching of consent as an “affirmative, unambiguous, voluntary, continuous, knowing agreement between all participants in each physical act within the course of a sexual encounter or interpersonal relationship.” Among those advocating for the bill was the Denver-based racial justice nonprofit Soul 2 Soul Sisters. According to Briana Simmons, who coordinates the “Black Women’s Healing, Health, and Joy” program for the organization, comprehensive sex education provides information that is vital to bodily autonomy, an important value in Womanist faith traditions, Christian and otherwise. “We can only make the best decision for ourselves if we have the most accurate and comprehensive information,” Simmons said. “At that point, we can consult with whomever we trust, be that a faith leader or a higher power, as we make those decisions for ourselves.”

The bill ultimately passed, but Colorado, like many states, has felt the push and pull between progressive and conservative political movements in the past year. After the racial reckonings of 2020, when millions of Americans participated in Black Lives Matter marches and online campaigns, 2021 saw a profusion of legislation proposed and passed to prevent schools from teaching about systemic racism. In many cases, sex education follows the same rhythm. Teter has seen pushback in the form of “bad faith” bills used mostly by conservative lawmakers to voice opposition to recent progress. For instance, one bill called for high-definition footage of a human embryo to be shown during sex education classes, ostensibly to discourage abortion. But such footage doesn’t exist, Teter said, and such “off-the-cuff bills” have little chance of going anywhere. On the whole, Teter said, comprehensive sex education is “in a good spot” in Colorado.

That’s not the case everywhere.

Local community values

IN 2021, ALABAMA voted to change its sex education policy for the first time since it was written into the education code in 1973. The bill updated language for medical accuracy and removed the inaccurate description of homosexuality as illegal and “not a lifestyle acceptable to the general public.”

That kind of language—which stigmatizes queer identity—and claims about abstinence’s psychological health benefits are common in state education codes. And change has been slow: The federal government continues to fund abstinence-based education in 38 states, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research and policy organization focused on sexual and reproductive rights. What became the Title V Sexual Risk Avoidance Education (SRAE) grant program for states and territories was established in 1996 to promote sex education that emphasizes abstinence as the preferred method of preventing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections. A second SRAE grant was established in 2016 to directly fund nonprofit and faith based-organizations that meet the criteria—the list of grantees includes many explicitly religious organizations and churches.

According to Guttmacher, the U.S. spends around $110 million per year on SRAE programs, which address sex from a public health perspective, relating it to risky behaviors such as drugs and alcohol. With that framework, proponents of abstinence-only education maintain that while condoms and contraceptives might reduce risk, they do not avoid risk altogether.

The problem with this, comprehensive sex education advocates say, is that sexuality is a part of human life. Most teens encounter sex, even if they don’t have sex themselves, and they all have a relationship to their own sexuality. Most teens (although not all) experience sexual attraction, and many have to decide how to respond to peers who are attracted to them. Learning about boundaries, consent, and orientation helps young people prepare for situations and relationships in the future.

Research also shows that abstinence-based education—whether it prioritizes abstinence alongside other forms of protection or promotes abstinence only—does not achieve the stated goals of reducing teen pregnancy or sexual activity among teenagers. The alternative, “comprehensive sex education,” begins with medically accurate language and alternatives to abstinence, but is a broad, ill-defined term. The Guttmacher Institute calls for a “rights-based approach to comprehensive sexuality education [that] seeks to equip young people with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values they need to determine and enjoy their sexuality—physically and emotionally, individually and in relationships.” Comprehensive sex education, according to Guttmacher, “covers a broad range of issues relating to the physical, biological, emotional, and social aspects of sexuality. This approach recognizes and accepts all people as sexual beings and is concerned with more than just the prevention of disease or pregnancy.”

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Even as state-level advocacy sees occasional shifts, the degree to which individual students receive abstinence-based or comprehensive sex education may be determined closer to home. In some states, local oversight committees or councils composed of parents, educators, and clergy must approve sex ed material. Whether reviewing material for an entire district, one school, or even a single teacher, oversight committees are in place for the purpose of, as the Texas Department of State Health Services puts it, “ensuring that local community values are reflected in health education instruction.”

