Opinion: The Absurdity of the Wynne-Ford Sex-Ed Curriculum

In its absurdity, the Wynne-Ford sex-ed curriculum—as it must now be officially denominated, since Premier Doug Ford’s campaign promise to repeal it has been revealed as a sham—is nothing new. (Canadian Press/Nathan Denette; Adrian Wyld)

Back in 2015, when conservative commentator Mark Steyn alluded to Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s renewed attempt to smuggle her radical “sex education” curriculum into the elementary school classroom (I’d call it a hidden agenda, but only conservatives have hidden agendas), Indigo Books CEO Heather Reisman nearly fell off her hostess chair.

Interrupting her interview with Steyn about his latest book, Canada’s self-proclaimed Reader-in-Chief protested, “I’ve never heard of that.” (In progressive-speak, “I’ve never heard of that” means: “You-made-it-up-you-paranoid-right-wing-reactionary-pursuer-of-the-politics-of-hate-fear-exclusion-and-cultural-insensitivity.”)

When a paranoid, right-wing, reactionary pursuer of the politics of hate, fear, exclusion, and cultural insensitivity (this writer, I confess) shouted from the sidelines that Canada’s Reader-in-Chief should try reading a non-liberal newspaper for a change, the audience laughed insensitively, and the unwonted thrill of being part of a conservative majority in downtown Toronto nearly overcame us all.

Progressives seem not to have heard of a multitude of things of which we much less well-educated conservatives are quirkily cognizant (balancing the budget by reducing spending rather than increasing taxes; raising one’s children in the home rather than in state-subsidized daycare; coeds paying for their own contraceptives).

Progressives are not so much opposed to the other side as incredulous that there is another side. Whenever they discover that there are people who disagree with them, they attribute their recalcitrant non-conformity to moral defectiveness (racism, sexism, capitalist rapacity), mental instability (“phobias,” Christian “superstition”), or substance abuse (addiction to oil, or to “guns and religion,” as America’s former Progressive-in-Chief was heard to say, with similar incredulity).

In truth, it is hard to believe that a provincial government ministry could propose to teach pre-pubescents how to masturbate and negotiate “consent,” all the while encouraging them to question their sexual “orientation” and even their gender.

As for the rest, little kids as yet have no sexual orientation. Males in grade school regard their female counterparts as aliens from the planet Zebulon, while the girls think of the boys as a species of vermin. Pre-pubescents are by definition pre-sexual. It is perverse to try to coax them out of the closet when they haven’t yet entered the house.

‘They’ll Do It Anyway’

In its absurdity, the Wynne-Ford sex-ed curriculum—as it must now be officially denominated, since Premier Doug Ford’s campaign promise to repeal it has been revealed as a sham—is nothing new. Sex educators have long proven that they know nothing about either sex or education; but then the people who insist on re-engineering human life, and those who are completely ignorant about how human life is engineered, are invariably the same people.

The case for strangers teaching the kids of strangers about the most intimate human relationship in schools (as opposed to parents in the home) boils down to: They’re going to do it anyway, so let’s give ‘em condoms. And ever since, the graph-lines tracing the rise of teen pregnancy and venereal disease have mirrored the attitude of the membrum virile of the typically ithyphallic adolescent male.

When a society gives tacit approval to pre-marital sex by saying to its youth, “You’re going to do it anyway,” it’s no surprise if they “do it anyway”—with renewed confidence and vigour, and with the consequence that more and more of them get pregnant and contract disease.  (Try to imagine the nanny state saying to parents, “Kids are going to do it anyway, so let’s make it safer for them by sending them home with two packs of filtered cigarettes a day.” But then, smoking is considered a capital crime these days, whereas sexual gratification is the means to self-realization. In our post-religious, post-philosophical age, physical health counts for everything, the health of the soul, nothing at all.)

Progressive Child Abuse

No one can by now underestimate the moral depravity to which progressive ideologues are capable of descending. Social conservatives used to inveigh against the left’s moral experiments by warning about a “slippery slope.” A generation ago, for example, feminists pleaded for the modest right to abortion in the case of a threat to the life or health of the mother. Today, abortion is permissible at any time for any reason. Yet even with unrestricted access to this apocalyptic form of contraception, in urban centres throughout North America, nearly one out of every two children is born out of wedlock.

Social conservatives have been wildly too optimistic; and progressives were right all along in denying the existence of a slippery slope. There has never been a slippery slope—it was always, right from the beginning, a direct, vertical leap into the moral abyss.

With the Wynne-Ford sex-ed curriculum, we have at last splashed down in a miasmal sewer from which it’s hard to sink any further.  If parents continue to sit by and submit blithely to the corruption of their children in state-run moral re-education camps, they should hardly be surprised when little Johnny comes home one day and, after hectoring them as usual on the size of their carbon footprint, demands a sex-change operation.

If parents fail to mount even such protests as the left routinely mounts at the least offence to their overwrought sensitivities or tiniest rebuff to their agenda, they will have acknowledged their defeat, once and for all, in the culture wars.

And now that Ford has eternized Wynne’s progressive agenda, if they don’t withdraw their offspring from school en masse—with whatever legal consequences that entails—they will have convicted themselves of complicity in the sexual abuse of their own children.

Harley Price has taught courses in religion, philosophy, literature, and history at the University of Toronto, U of T’s School of Continuing Studies, and Tyndale University College. He blogs at Priceton.org, where a longer version of this article can be read.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.