Date: Thu, 23 Feb 1995 14:52:02 -0600 (CST) From: Kevyn Jacobs To: "Kansas Queer News [KQN]" Subject: WCCAP POSITION ON HB2301 Wichita C-CAP (Wichita Community Clinical AIDS Program) Position Opposing HB 2301 22 February 1995 Dear Members of the Education Committee: Kansas House Bill 2301, which ostensibly relates to teaching AIDS and sex education in public schools, is seriously flawed and must be defeated for several reasons. HB 2301 effectively chills the free exchange of ideas which the constitution guarantees for everyone. The bill proposes both a 30-day notification of parents before each AIDS prevention message enters the classroom and a weekend or evening preview for parents. This provision allows parents to exclude their children from AIDS education, but it also discourages guest speakers by requiring two presentations and two visits to a school district. This Is particularly chilling for students in remote, rural school districts. The net effect is to freeze the flow of information about sex and AIDS, and specifically to withhold that information in a family context. HB 2301 is about oblique censorship. It places an undue burden on educators who attempt to deliver federally-mandated information about preserving the health of children and youth, and it silently protects fearful >parents< from having informed children. Although the bill never uses the word family, it continually talks about parents, children and marriage -what most Americans imagine when they think of family. And this bill exposes, at the core of the family values and home-schooling rhetoric, a remarkable fear of sexual realities, new ideas and Intergenerational communication between parents and children. HB 2301 is unconstitutional. To subject one idea (AIDS prevention) to special restrictions is to open all ideas to restriction. If both chambers of the Kansas legislature pass this bill, and if Governor Graves signs it into law, a host of groups will undoubtedly sue the state of Kansas for violating the freedom of speech guaranteed in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. And while that lawsuit is pending, spending scarce Kansas tax dollars in lawyer's fees and court costs, local school districts like USD 259 will wonder why legislators have required them to duplicate procedures for parental notification, preview and pupil exclusion already In place. HB 2301 is deceptive. it claims to be about teaching human sexuality, but it's really about >not< teaching It. Although current statistics indicate that 72% of seniors in Kansas public schools have already had sexual intercourse, HB 2301 legislates that sex education teach abstinence as the "expected standard" and "expected norm" for all children. It may be a message designed to make the minority feel compliant and safe, and the majority feel shamed that they've disappointed somebody's expectations, but it's unlikely to persuade students that they should delay sex and intimacy until marriage in a society where half of marriages end in divorce. By making no reference to safer sex practices, HB 2301 Implies that abstinence and monogamous marriage are the only two choices: no-sex or True Sex. That's fine if you believe In a world where everything Is neatly divided Into us / them or black / white, but many people do not believe in that simplistic binary scheme or that restricted view of human sexuality. That binary perspective provides a lousy approach to stopping a global epidemic for which the only successful intervention has been frank talk about people's >real< behaviors of sex, intimacy and pleasure, and how to protect their health by making those behaviors safer. ironically, HB 2301 attacks condoms when America's only respite from escalating HlV Infection rates was among San Francisco's gay community which discussed people's lives frankly and collectively promoted safer sex and condoms. Because HB 2301 rejects those approaches, its real agenda seems not to be education or AIDS prevention but to promulgate a restricted vision of The Family as monogamous and heterosexual. To promote this nostalgic vision of idealized Victorianism, Kansas legislators had to dig deep, mandating that sex and AIDS educators talk about financing babies born out-of-wedlock and illegal sex acts (quoting from }Kansas Statutes Annotated{), including some forms of heterosexual interaction. HB 2301 commands Kansas sex educators to use the rhetoric of fear, guilt and danger, implicitly believing that its young citizens will marry as HIV virgins (well, 28% of them) and, after the wedding, magically experience sex >without< all that emotional baggage. Meanwhile, every Hollywood movie and TV show peddles nonmonogamous heterosexuality as America's prime commodity, telling the youth of America that they need sexual intercourse and disposable relationships to prove their adulthood and gender identity, and that they'll move one step closer to that goal if they just buy this new product. About 72% of Kansas kids buy that message, and HB 2301 does nothing in response but preach: sex is dangerous, condoms are risky, so lust say no. HB 2301 is misguided if its proponents suppose that AIDS education ignores abstinence as the only safe and effective protection against STDs, pregnancy and sexually-acquired AIDS. Curricula produced by the American Red Cross, Center for Disease Control and National institute of Health already accent abstinence as the most effective way of protection against acquiring STDs. Some readers would say that HB 2301 is merely redundant and that Kansas education will proceed as usual regardless of legislative action. That may be true to an educator, but that interpretation misses one important point. Our elected representatives like Daniel Thimesch of Cheney, Darlene Cornfield of Valley Center and six Wichita representatives find it oddly necessary to endorse redundancy. Why? The answers seem embedded in HB 2301's strategic detour from sex and AIDS education to an ideological embrace of the monogamous heterosexual family. in today's myopic video culture, endless reruns of "realistic monogamy and family life" reinforce a post-WW2 image of American life, and often blind us to the striking similarities between 1995 and 1895. The ideology of monogamy last flourished at the turn-of-the-century when rapid social changes threatened America's economy, immigration patterns, health, family structure, and a sense of cultural identity. TV erases all that from our popular memory, and amnesiac America sees only the Fifties, the Sixties, and the advent of global market capitalism in the mid-Seventies. New opportunities arose only as we began to erase our sense of national boundaries and identity. Distant global problems now seem disturbingly close to home. Complex problems refuse simple solutions. Realism and modernism yield to a postmodern aesthetic. Bottom-line profits influence everything. All these changes push people of faith to understand ethics, morality, spirituality and God in new ways. And although nostalgia feels real good in that scenario, nostalgia is not a smart basis for a coherent public health education policy.