It All Comes Down to Sex

A story on president-elect Trump’s “extreme” policies included this fear-mongering observation about a charter school that does promotes sexual restraint:

Charter schools created with the help of the Barney Initiative are also proving to be an ideal vehicle for evading laws enforcing separation of church and state. Since my investigation into the opening of a Barney-related charter in Colorado called Golden View Classical Academy, an independent news outlet in that state confirms the school indeed provides students a religion-based curriculum on the taxpayers’ dime.

As Marianne Goodland of the Colorado Independent reports, charter schools like Golden View “have found a legal workaround, and many Democratic and Republican lawmakers are looking the other way.”

Goodland recalls when Golden View applied to the district school board for approval, the school’s director “assured the board Golden View would not use a religious curriculum” and “agreed to comply with the intent of Colorado’s sexual education law by providing ‘appropriate instruction on human anatomy, reproduction and sexuality.’”

Yet, she notes the school’s family handbook, “adopted before the charter application was approved includes references to teaching about sexual intercourse only “in the context of a monogamous relationship between two people of opposite sexes,” a focus on abstinence, admonitions on “the moral and physical consequences of promiscuous sex,” and the “limited effectiveness” of condoms in preventing sexually transmitted diseases.

See what the reporter did there? Teaching chastity is a violation of the separation of church and state. This is an argument that Protestants used all the time against Roman Catholic parochial schools.

But how exactly is such a sexual ethic scary? With STD’s as common as children born outside marriage, one might think adolescents refraining from sex would be a positive contribution to the common good. No strain on social services or health insurers for those who “just say no” to a roll in the hay.

Sure, it might be a tad scary if the schools produced citizens who voted for legislators who wrote laws that made certain kinds of sexual activity illegal. But do the Never Trumpers actually think the man who gropes women will sign on to that kind of legislation?

You can’t make this stuff up.

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