sex education – Powers For the People

The House had only four bills to debate on Wednesday, and two of them were retained on the calendar. We spent most of our time debating SB1456 and SB1254. Both of these bills are designed to limit public health information.

SB1456 is about sex education. You’ll remember that Arizona is one of the states that does not offer comprehensive, medically accurate sex education. (In fact, I have been proposing medically accurate sex education for years, and that bill doesn’t go anywhere.) SB1456 dictates what can be taught in sex education. It separates out information on HIV and AIDS and requires parental permission be given separately for that subject matter. Why? Because Republicans believe that teaching kids about HIV and AIDS would include mention of how one can contract these diseases, including sexual behaviors that they don’t want their children to learn about.

Continue reading Republicans Put Ideological Guardrails on Health Information (video)

We had a marathon Health and Human Services Committee Meeting today— with several long debates on topics including childcare subsidies, prescribing rights for pharmacists, expedited foster care and pornography.

To the supporters of the anti-pornography measure, I suggested that if we want people to practice healthy sexuality, we should be teaching medically accurate sex education in our schools — along with emotional intelligence and relationship building and maintenance (whether it be with friends, colleagues or partners).

Republicans are concerned about children and men watching too much porn on the Internet. Arizona is the third worst state in the country in terms of comprehensive and medically accurate sex education. If children and teenagers want to learn about sex and adults are not giving them any information, they will turn to the Internet.