Ironically, this has created an opportunity for comprehensive sex education advocates, albeit a more piecemeal and uneven one. Where district leadership and parents are amenable, clergy such as Anna Taylor-McCants, outreach pastor at Zion Lutheran Church in Ann Arbor, Mich., have worked to advance a more inclusive sex education curriculum. Taylor-McCants brought years of reproductive rights and LGBTQ advocacy with her when she moved to Michigan and agreed to serve as the requisite clergy member on the Sexual Health Education Advisory Committee for Ann Arbor Public Schools. It’s a progressive district, she told Sojourners, and the committee has had no problem rejecting proposed curricula that do not acknowledge trans or nonbinary identities. But she’s also trying to go back through previously adopted curricula to make sure it all meets current standards as comprehensive and inclusive.

At the same time, state law limits how far they can go on some topics. “I was fascinated to find out that you cannot even mention the word abortion in the classroom at all,” she said. For Taylor-McCants, truly comprehensive sex education has to cover bodily autonomy throughout the reproductive process, and she feels that keeping health care information out of public schools is inherently racist and classist. “If we don’t teach this very real thing, and your parents are skeptical of doctors, or you don’t have a gynecologist ... you don’t have access to the full spectrum of knowledge that wealthier kids would,” Taylor-McCants said.

But the right to determine what their children learn, and more importantly what they don’t learn, is a constant battleground in U.S. education.

The intertwining of sex and race

VIRGINIA HAD BEEN on a reliably blue streak when voters elected Republican Glenn Youngkin to the governor’s office in 2021. Many say the election was lost when Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe said, in September 2021, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.”

It wasn’t sex education that drove a rift between McAuliffe and voters but weaponized use of the term “critical race theory.” However, McAuliffe’s comments came amid a national furor over library books, spurred by activists, politicians, and conservative parents. The books many conservatives wanted banned included not only those from Black and Indigenous perspectives, but also young adult fiction with an LGBTQ point of view.

A month later, in Texas, Republican state representative (and then-candidate for state attorney general) Matt Krause sent a list to public school superintendents with 850 titles he wanted to see stricken from school library shelves. Shortly after Krause’s list came out, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (who also faced primary challengers) called for the removal of “pornographic and obscene material” from public school libraries. He cited growing concern of parents, but no specific examples of such material. In January, Abbott debuted his “Parental Bill of Rights,” saying, “Parents will be restored to their rightful place as the preeminent decision-maker for their children.”

In the meantime, Texas school librarians say they have seen more book challenges brought by parents in the 2021-22 school year than ever before. The most common targets: young adult fiction with queer and/or Black protagonists.

When it comes to issues they see as moral or ethical, it is natural for parents to want a voice in the decision-making, said Dartmouth historian of American religion Randall Balmer. “As someone who is a parent, I understand that to a degree. The world is a scary place.” The problem arises, Balmer said, when one set of parents set their sights on a goal larger than their own kids. “We’re not only going to protect our kids, we’re going to change the whole system in our image,” he said, explaining the thought process of many involved in school board battles over critical race theory, book banning, and sex education.

That “image,” Black parents have pointed out, is race-specific. White parents’ concern for the feelings of their children has prompted much of the backlash over critical race theory, ignoring the fact that the books and history they want to ban are those that accurately reflect the Black experience in America. Protecting their kids from the harsh realities of race in this country is not a privilege Black parents have had.

Privileging whiteness in schools has mobilized plenty of parents, but by linking issues of race and sex, Republicans are following an old playbook. In Balmer’s 2021 book Bad Faith: Race and the Rise of the Religious Right, he lays out how the abortion issue became, as he ironically puts it, “a godsend” for the Right. The issue of more immediate concern in the 1970s, he argues, was maintaining segregation and tax-exempt status for private evangelical “segregation academies” in the South after Brown v. Board of Education. Evangelicals could broaden their political coalition to include Catholics, however, if they led with opposition to abortion. With only two options at the ballot box, the sex vote bolstered the race vote.

The two issues, sex and race, have been intertwined even longer. Anti-miscegenation laws and the “one-drop rule” used institutional power to prevent sexual and thus genetic mingling of races, while those enforcing segregation outside the law often used the cultivated fear of Black sexual aggression against white women to justify lynching.

