A Divisive Conversation

"It's values-based sex ed, and all the values are evangelical values. It's not even mainstream Christianity. I'm not against abstinence. But I think the message is diminished when it's surrounded by misinformation and fear."
Kathy Dawson, Edmonton mother
 

"She did a lot of slut-shaming to the women, and pointed out the guys as horndogs. She really ridiculed single-parent families; she made it sound like they all give birth to juvenile delinquents."
Emily Dawson, 18, Edmonton, Alberta

Photo By CBC Thu, 10 Jul, 2014

Emily is now 18, but she was a year younger when she was exposed to a mandatory sex education class called Career and Life Management (CALM), at her school. Mandatory in the sense that no high school student in the province may graduate without having attended such a life-preparatory course. Emily's mother asked to have her daughter excused from lectures following her daughter's initial exposure to the course.

About 60 Edmonton area junior highs and high schools provide these CALM courses. The right to teach these classes had been awarded to the Pregnancy Care Centre which provides the speakers for the courses. The Pregnancy Care Centre is a Christian-based anti-abortion activist group. Several members of the Edmonton School Board had attended a Pregnancy Care Centre lecture and lauded it as "scientifically sound ... inclusive, respectful of individual differences and without religious content."

Public schools, after all, are at the service of secular municipal and provincial governments. Emily's mother, Kathy supports sex education as an agnostic. She had originally given the required parental permission for her daughter to attend the sex education classes. And then she discovered that the "sex ed" class lecture was being taught by an anti-abortion activist from the Pregnancy Care Centre

That centre is known to provide free abstinence education. Kathy Dawson was refused her request that her daughter be exempted from the following lecture without her daughter incurring an academic penalty. She decided to herself sit in on the next class to become familiar with the lecture content. The lecture favoured chastity until marriage, and argued against divorce and abortion, positions rooted in Christian doctrine.

In their complaints, mother and daughter claim the course presenter taught that 60 percent of boys carry the HPV sexually transmitted infection under their fingernails; that gonorrhea can kill in three days' time; that girls should dress modestly to avoid inflaming boys' passions. Mother Kathy wrote to trustees, began a petition. And the board endorsed the Pregnancy Care Centre's sex education curriculum.

Mother and daughter then turned to legal action, filing a complaint alleging discrimination in view of their agnostic belief, and because of their single-parent family status. Ms. Dawson filed a complaint against the board, that it had infringed her parental rights failing to offer advance notice of course content, refusing to allow her to remove her daughter from the class sans academic penalty.

And now that the issue has been given prominent play in the news, the Edmonton Public School Board has reached the conclusion it would instruct principals to no longer use the pro-life group in teaching sex education in high schools. "The challenge for us is this has become a very divisive conversation. There is no desire by the district to have that occur", stated acting superintendent Lorne Parker.