Parents across North America and Australia have joined a global protest against the teaching of graphic sex education in primary and secondary schools.
“Sex Ed Sit Out” is a campaign supported by groups including the Family Research Council, and aims to raise awareness of the nature of some sex education, and its strong focus on LGB sexuality and transsexualism.
The protest saw parents removing their children from schools for one day.
Safe Schools
Organisations such as the pro-LGBT Human Rights Campaign and abortion giant Planned Parenthood are responsible for some of the content being taught in American schools.
In Australia, parents protested against the highly controversial ‘Safe Schools’ programme, which includes promoting gender fluidity, features graphic descriptions about gay sex and claims “virginity is whatever you think it is”.
Elizabeth Johnston, one of the campaign organisers, says part of the objection is that sexual content in some schools is not limited to sex education lessons, but appears in other subjects.
She said: “We send our kids to school to learn reading and writing and science and history, not how to question whether they really are a boy or a girl.”
Parental freedom
Some of the content in school curricula encourages children to “break out of the gender binary”, and instructs teachers on how to talk about “gender fluidity” to five-year-olds.
Caryl Ayala, who organised a protest in Austin, Texas, said: “We need to alert parents about what’s going on in their schools”.
She said talking about sexual health should be left up to the parents, rather than taught in the classroom.
“We send our kids to school to learn reading and writing and science and history” Elizabeth Johnston
In one town in Alberta, Canada, it was reported that 50 per cent of high school children did not attend school on the morning of the protest, rising to 90 per cent remaining at home in the afternoon.
And in Australia, hundreds of parents drew attention to explicit sex education in the country by protesting outside Parliament House in Melbourne.