On Monday evening in Austin, Minnesota, state representative Peggy Bennett, R-Albert Lea, the MN027A GOP challenger Mueller For Minnesota and Senate District 27 Republican candidate Gene Dornink For Minnesota are hosting Resist the Comprehensive Sex Education Bill.
On her Representative Peggy Bennett page, the veteran lawmaker and retired teacher posted on Sunday:
Friends, tomorrow (Monday) evening at 6PM at the Austin, MN Senior Center, I will be speaking at an educational event about Comprehensive Sex Education (CSE.) I will be joined by some other experts on this subject as well. CSE is being pushed by a number of legislators and special interest groups, including Planned Parenthood. Those promoting it would like to see CSE mandated for all public and charter schools in Minnesota. It is being touted by its proponents as “scientifically accurate and developmentally appropriate” sex education for our kindergarteners through 12th graders. After studying the bill and this topic in depth, I find CSE highly concerning. It sounds benign and somewhat sensible on the surface, but in reality it is a Trojan Horse, sexualizing our children early and, in fact, grooming them for sex. Parents, grandparents, and concerned citizens, please come tomorrow evening to learn more about this very important topic. Our children are too important to ignore this!
Neither Bennett nor the event post say who those other experts might be, so Bluestem thought it might be worth looking for the makers of the film "The War On Children: Exposing the Comprehensive Sexuality Education Agenda."
Monday night's event post uses a screenshot from that film, as the banner for this post demonstrates. Mr. Google led us to the website Stop CSE [Comprehensive Sexuality Education], which is a project of Family Watch International and the Protect Child Health Coalition, whose website's About Us page tells readers is "The Protect Child Health Coalition is facilitated by Family Watch International (FWI) and directed by a rotating leadership of co-chairs representing various organizations working to stop CSE in the U.S. and abroad."
At the top of the Stop CSE [Comprehensive Sexuality Education] page, readers learn, "“Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) goes far beyond sex ed, and is a dangerous assault on the health and innocence of children…” (American College of Pediatricians)"
Who are these folks? The Southern Poverty Law Center has designated Family Watch International as an Anti-LGBT extremist hate group. On the SPLC page for Family Watch International, readers learn:
Family Watch International works within the United Nations and with countries around the world to further anti-LGBT and anti-choice stances. Founder Sharon Slater promotes anti-LGBT pseudoscience that includes the falsehood that homosexuality is a mental disorder derived from childhood trauma, and that so-called “conversion therapy” can effectively eliminate same-sex attraction.
Founded in 1999 as Global Helping to Advance Women (Global HAWC), Family Watch International (FWI) is based in Gilbert, Arizona, and claims to be a nonprofit international educational organization. FWI is under the leadership of founder and longtime anti-LGBT and anti-choice activist Sharon Slater, who is Mormon.
Sharon Slater touts herself as an “internationally recognized leader in the effort to promote and protect the family and family values.” Her attacks on LGBT individuals — who, she repeatedly insists, are prone to disease, “significantly more promiscuous,” and “more likely to engage in pedophilia” — are presented under the guise of protecting children, who she claims are most at risk of being unwittingly indoctrinated into the sinister “global sexual rights revolution” that seeks to undermine the nuclear family, unleash sexual predation on children, undermine religious values, and sow “gender confusion.”
Though FWI occasionally dabbles in domestic policy, it is an international outreach group with an intense focus on Africa and the U.N.
Slater, along with a network of other religious fundamentalist organizations active in Africa, spreads her homophobic, anti-choice, abstinence-only agenda by claiming that the U.N,’s push for equal rights for LGBT people and women is part of a Western neo-imperialistic project. She’s forged close ties over the years with virulently antigay African activists like Ugandan pastor Martin Ssempa — an enthusiastic supporter of the country’s “ Kill the Gays ” bill — who have helped her lead campaigns to oppose the decriminalization of homosexuality. While these laws impose long prison terms on LGBT people, Slater insists that her position is a compassionate one: by reinforcing a culture inimical to homosexuality, she claims, LGBT people will be encouraged to unlearn their attraction, in turn neutralizing the threat they present to what the Christian Right calls the “natural family.” The rights of LGBT individuals, she argues, are “fictitious.”
In its own words. . . .
On Comprehensive Sexual Education (CSE): “Promotes affirmation of and/or exploration of diverse gender identities. May teach children they can change their gender or identify as multiple genders, or may present other unscientific and medically inaccurate gender ideologies. Fails to teach that most gender-confused children resolve it by adulthood and that extreme gender confusion is a mental health disorder (gender dysphoria) that may be helped with therapy.”
—“15 Harmful Elements of CSE,” on FWI’s Stop CSE Website, 2016. . . Sharon Slater founded Family Watch International as Global HAWC in 1999 after experiencing what she claims was a political awakening at the World Congress of Families (WCF) gathering in Geneva, Switzerland. WCF, an anti-LGBT hate group based in Illinois, is composed of Christian Right activists and serves as an umbrella for the Christian Right to create networks at home and abroad and drum up support for their efforts to curtail LGBT and reproductive rights. The organization opposes all that it sees as oppositional to the heterosexual, divinely ordained, “natural family” — including abortion, birth control, and homosexuality.
Before attending the Geneva conference, Slater later wrote, “I had never been involved in a cause. That experience changed the direction of my life, as I learned about the assaults in almost every area of family life and was instilled with the hope that if we all worked together, we could effectively stop many of these attacks.”