Send in the angry moms

IN SCHOOLS, THIS task of racialized protection fell to mothers. In the 2018 book Mothers of Massive Resistance: White Women and the Politics of White Supremacy , Western Carolina University historian Elizabeth Gillespie McRae drew a direct line between women’s social role as caregivers and the task of keeping white supremacy embedded in public school curricula. “Employing a politicized formulation of motherhood, white segregationists across the ideological spectrum practiced a politics that emphasized performing whiteness as synonymous with ‘good’ womanhood, cultivating a politics that minimized their racial identity and privileged their identity as parents and mothers,” McRae wrote. This included serving on the committees overseeing curricula.

In the early and mid-20th century, the most worrisome curriculum was history, where the teaching of the Civil War was given a heroic revisioning in the South. But building a nationwide conservative coalition would mean finding issues that would work to alarm those less interested in the myth of the Lost Cause. As the culture wars of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s raged, Christian conservatives such as Pat Robertson and Phyllis Schlafly included sex education—either abstinence-only or opposition to the topic entirely—in a list of topics parents should monitor to ensure that their children’s public schools reinforced conservative Christian values.

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Still today, where sex education has made headway, it has often come with strong controls for parents. The 2021 Alabama bill that updated language for sex education also carried a provision requiring schools, on request, to send sex education material home to parents for review. Parents are also included on local oversight committees like the ones in Michigan and Texas, many of which have curtailed references to LGBTQ inclusion.

But finding parents opposed to comprehensive sex education might be getting more difficult. Pundits have raised concerns about the “minority rule” of conservative legislatures, with lawmakers playing to more and more conservative primary voters, who constitute a small percentage of the general population. In contrast, a 2018 national survey conducted by the consumer market research firm Growth for Knowledge at the behest of Planned Parenthood found overwhelming parental support for sex education—89 percent said it was “somewhat” or “very” important in middle school. Approval went up to 98 percent for high school. Of those surveyed, only 15 percent said they would support a curriculum encouraging young people to delay sex until marriage—a curious contrast to the elected officials pushing for conservative laws on these parents’ behalf.

Who is sex ed for?

THE STRONG SUPPORT for comprehensive sex education means that parents on oversight committees will likely be more like Tina Castellanos, a Texas parent who differentiates between the values she gives her kids at home and what she thinks should be taught in public schools. Castellanos is a doula and breastfeeding consultant in San Antonio, where she raised her three children in the Catholic Church. She was a maternal and child health fellow at the University of Texas School of Public Health when she joined the school health advisory council in her children’s school district, hoping to be a voice for evidence-based approaches to health education.

Castellanos was not the only person of faith on the council, and the debates were passionate, she said. In the end though, hearing from teachers left no doubt about the need for thorough and relevant resources. “We were able to hear what they were seeing, what kind of questions they were being asked,” Castellanos said. “If we don’t provide a really well-balanced comprehensive program, those teachers are sort of left to figure it out.” The teachers couldn’t just tell kids to ask their parents, she added. “It’s about the kid who gets nothing. Who doesn’t have a parent, or has a parent who isn’t willing to talk about it. Or even the kid who is being abused and doesn’t know how to describe it.”

When Castellanos thinks about who sex education serves, she thinks about the teenage girls she meets through her work. Many of these young girls became pregnant not because they knew too much, Castellanos explained, but because they hadn’t been given empowering information and tools in time. While some people might think of teen pregnancy as the terminus of the slippery slope, Castellanos said, it can get worse. “A lot of these really young girls who get pregnant become useful to guys who want to use them during their pregnancy. And many of these girls are ending up with STIs,” Castellanos said. “Those are things that somebody should have talked to them about.” As a Catholic, that “somebody” is communal, she emphasized. “That’s what Catholicism has always been for me. I see it as this thing that we’re doing for everyone in our community, not just everyone in our church.”

Like many parents, she knew what she planned to tell her children about sex, how she planned to instill values and ethics at home. But as she looked at the explanations and answers in the curriculum, she said, she wasn’t thinking of her own kids, primarily.

“Parents so often can’t see past their kid,” Castellanos said. “Religion, for me, is caring for humanity.”