In the face of discord and subjective morality-based arguments, the board stood up for the rights of all of its students to learn in a safe and respectful environment.
A series of proposed changes to the sex ed curriculum in Omaha, Nebraska generated intense opposition late last year, with hundreds of angry parents packing a meeting to denounce plans to teach students about gender identity, emergency contraception, and abortion. Now it is up to the board to decide how and what students will learn.
Scott Southworth, the district attorney of Juneau County, Wisconsin, is threatening to prosecute teachers who comply with a new state law that requires sex education courses to include “medically accurate, age-appropriate” information, including information on contraceptives. Southworth claims the law “promotes the sexual assault of children,” “[u]ndermines parental authority,” “requires school districts to condone controversial sexual behavior,” and “provides access [...]
Health education that consists of only an abstinence-only message has disturbing consequences. By depriving teenagers of access to information about their health and bodies in schools, it makes them vulnerable to STD/s and unwanted early pregnancies. The problems of censoring sexual health education are reflected in a recent report released by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. The report [...]
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I recently had the chance to watch The Education of Shelby Knox, a documentary chronicling a high school student’s campaign to bring alternatives to abstinence-only education to her school in Lubbock, Texas. A lot happens in eight years. Shelby has since graduated from both high school and college; she is now 23 years old and living in New York City. [...]
GRADE: B – The push to teach abstinence-only education landed Health Education (primarily sexual education) in an abysmal place. As we have explained on the NCAC website, government funding-based mandates to provide a narrow and limited curriculum on a topic, such as human sexuality, amounts to censorship. Essentially, the abstinence only curriculum left out essentially information about contraception and sexually [...]
It's five, and my Firefox windows is a few tabs away from crashing. Let's go through 'em, shall we? Bristol Palin is now a celebrity spokesperson for the teen pregnancy prevention run by the Candies Foundation. You may have heard of Candies, a tween/teen clothing store which markets the "floral lace thong" for 7-16 year olds. I'd add a link [...]
It’s refreshing to see President Obama moving forward on his promise to separate science from politics. By freeing scientists to do more research using stem cells, and by commissioning NIH to develop guidelines, the President has put scientific decisions where they belong – with scientists. Now maybe he’ll do the same with abstinence-only-until-marriage programs, which have been condemned as inaccurate [...]
On Friday, January 23rd, President Obama lifted the “global gag rule” by executive order. The policy prohibited international organizations receiving federal funding to talk about abortion as an option. In the Winter 2008 issue of Censorship News, in our “issues to watch” with the upcoming Obama Administration, we wrote: The “global gag rule,” created by executive order, prohibits federally-funded international [...]
Over the past eight years, government censorship of science has ranged from silencing researchers to creating policies that interfered with the free exchange of scientific ideas. Government censorship of science includes distortion and suppression of data, and threatens the public’s access to truthful and accurate information. Though many examples of censorship and suppression have been revealed, it is likely in [...]
2009 is approaching, and as we plan our next year, we want to know: what censorship issue is nearest and dearest to you? Your answers can help shape this blog and the kind of projects NCAC pursues. Feel free to write in answers. And send it along to friends and frenemies. [polldaddy poll="1158458"]
As the Washington Post reported earlier this week, a recent study that correlates pregnancy rates among sexually active teens to the amount of TV sex they watched disregards a key issue: teen access to contraceptives and information on contraception. According to the study, which was published in Pediatrics, the more sexual content on TV that sexually active teens watch, the [...]
The most enjoyable part of my election night was walking away from hipster Williamsburg and past a laundromat where Obama's acceptance speech was playing. Inside the laundromat was a young Orthodox Jewish couple, a biracial lesbian couple, a handful of young adults looking up at a TV. As strange as this scene felt - either a classic 1980s tableau of [...]
