By Kairi Kuritani / Herald Forum
There’s been a lot of talk lately of schools “pushing an agenda,” and I’d like to correct the record on the matter.
In high school, I was taught world religion; we learned the beliefs and history of all the world’s major religions, as well as some new age beliefs. But the thing is, at no point was I told which one was right or wrong. I was simply given the information based on our reality, and left to come to my own conclusions.
The same can be said of inclusive sex education. Simply telling students that, factually, LGBTQ identities exist, what they are, and that queer people are equally deserving of respect as any other identity, is not setting an agenda. One in five Americans age 10 to 25 identifies as LGBTQ according to the Pew Research Center and Gallup, and to erase that, as my sex ed courses did, would be to disregard reality.
Just in the same way that my learning about Catholicism in high school did not make me convert, neither will inclusive sex ed force anyone to adopt an identity that is not their own. There have been studies by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Pediatrics that debunk the so-called “social contagion” theory of gender and sexual identity, or that this increase in LGBTQ identity is driven by coercion by peers or educators, and we should not form policy based on counterfactual arguments.
But it begs the question, what would pushing an agenda look like?
Maybe it would look like Florida’s curriculum being rewritten to deny the fact that George Washington was a slave-owner, despite the fact that you can read his own will and see where he, himself confirms this as true.
Maybe it would look like Florida’s Department of Education instructing educators to deny transgender students equal access to school amenities and athletics, in direct violation of federal nondiscrimination policy.
Maybe it would look like 22 state attorneys general suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture because they do not allow discrimination based on sexuality or gender identity in their free lunch program, and they wish to have this revoked.
Let me reiterate: Nearly half of our country’s state attorneys general want to allow states the right to refuse access to food, during the second recession in my lifetime, to children, who cannot provide food for themselves, purely based on how they self-identify. That is setting an agenda.
It would serve us well to know the difference.
Kairi Kuritani lives in Mountlake Terrace.
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