Proposed Kentucky Law: Abstinence Is the “Expected Standard” in Sex Ed

Southern legislators mull over how to teach kids about the birds and the bees.

Getty

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

As they resume their legislative sessions at the start of the new year, politicians in two Southern states are caught up in debates about how to best teach kids about sex. 

Kentucky currently has no law dictating how sex education should be taught, although the state’s Department of Education is working on guidelines for health classes in public schools, which generally include some form of sex ed. State Democrats recently introduced House Bill 80 that would require “age appropriate” sex ed to begin in the fourth grade and continue through 12th grade.

Republican state Sen. Stephen Meredith, on the other hand, wants every grade to learn the same thing: He introduced a Senate bill to require sex ed classes to teach that “abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage is the expected standard for school-age children.”

In a Senate committee hearing on Thursday to discuss Meredith’s bill, state Sen. Danny Carroll, a Republican who voted in favor of SB 71, explained his rationale for requiring abstinence and monogamy as the standard in sex ed classes: “As a society, if we don’t set some baselines for our children, there are going to be no limits,” he said, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.

The bill was criticized for its narrow ideology by comprehensive sex education advocates and community faith leaders, the Courier-Journal reports. Rev. Lauren Jones Mayfield, a pastor at Highland Baptist Church in Louisville, said the bill “assumes sex is between a married man and woman in a Christian home,” and criticized abstinence education for placing responsibility on women to be gatekeepers and creating a culture of shame around sex.

The bill passed the Senate Education Committee 7-2 on Thursday—all seven men on the committee voted in favor of it.

In neighboring Tennessee, Knoxville Republican state Sen. Becky Duncan Massey introduced legislation to allow sex education instructors to discuss sexual abuse in their classes without fear of violating a 2012 measure known as the “Gateway Law.” I wrote about the Gateway law for Mother Jones in a feature about how the state’s sex ed policies affected me long into adulthood: 

In 2012, Tennessee legislators passed a law that marked a new extreme, requiring anyone teaching sex ed to teach abstinence as the only legitimate option, and banning any discussion that could be perceived as encouragement of “gateway sexual activity.” Educators who crossed this murky line could face legal action. (In reaction, Stephen Colbert deadpanned that “kissing and hugging are the last stop before reaching Groin Central Station,” so it’s important to ban “all the things that lead to the things that lead to sex.”) To define the key words, “sexual activity”—touching someone’s “primary genital area, groin, inner thigh, buttock or breast”—the legislators cribbed from Tennessee’s criminal code.

In 2014, state lawmaker’s passed “Erin’s Law,” which encouraged instructors to teach kids to report abuse. But a Tennessean investigation found that most schools were bypassing discussion of sexual abuse for fear of running afoul of the 2012 law. In 2016, only 250 of Tennessee’s 1,833 public schools requested free lesson plans about sexual abuse from the Sexual Assault Center.

Massey’s bill was introduced the same day the Tennessee comptroller released a report that criticized the Tennessee Department of Education for not collecting enough data on the topic, making it “difficult to determine the extent to which…specifically, the subject of sexual abuse prevention is taught in schools.”

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate