California’s Sexualized Curriculum and the Equality Act
Public schools in California are now a major battleground in the war on family. The fight is in the home and the classroom, as kindergarteners in California are being indoctrinated by a state-sanctioned curriculum promoting transsexuality.
Originally, teaching children about sexual health mainly meant instruction about sexually transmitted diseases and how to avoid them. Now, it has taken on a whole new purpose. Adopted by the California State Board of Education on May 8, the newest revision of the state’s Health Education Framework guides teachers to force gender identity ideology on kindergarteners, educate elementary students about slang terms for genitals, and teach teenagers about the intricacies of perverse sexual acts.
California’s adoption of the 2016 Healthy Youth Act requires schools to give students from grades 7 to 12 “comprehensive sexual health education and hiv prevention education.” The Health Education Framework takes this to the next level. The Department of Education’s summary of this new curriculum guidance states, “It is permissible to teach knowledge and skills related to comprehensive sexual health and hiv prevention education in grades kindergarten through grade six (K-6), inclusive. … Content that is required in grades 7-12 [which includes sexual education] may also be included in an age-appropriate way in earlier grades.”
That means 5-year-olds can be taught about “safe sex.” But that is far from the worst of it.
As unheard of and appalling as this is, the direction that the Framework gives to school districts and teachers ranges far beyond sexual health instruction. It is about sexuality instruction.
Our government educators have created a curriculum that indoctrinates young, impressionable children who have no world experience—no other knowledge to deny what they are taught in school. When originally proposed, the Health Education Framework required a book titled Who Are You?: The Kid’s Guide to Gender Identity. Due to statewide protests, the book is no longer required, but it is still recommended by Department of Education officials. This book, which is for children in kindergarten through third grade, states: “Some people say there are only two genders. But there are really many genders. And for some people, there are more than just two choices.” It then goes on to list a number of gender terms, such as gender neutral, agender, neutrois, etc.
Another book that the Department of Education recommends is The ‘What’s Happening to My Body?’ Book for Boys. This book, made for fourth through sixth graders, lists colloquial and vulgar slang words for male and female genitals. It teaches boys—who have not yet even been through puberty—about perverted forms of sex and says, “Sexual fantasies can be a rich and varied way of experimenting with your sexual self.” This book is for 9-to-12-year-olds! The book teaches that homosexuality and other “preferences” are just ordinary, natural ways of life.
The Department of Education also suggests a book for high schoolers called S.E.X.: The All-You-Need-to-Know Sexuality Guide to Get You Through Your Teens and Twenties. This book gives detailed explanations of a host of perverted and dangerous sexual acts—while claiming to be about sexual health.
On May 17, a group called Informed Parents of California organized protests against the newly adopted education guidance. The protests were called the “SeXXX Ed Sit Out.” Informed Parents of California is a group that works to “expose the shocking truth about the sexualization and indoctrination of our children in California’s public schools.”
Parents involved in these protests took their children out of the public school system to show their disgust for government policies. One flyer at the rally said, “We’ve tried to reason with the districts. We’ve rallied, asking them to take action. We’ve spoken at the State Dept of Ed, and so far, they are ignoring us. Let’s show them that without our children there won’t be schools!”
California’s Health Education Framework is a huge tool used by the left to push its agenda, but it is by no means the only device.
Enter the Equality Act.
A new bill was recently passed by the United States House of Representatives that essentially would make it illegal not to teach transgender ideology in elementary school. This new law would make it illegal to prevent boys who say they identify as girls from competing against actual girls in track meets. It would criminalize someone who refuses to provide any service or good for events celebrating sexual perversion, no matter your religious beliefs.
Introduced to Congress by California Democrat Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on March 13, the Equality Act was approved and passed by the Democrat-controlled House a little over one month later. It is now being considered by the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans.
This bill is meant to expand upon the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A summary of the act posted on Congress’s website reads:
This bill prohibits discrimination based on sex, sexual orientation and gender identity in areas including public accommodations and facilities, education, federal funding, employment, housing, credit and the jury system. Specifically, the bill defines and includes sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity among the prohibited categories of discrimination or segregation. …
The bill prohibits an individual from being denied access to a shared facility, including a restroom, a locker room and a dressing room, that is in accordance with the individual’s gender identity.
In order to become law, the House-approved Equality Act still has to survive the Senate and avoid being vetoed by the president. It is unlikely the bill will last that long, but this doesn’t mean Americans will remain free from the tenets of the act.
