Christian Nationalists believe teaching children and teenagers about sex will make them curious, as if teens won’t think about sex - much less want to HAVE sex - if we simply don’t teach them about it. They insist it is best to keep kids in the dark about their bodies.
This is why Christo-fascist states like Florida don’t require sex education in any grade. The more ignorant they make kids, they reason, the less likely they will be to have sex.
I wrote about my own lacking sex education in a Christian Nationalist school for Newsweek HERE. Here’s an excerpt from that essay:
When I got my period at the age of ten, I didn't know it was part of the baby-making cycle. I bumbled into my teens, clueless about how babies happened until a random encounter with a bookstore copy of The Joy of Sex Illustrated enlightened me. Penis and vagina equals baby.
Source: I’m Childless Because of a Far-Right South Carolina Church, Newsweek, Andra Watkins
Project 2025 endorses this Christian Nationalist view of sex education and proposes to give it the force of law. Here’s how.
“High-risk sexual behavior” in the P2025 text below means engaging in any type of sexual immorality. As we saw in Monday’s newsletter, two teens simply kissing constitutes sexual immorality to Christian Nationalists.
Teen Pregnancy Prevention (TPP) and Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP). TPP is operated by the Office of Population Affairs in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health; PREP is operated by the ACF Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation. Both programs should ensure that there is better reporting of subgrantees and referral lists so that they do not promote abortion or high-risk sexual behavior among adolescents. CMS should ensure that Sexual Risk Avoidance (SRA) proponents receive these grants and are given every opportunity to prove their effectiveness. SRA programs, both at ACF and at OASH and both discretionary and mandatory, should be equal in funding and emphasis. Qualitative research should be conducted on both types of programs to ensure continuous improvement.
Project 2025, page 476
To Christian Nationalists, teaching sex education promotes promiscuity, even prostitution.
In addition, certain provisions should be employed so that these programs do not serve as advocacy tools to promote sex, promote prostitution, or provide a funnel effect for abortion facilities and school field trips to clinics, or for similar purposes. Parent involvement and parent–child communication should be encouraged and be a part of any funded project. Risk avoidance should be prioritized, and any program that submits a proposal that promotes risk rather than health should not be eligible for funding.
Project 2025, page 476 - 477
“Risk avoidance” in the P2025 text is code for abstinence. “Promoting risk rather than health” translates as “promoting sex education rather than abstinence,” where risk = sex and health = abstinence.
This article in Education Week gives a deep dive into the state of sex education across the US. Thirty states currently require sex education programs to promote abstinence. (Readers can click this link to see what each state currently requires.)
Project 2025 calls for abstinence-based teachings only.
“Sex-promotion textbooks” in the P2025 text below is equivalent to standard sex ed teaching, where students learn about their bodies and the anatomically correct names for each body part, how their sex organs function, and how pregnancy happens.
“The aim of promoting optimal health” in the P2025 text below means abstinence.
These same parameters should apply to sex education programs at ACF. Any lists with “approved curriculum” or so-called evidence-based lists should be abolished; HHS should not create a monopoly of curriculum, adding to the profit of certain publishers. Furthermore, lists created in the past have given priority to sex-promotion textbooks. HHS should create a list of criteria for evaluating the sort of curriculum that should be selected for any sex education grant programs, both at OASH and at ACF, with the aim of promoting optimal health and adhering to the legislative language of each program.
Project 2025, page 477
I keep thinking about Elizabeth Smart who at 14 was kidnapped from her home and repeatedly raped by an unhinged religious extremist. She could have been rescued much earlier than she was if only she had identified herself to someone and asked for help. She didn’t because of the abstinence only sex education she had received. She believed that once she had been raped she was dirty and worthless and that no one - not even her own family - would want her. The people who taught her that are guilty of every single rape and violation that occurred after her first lost opportunity for escape. Abstinence only sex “education” isn’t just worthless, it’s actually dangerous.
Abstinence was the default “education” or lack there of. And you how that turned out for thousands and thousands of teens. Too many unwanted babies or babies born into weak teen marriages which increased poverty and child neglect and abuse
The radical AIDS movement played a big part in opening up the topic of health safety and condoms.