NEW YORK: Catholic Archdiocese Opposes Sex Education In Public Schools

It may be hard to believe, but sex education is currently not available to all public high school students in New York City. Each school is allowed to decide whether to offer the courses and only about half do. Bloomberg wants to change that, much to the outrage of busybodies from the Catholic Church.

In the first serious challenge to the city’s mandate, which was announced on Tuesday, a spokesman for the archdiocese said the church’s position was that parents, not the schools, should educate children about sex. “Parents have the right and the responsibility to be the first and primary educators of their children,” Joseph Zwilling, director of communications for the archdiocese, wrote in a statement. “This mandate by the city usurps that role, and allows the public school system to substitute its beliefs and values for those of the parents.”

The Catholic League's reliably whacko Bill Donahue weighs in:

There is a sex-education program that could work, and it is one that is similar to the approach being used to discuss smoking. We don't tell kids not to smoke and then instruct them on the proper way to inhale. No, we show them horrifying pictures of a smoker's lungs. We tell them of the physical pain they are likely to endure by smoking. We tell them how it will shorten their life expectancy. We could do the same when discussing sexual experimentation at a young age. We could discuss how abortion affects the psyche of the mother who elects to terminate her baby. We could show pictures of what abortion does to the child being cut up into pieces. We could instruct them on the link between unwed motherhood and poverty. We could inform them of the greater likelihood of acquiring a sexually transmitted disease. In other words, we could teach the negative real-life consequences of sexual experimentation at a young age.