Maryland voters are over the age of 18, so I am presumably addressing adults.
A group called MCAP (Maryland Coalition Against Pornography) sent me an e-mail with a survey on pornography and sex education in schools. Well, they called it a survey, but it came across as a hysterical screed. I felt like Anita Bryant was calling me from the 1980’s, handing me a fresh-squeezed glass of Florida orange-like product with one hand, a pamphlet on how masturbation will make me go blind with the other, while ranting something homophobic. (Let’s be real. If I was going to go blind from masturbating to pornography, it would have happened when I was 15, not 50. The same is true for 99.9% of the rest of the population.) I doubt MCAP would have posted my full, unedited, and very sarcastic response, but voters deserve to know where I stand.
Am I worried about “pornography in school libraries”? What? Does anyone still believe this nonsense any more? Any teenager with a smartphone or computer can access more explicit pornographic images and videos in 5 minutes in their bedroom than they could ever hope to find in a school or public library in 5 years. The people pushing this hysteria about “pornography in schools” are either hopelessly naive, or think that I am hopelessly naive, which is insulting my intelligence and yours. School teachers and librarians don’t put pornography in school libraries. Anyone claiming otherwise is trying to scare other people about what is in school libraries and classrooms. In doing so, they are slandering teachers and librarians. Slandering and denigrating teachers is their agenda, not “protecting our kids”. If someone doesn’t want their own kid to read a particular book, then Frederick County Public Schools already allows parents to stop their own kids from reading those materials. They don’t get to tell every other parent that Catcher in the Rye should be banned (again).
I think I have already made my thoughts on sex education in schools plain, but in case you have not read it in my post against M4L, I will paraphrase it here. States which oppose teaching honest sex education in schools, and/or which promote “abstinence-only” sex ed, have higher levels of teen pregnancy, higher rates of sexually transmitted disease, and higher poverty. States which teach real sex education have lower rates of teen pregnancy, lower rates of sexually transmitted disease, and lower poverty*. None of that is a coincidence. Teens who are ignorant about sex still have sex- they just become ignorant teen parents. (Just ask Sarah Palin, a grandmother several times over.) If other parents want to become grandparents at the ripe old age of 34, then FCPS allows them to opt their kid out of sex education classes. If I get elected to the Board of Education, then I will not be voting for Maryland to go down the road of Alabama and Mississippi, states with high poverty and disease. Our kids deserve better.
(* Supporting links are in the other post.)