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| Gayle Ruzicka - The very face of Evil |
Representative Bill Wright (R) introduced HB 363 on the docket with the intent of banning all discussion of contraception, homosexuality and sexual practices from the public school health and sex eduction programs. This should be seen as an assault on our children because it is exactly that! Even the BYU Health Services Department has come out against this bill.
Cougar Hall, assistant professor and school health adviser at Brigham Young University told the committee that Utah current law is very conservative. He said he supports abstinence education 100 percent, but there needs to be some information out there for students at risk.
"It is immoral to withhold life-saving information from segments of our population because it doesn't fit our value system," Hall said.~ Deseret NewsBill Wright used his granddaughter as a prop to defend his bill saying:
"She represents the innocence of those we are really talking about," Wright said. "This is not an important part of our curriculum. … It is just basically something out there that takes away from the character in our schools and takes away from the character of our students."
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"I think we are intellectually dishonest when we teach pregnancy prevention in our classes and do not teach the only sure pregnancy prevention," Wright said.
My daughter Jessica (Liberal Blogger Kate) pointed out the misogyny in this tactic saying that only a girl could represent the innocence lost by sex. He did not bring in a grandson because using a young boy as a prop would not have the same effect.
Mr. Wright is a Dairy Farmer by trade. I don't say this to mock is chosen profession but to mock his credentials as a health educator or someone who would set health education policy. To this end, Mr. Wright is advocating withholding information from children and to rely on the failures of the past. Parents do not really educate their children about sex. Most of them are as qualified as Mr. Wright, or the woman with her hand up his back, Gayle Ruzicka; to provide real world sexual information to children. Just because you have had sex, does not make you an expert. Our children should be educated about their bodies and how they function mechanically and psychologically. Our goal for our children should be not just having safer sex but developing a healthy attitude toward sex. They will eventually have sex and we need to raise them in an environment where they can have good sex.
If you take Mr. Wright's comments and view them in the daylight your will realize how absurd they are. We teach math in progressive steps. Counting, Basic Addition, Subtraction and so on. We do not expect them to open up a Trigonometry book and start solving the problems. The same goes for their bodies. Bad sexual information leads to bad decisions and bad sex. I wish I had the information I know now when I was a teen and even in my 20's. I feel like I was robbed to some degree of many additional years of good sex. As much as I now know, I still find that I have some general misconceptions about sex. If I am left to educate my children on my own those misconceptions could be passed on as bad information.
We have progressed, as humans, beyond the bronze age but for some reason we continue to cling to attitudes and practices from that era. I don't know what Mr. Wright and the Puppet Master Ruzicka have to gain by denying quality information to children. Why is denying the truth a virtue? In response, I am linking two websites that are a great jumping off point for sexual information. The first is Go Ask Alice from Columbia University and the second is Kinsey Confidential from Indiana University. I think it is time somebody tells Gayle Ruzicka to shut up and sit down. Let's provide our children with good information with an acknowledgement that the older they get the less they need us and the more independent their decisions become.
