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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Letter of the Day
Picking up parents' slack
Students attend a sex-education class in Florida. (ALAN DIAZ / THE ASSOCIATED PRESS ARCHIVES)
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Re: God-given duty (Letters, June 6). I was not aware that it is a "God-given duty" for parents to provide sex education to their children. If more parents would actually exercise this divine right, then perhaps there would not be such a need for school teachers to pick up the slack.
Unfortunately, those parents who protest compulsory sex education are probably the same parents who themselves will not educate their children. Indeed, many such parents would seem to prefer to leave their children ignorant or misinformed, naively thinking that their children will abstain from sex until marriage.
And let us not denigrate the word "education" by pairing it with the words "abstinence only." It has been demonstrated that abstinence indoctrination generally only delays the onset of sexual activity by a few months, at which point the parties are less likely to take risk-reducing steps, thanks to their relative ignorance.
It should be trite to reference the myriad studies that show sex education reduces the risks associated with sex and that it does not, in fact, sexualize children any more than they already are or will be.
These are reasons why schools should provide sex education to students. But what about the parents? The fact that we still have parents who think the fluid concepts of gender and sexuality (i.e. homosexuality) are immoral indicates that some parents should probably be joining their children in these sex-education classes.
KEITH LENTON
Winnipeg
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 9, 2012 A17
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