While managing her own organization, Slater also worked as president of United Families International (UFI) from 2001 through 2006. Also based in Phoenix suburb of Gilbert, Arizona, UFI is a hate group that formed when two organizations founded by activists Susan Roylance (currently the International Policy and Social Development Coordinator at WCF) and Jan Clark merged in 1983. During Slater’s tenure, FWI has used its consultative status (under Global HAWC’s name) within the U.N.’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to promote abstinence-only education and counter “homosexual activism.” . . .
FWI has also entered the world of documentary filmmaking, where they promote the work of discredited psychologists and therapists under titles like Porn Pandemic (2014) and The War on Children (2016). . . .
Learn more at the SPLC. Will Bennett's fellow experts come from a homegrown talent agency like the Child Protection League, or will the documentary and FWI staff join her on the tage? Or is the screengrab from a SPLC designated hate group enough?
As for the American College of Pediatricians, the Wikipedia entry for the group notes:
The organization's view on parenting differs from the position of the American Academy of Pediatrics, which holds that sexuality has no connection with the ability to be a good parent and to raise healthy and well-adjusted children.[3][5][6] ACPeds has been listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for "pushing anti-LGBT junk science".[4] A number of mainstream researchers, including the director of the US National Institutes of Health, have accused ACPeds of misusing or mischaracterizing their work to advance ACPeds' political agenda.
The Southern Poverty Law Center's page on the American College of Pediatricians states:
The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds) is a fringe anti-LGBT hate group that masquerades as the premier U.S. association of pediatricians to push anti-LGBT junk science, primarily via far-right conservative media and filing amicus briefs in cases related to gay adoption and marriage equality.
ACPeds opposes adoption by LGBT couples, links homosexuality to pedophilia, endorses so-called reparative or sexual orientation conversion therapy for homosexual youth, believes transgender people have a mental illness and has called transgender health care for youth child abuse. . . .
. . . Though it sounds official, the ACPeds is not the leading organization for U.S. pediatricians; that designation goes to the 66,000-member American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). ACPeds was founded in 2002 when a small number of socially conservative AAP members broke away from the AAP after it endorsed adoption by same-sex couples. ACPeds subsequently issued its own report stating that gay parenting puts children’s health and development at high risk.
ACPeds supports “reparative” or sexual orientation conversion therapy for homosexual juveniles, the debunked theory that homosexuality can be “cured” through therapy, and has encouraged the practice in communication with schools nationwide. ACPeds has also called being transgender a mental illness, and opposes families’ support of their transgender children, calling such support “child abuse.” Though membership is believed to be just a few hundred, ACPeds spreads its falsehoods by acting as a go-to authority for far-right media outlets like Breitbart and the Daily Caller, and Christian publications and websites. . . .
ACPeds’ founder, Dr. Joseph Zanga, described it as a “Judeo-Christian, traditional values” organization, “open to pediatric medical professionals of all religions who hold true to the group’s core beliefs: that life begins at conception; and that the traditional family unit, headed by an opposite-sex couple, poses far fewer risk factors in the adoption and raising of children.”
ACPeds now claims more than 500 members, though its current president, Dr. Michelle Cretella, wouldn’t answer a direct question about its membership numbers in 2016. In 2012, ACPeds was estimated to have no more than 200 members. AAP currently has more than 66,000 members. . . .
Are those folks some of Bennett's experts?
Some commenters on Bennett's post are pushing back, though not connecting the dots with the graphic source material:
Doogie Houge Any health professional would tell you that the education is appropriate. Again, we're going to deny science, and build support among those least likely to know. Backwards here we go 🙃
Angie Hanson Rep. Bennett, as a fellow educator, I am extremely disappointed in your fear rhetoric about educating children about their own bodies and health.
My mom was a volunteer at Crime Victims Crisis Center when I was a child. She had different curriculum, but I remember being taught at a young age about the correct names for all the parts of my body, that I control my own body, that I could and should say no to unwanted and inappropriate touch and finally how to report.
She saw first hand that molesters often used unusual names for body parts which made reporting difficult for children.
She taught me this to try to protect me and to ensure I would have the knowledge to report had something ever happened.
Not all parents have the same knowledge, experience or comfort level that my mom had to teach their own children.
Education also is the most effective way to prevent unplanned pregnancy and STDs. Keeping students safe and bringing down number of abortions.
I believe the bill allows for districts to have choice over curriculum and parents are allowed to opt their children out. Does it not?
Jennifer Vogt-Erickson Representative Peggy Bennett, "grooming children for sex" has a specific meaning in the context of sexual abuse. The intent of the CSE legislation is to help educate children (and parents) to recognize this behavior and know who to turn to for help--the opposite of making children more vulnerable. I am already using this curriculum (which is very well done, but could have a stronger component on internet safety) with my children partly for that purpose. Are you thus saying I am harming my children?
You may have good reasons why you don't like the curriculum, but it's careless and wrong to make an extreme statement about it grooming children for sex. That's a very serious and misdirected accusation.
We look forward to learning just who the "experts" on stage with Bennett are, and whether the film in the graphic for the event is shown.
Related earlier post:
Screengrab: The Facebook art work for Resist the Comprehensive Sex Education Bill event on Monday night in Austin, Minnesota, hosted by state representative Peggy Bennett and two Republican candidates hoping to unseat incumbent DFL state legislators.
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