Nebraska Sex Education Standards Include 'Grooming 101,' Horrifying Framing of Abortion
My youngest child graduated from a public high school in 2014 and at some point between now and then, education in the U.S. has transmogrified into something few of us could have imagined.
Nebraska has become the latest state to adopt the National Sexuality Education Standards which provide guidelines, content and skills [?] for students in grades K-12.
The Washington Free Beacon spoke to Nebraska parent Justin Thiel, 31, the father of a child who will start kindergarten in September. Before registering his daughter, he read the new sex education standards. Appalled by what he’d learned, Thiel told the Beacon, he decided on a different direction.
“I signed her up for a Christian school the day I read the standards,” he told the newspaper.
The groups that developed the NSES — including the leftist National Education Association — state that their goal is to provide clear, consistent and straightforward guidance on the essential minimum, core content for sexuality education that is developmentally and age-appropriate for students in grades K–12.
According to the standards, children in grades K-2 should be taught the proper names of male and female body parts and gender norms. They must understand that every living thing reproduces.
Children in grades 3-5 are required to learn about the human reproductive process, HIV and other STDs and how spread, masturbation, various sexual orientations including homosexuality, the differences between “cisgender,” “transgender” and “nonbinary,” and the process of “transitioning.”
Students in grades 6-8 are to learn about methods of contraception, various types of sex, how to use a condom correctly and abortion.
Retired Nebraska pediatrician, Dr. Susan Greenwald, who spent years working with childhood victims of sexual abuse, spoke to the Free Beacon.
“The first thing out of my mouth was, ‘holy s***—what pedophile wrote this?'” she said, “This is Grooming 101. If you were a pedophile and wanted to teach your kid to be a victim, this would be what you use.”
The most recent version of NSES was released in 2020. The Future of Sex Education (FoSE) Initiative, which is a partnership between Advocates for Youth, Answer and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS), was a major contributor to this edition.
These groups are funded by the federal government and pro-abortion organizations — which tells us everything we need to know about abortion will be framed: It will be from a liberal point of view, and it will be horrifying.
According to the Free Beacon, “parents, doctors, and government officials are starting to push back against lesson plans that focus on hormone therapy, abortion, and gender transition.”
Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts, a Republican as well as a parent, opposes the new standards. He expressed his resistance to the Nebraska Department of Education’s then-proposed adoption of the standards in a statement on his website.
He wrote, “Like many Nebraska parents, I was deeply troubled by the standards. They would teach young children age-inappropriate content starting in kindergarten. They would also inject non-scientific, political ideas into curriculum standards. That’s why I have called on the NDE to scrap the proposed sex education topics in the standards …
“The proposed sex education standards represent a significant shift in approach to health education. Many of the new themes are sensitive topics that should be addressed by parents at home and not by schools. Children who are the same age often mature at different rates. Families approach many of these topics from different perspectives, and may choose to address them at different points in a child’s development. That’s why parents, not schools, should be the ones deciding when and how to educate kids about many sex-related topics.”
Unfortunately, the decision was not his to make. He explained that the NDE was governed by a separately elected board. And he urged parents in the state to push back.
It looks like the parents have made some progress. On Sunday morning, the Omaha World-Herald reported that 47 school boards in the state have objected to the proposed standards. These boards have either introduced resolutions or written letters to express their opposition.
The article sums up the opponents’ position: “The standards would sexualize children by introducing them to mature topics before they’re ready, promote promiscuity, make schools teach a particular ideology, and infringe on parents’ rights to teach children about sexuality according to their family’s belief systems.”
And the supporters’ position: “The language recognizing diverse family structures, gender identities and sexual orientations will make those families and children feel welcome instead of leaving them ostracized and vulnerable to depression and suicide.”
The World-Herald reached out to Abbi Swatsworth, director of OutNebraska, a nonprofit LGBTQ advocate group which seeks to “protect LGBTQ+ youths and create safe spaces for them.”
Swatsworth said it’s “not hyperbole when we say inclusive health standards are lifesaving.” As she sees it, officials such as the governor, who want to “scrap” these standards, are harming Nebraska’s children. She added, “I don’t know that they mean to be hurtful, but it can cause harm because it’s an erasure of those identities, the families and students. We have research and data that says that that’s dangerous.”
That may be so, but it seems to me that parents should be deciding what’s “dangerous” for their own kids.
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