“But among you there must not be even a hint of sexual immorality, or of any kind of impurity, or of greed, because these are improper for God’s holy people”. (Ephesians 5:3) Hello, and welcome to Catholic School, teaching kids the importance safe sex one day at a time.
I went to Catholic school for 13 years, kindergarten all the way to graduating high school and the only talk about sex in the classroom was about the immaculate conception. For a majority of my childhood I thought the whole idea of sex was two people falling in love, than getting married, than when they wanted to have a baby they kiss with there clothes off than tada!! The beautiful gift of life ladies and gentlemen. It wasn’t until later in middle school that I learned what sex really was, Thank you Sarah Jane for enlightening me on the truth of the reproduction process on the jungle gym at recess.
Sex wasn’t a topic of discussion because as a Catholic it is just expected that you are saving yourself until marriage. There was no birds and the bees talk, no banana with a condom or anything relating to educating young adolescence on ways to practice safe sex. The answer was to simply just not do it. I talked more about obtaining from sex in my religion classes more than my health classes even brought up the topic in high school, and no health class was educating us on even basic sexual education knowledge. Not only is this neglect of sexual education failing straight kids it is also failing queer kids, they are getting the very heteronormative sense that this is the way that sexuality works, this is the way monogamous relationships works, and this is the only option. That can cause a lot of trauma for someone sitting in religion class, closeted still trying to figure out who they are.
It wasn’t until I got to college and took my first health class that I realized how much of an injustice that lack of sexual education was to me and my peers at one of the most vulnerable and important stages of development in our lives. Sexual education is not just about safe sex there are so many different elements to sexual education that we were deprived of and instead of learning about it in a professional and safe environment we were forced to take matters into our own hands and figure it out ourselves.
You might be thinking “Well why couldn’t you go to your parents?”. I was raised in a Conservative Catholic household so believe it or not my parents weren’t exactly throwing condoms at me left and right. And my parents went to Catholic school their whole life too, it just was not a dinner table type of discussion, it wasn’t the norm. If you were raised practicing Catholicism you probably know what I am talking about there was a constant shaming and disapproval towards premarital sex. That is why sexual education NEEDS to be implemented into a Catholic School curriculum. Ok, so maybe leave out some of the explicit details to leave it a little more PG. But, sending fertile young women and horny young men off to college without learning about STDs and infections, consent and sexual assault, or different forms of protected sex they can practice is just putting us more at risk of getting into a bad situation.
Also let me remind you of a trend for hormonal teenagers if you haven’t caught on, if you tell them they can’t, they will figure out a way how. And don’t be fooled by the uniforms and the “Our Fathers”, those Catholic school kids are Goddamn insane.
All of the images I have used are credited to the following:
ShoutOut! James Madison University 
Great post!!! let’s normalize sex ed
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