Sex ed programs ignore Church teaching

Despite the consistent teaching of the Church that children should be educated in intimate sexual matters by their parents and not in the classroom, the Archdiocese of Baltimore is plowing ahead with plans to have sex education courses in all its schools by 2003.

Archdiocesan officials reportedly announced these plans at the Baltimore Archdiocese's August 29 convocation on child sex abuse.

Defend Life requested an interview regarding these plans with Dr. Ronald Valenti, executive director of the Archdiocese's Catholic Education Ministries.

Dr. Valenti declined an interview, stipulating instead that Defend Life submit questions to him in writing. He said he would review them and might forward them to Loyes Spayd, coordinator of Elementary and Family Catechesis.

Defend Life submitted seven questions in an October 24 letter to Dr. Valenti, covering such topics as the Archdiocese's policy on sex education, how many of its schools now have such programs, the specific programs being used, and the timetable for school compliance.

Judith Ammenheuser displays a Growing in Love text.

Dr. Valenti has declined to answer the questions (see Dr. Valenti's November 4 letter, page 3).

However, Defend Life has learned of three programs in use, or likely to be in use, in the Baltimore Archdiocese.

The Benziger Family Life program, also used in the Washington, D.C., Archdiocese, is presently being used in some schools in the Baltimore Archdiocese.

The Fully Alive program was praised by a speaker at the Archdiocese's August 29 convocation.

A third program likely to be used is Growing in Love, of which James DeBoy, a long-time staff member of the Baltimore Archdiocese, was a principal consultant.

According to various groups of concerned Catholics that have reviewed these programs in depth, all of them violate Church teaching on chastity education and are seriously flawed.

Bishops push sex ed

Judith Ammenheuser, president of the Maryland-based group, Mothers' Watch, got drawn into the battle over sex education inadvertently.

"In 1970 I was invited to join a Parents Advisory Committee for the public schools," she explains.

"One of the purposes was to bring in sex education, but I didn't know it at the time."

It wasn't until 1977 that the Board of Education started having hearings on sex education. Around 1978, Judith recalls, the Anne Arundel County School Board voted 6 to 1 in favor of sex education.

As early as the late 1960s, says Judith, sex education was being recommended for public and Catholic schools by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the United States Catholic Conference.

A major player in this push was Bishop James McHugh, who worked with the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), Planned Parenthood's clearinghouse for educational materials.

In fact, much of the methodology, message and material for Catholic sex education courses comes from Planned Parenthood/ SIECUS sources.

Obviously, it is to Planned Parenthood's advantage to sexualize children at an early age and condition them to be willing participants in contraception and abortion.

New Jersey and Maryland were the first states to mandate K-through-12 sex education in public schools. Judith says that if it hadn't been for the Catholic bishops' support of sex education in public schools, it wouldn't have been approved.

"The Catholic school programs are identical, if not worse, than those in public schools," she charges.

She recalls a 1980 conference at which Planned Parenthood officials were "having a good laugh" about how it was easier to get sex ed into Catholic schools because "Parents don't sue at Catholic schools."

Explicit sex, no absolutes

Judith, a mother of four, two of whom went to Catholic schools, began writing about sex education in the late 1970s, along with Peggy Grimes, mother of 13.

In the early 1990s the two joined forces with Anne Polcha to write critiques of various sex education programs at the request of Fr. Paul Marx, then-director of Human Life International.

The three women started Mothers' Watch in 1994, specifically to address the issue of sex education in Catholic schools.

All of the Catholic sex education programs that Mothers' Watch has seen or critiqued, says Judith, violate papal teaching, beginning with Pope Pius XI in 1929, that classroom teaching of explicit sexual details is harmful to children.

Equally damaging is the failure of these programs to base instruction on a firm foundation of Catholic teaching.

Instead of teaching objective truths, the programs use "values clarification" techniques.

"It's not just the explicit sex in these materials that's so damaging," Judith explains; "it's the values clarification message: I am special (not God). There are no absolutes. They are taught 'choices.'

"The children are put in small groups to discuss and resolve problems. This promotes the idea of peer dependency.

"They get the children to zero in on feelings‹the idea of feelings and 'choices' predominates.

"They might throw in a little on Church teachings, to give it a 'Catholic' look. But this is not enough to overcome the tide of emotions the children will be feeling when they are titillated by these programs." Chances are that the parents will have no idea what's being taught in their children's sex ed classes, says Judith, because the student text for the program will be rather innocuous.

The more explicit material will be in the Family Resource text ("which is supposed to go home to the parents, but doesn't necessarily"), the Teacher's Guide, and the Program Resources text.

Supposedly, a letter should be sent home by the school to inform parents of the program and get their signed approval, but schools often don't do this, says Judith.

The school may instead have a meeting to announce the introduction of a "Family Life Program."

"They'll have representatives from the Archdiocese to present it in a panel. They will say, 'We've got to have this, sex is all around us, girls are getting pregnant at an early age, etc.'

"They will have plants in the audience who will say, 'We have this program in our school, and it's great!'

Parents will typically be given 15 minutes to look over the texts, an impossibility in such a short amount of time.

In such a case, "Parents should look at the glossary" of the texts, Judith recommends. "That will tell you what they're going to be talking about."

Mothers' Watch has asked to meet with Baltimore's William Cardinal Keeler, but without success. Once when the Cardinal visited Judith's parish, she voiced her concern about sex education to him.

"He said that the parents aren't doing it. I said I would like to come in and talk to him, but he absolutely refused to agree to a meeting."

What advice would Judith give to parents who want to keep sex education out of their schools, or get it out if it is already there?

"They have to be very active in the school and confront the school with the issue," she says.

First, find out what program there is going to be. Get other parents involved; even two are effective, but it's important not to do it alone.

"These people have been well-trained to meet opposition. Teachers go to workshops where they learn how to handle parents who oppose the programs."

But schools don't like bad publicity, she says: "They are intimidated by parents.

"And I think parents are in a good position now when they try to protect their children, because of the current problem with clerical sexual abuse."