School libraries and grade school classrooms have become battlefields in America’s culture war. School districts from Broward County in Florida to West Ada School District outside of Boise, Idaho, have stocked pornographic books promoting transgenderism and gay sex. Curricula are curated to get kindergarteners to question their genders and third graders to think about anal sex. Parents are incredulous and irate—and wondering how it has come to this.
The ideology of sexual revolution does not drop down from the sky and land in a school library. There is a plan to bring sexual liberation down to earth. Planned Parenthood has long been in the business of mainstreaming transgenderism, the queer agenda, and “kinky” sex. It has gained such power through strategic control of the administrative state, as we show in our new report from the Claremont Institute.
Planned Parenthood’s influence in sex education depends on four main funding streams established by Congress. The Teen Pregnancy Prevention program (TPP) and the Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP) are competitive grants created through Obamacare. The other two Sexual Risk Avoidance Education (SRAE) programs have been around for decades, and were originally designed to promote abstinence-only until-marriage education. These four programs collectively dispensed $228 million through 243 grants between 2020-2023.
Planned Parenthood and its affiliates dominate the grant-awarding process, winning about $167 million—80 percent—of all sex education grant money between 2020 and 2023. This success begins with pressuring Congress to defund abstinence-only sex education and to increase funding for harm reduction programs that reduce sexual risk rather than avoid sexual risk.
Their main influence comes through the complicated grant-making process. The library books and the curriculum follow National Sexuality Education Standards (NSES) that push forward the leading edges of the sexual revolution. The NSES are a Common Core for sex ed, designed and updated with the aid of Planned Parenthood.
The second edition of NSES, published in 2020, requires teaching gender identity to kindergarteners and instructing third graders about puberty blockers. NSES also requires teaching about abstinence. However, they introduce a new vision of abstinence. Abstinence under their new definition becomes encompasses the promotion of gay sex, “rear entry” sex, oral sex, obscenity, mutual masturbation, “reproductive rights,” sexual orientation, gender transitioning, and other practices. What sounds like “wait for marriage” ends up as “taking puberty blockers” and genital mutilation. Ultimately, these abstinence programs even advocate for having sex, as long as condoms are used or abortion is available. HHS validation of the standards has led to nearly half of school districts in the country adopting them or following standards based on NSES.
Planned Parenthood and its affiliates then design and sell curricula to satisfy the NSES standards that they helped set—a radicalizing ratchet effect within the law. Twenty five percent of TPP funding every year must go to the development of new sex education products. For instance, the BCPS sex education curriculum, known as Family Life and Sexual Health (FLASH), was developed by the TPP grantee Public-Health Seattle and King County. FLASH is now endorsed by Planned Parenthood, which delivers the curriculum to youth in schools.
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Few innovative programs developed under these federal grants even pretend to teach abstinence. One such program is a $5 million grant to Planned Parenthood of the Great Northwest, Hawai’i, Alaska, Indiana, and Kentucky, which developed INclued [sic], an LGBTQ education program including instruction on sex toys, dental dams and transgender ideology. The program is operating in sixteen states.
Parents who object to these school programs as pornographic are told that HHS deems these curricula to be “medically accurate.” However, the special understanding of “medically accurate” determined through the TPP Evidence Review is more political than scientific; its standards are easily manipulated. Of the over 600 studies evaluated under TPP Evidence Review, only twenty-four of them were approved for use in schools; Planned Parenthood endorsed or created seventeen of them.
Many red states, like Florida and Idaho, have good laws requiring that sexuality instruction in public schools teach abstinence from sexual activity outside of marriage as the expected standard for all school age students. Such states also give local school boards authority to decide how kids will learn about abstinence in sexuality education, a loophole that Planned Parenthood and affiliates have exploited with the aid of the federal government. Congress blesses the direct funding of local interest groups. This is how Planned Parenthood of South, East, and North Florida, for instance, began delivering sex education to students directly, or how Planned Parenthood delivered sex education through health districts in Idaho. Congress could stop funding the instruments of sexual revolution, but states do not need to wait for congressional action to disentangle themselves from the federal sex education regime. States should pass laws that reject National Sexuality Education Standards and prevent any district from adhering to them. Additionally, states should reject all Planned Parenthood–endorsed sex education curricula from use in any schools or school trainings.