In fact, much has happened already across America, signifying what the passing of this bill would entail. The California curriculum is one example. Even without the Equality Act, millions of children are subject to transgender indoctrination and “education” about mature-rated content.
Supreme Court rulings, such as Pierce v. Society of Sisters have upheld the fact that, constitutionally, parents have the right to govern their children’s education. Despite this, a number of states, including California, Colorado and New Jersey, already have laws enforcing the teaching of gender identity ideology. The Equality Act would enforce such laws nationwide.
The Heritage Foundation published an article on March 14 by Monica Burke, which highlights cases that have arisen because of laws and court rulings on the state and local levels similar to the Equality Act.
Gender identity laws and attitudes do not bring equality, but rather heartache, grief, abuse and a host of other problems.
For example, in May 2017, a rule was passed for all schools in Decatur, Georgia, requiring them to allow boys who identify as girls into female restrooms, locker rooms and other private female areas. Six months later, a kindergarten girl was sexually abused in the girls’ restroom by a boy who claimed to identify as “gender fluid.”
Even after this, school authorities refused to change its transgender policy.
Further north, in Virginia, French teacher Peter Vlaming was fired in early December 2018. The reason: In order to uphold his Christian beliefs, he refrained from calling one of his transgender students by her preferred male pronouns. Vlaming tried to be accommodating without compromising, and he even called his student by her new, masculine name.
“I’m happy to avoid female pronouns not to offend because I’m not here to provoke,” Vlaming said, “but I can’t refer to a female as a male, and a male as a female in good conscience and faith.”
As a result of his precarious balancing act, Vlaming was fired because his refusal to refer to his female student as “he” and “him” was ruled discriminatory.
In 2018, the Cincinnati Children’s Gender Clinic recommended that a 17-year-old Ohio girl dissatisfied with her gender receive testosterone supplements so that she could transition into being a “boy.” The parents, who instead wanted their daughter to receive counseling, lost custody of her.
Most recently, Selina Soule came in eighth place in Connecticut’s 2019 indoor track championship for a girls’ running event, missing qualifying for New England regionals by two spots. In first and second place came Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood—two boys claiming to be girls. Miller set a new state record for the girls in this event. “We all know the outcome of the race before it even starts,” said Soule after the competition. “It’s demoralizing.”
If proposed legislation like the Equality Act becomes federal law, incidents such as these would become ever more frequent and severe.
The Heritage Foundation writes:
The fight is already here. Catholic hospitals in California and New Jersey have been sued for declining to perform hysterectomies on otherwise healthy women who want to become male. A third Catholic hospital in Washington settled out of court when the [American Civil Liberties Union] sued them for declining to perform a double mastectomy on a gender dysphoric 16-year-old girl.
These cases would multiply under the Equality Act. This bill would politicize medicine by forcing doctors, nurses and other medical professionals to offer drastic procedures—not in view of new scientific discoveries, but by ideological fiat.
What we are seeing today is like nothing else in American history. And it is all part of a major war on family! This is a war that the Trumpet and its predecessor, the Plain Truth, have been reporting on for decades.
Late editor in chief of the Plain Truth, Herbert W. Armstrong, wrote in his magazine’s October-November 1978 issue:
A solid family structure is the very foundation of any stable and permanent society. But today, in the affluent countries, a conspiracy is developing which seeks to destroy marriage as an institution, as well as the family. … The threat is dual: 1) Unrealized by most, there is a widespread and aggressive conspiracy to destroy the institution of marriage. 2) Marital relationships and family life are breaking down, and divorces are increasing alarmingly.
That was written over 40 years ago. Today, we can clearly see where that conspiracy against family has led!
In the same article, Mr. Armstrong explained that this movement is, in part, “a well-organized movement to subtly influence college students to prefer alternatives to marriage.” Now, the movement has gained so much momentum that it is hardly subtle at all—kindergarteners are being influenced to think that they can change their very gender!
The Equality Act, similar local-level laws already in force, and California’s Health Education Framework prove that Mr. Armstrong was correct.
The war on family has been a long, drawn-out struggle. Its proponents did not start by saying that they wanted to destroy family and teach 5-year-olds that they can be whatever gender they feel like. They started by normalizing divorce. They started by making fornication and other forms of debauchery acceptable during the sexual revolution of the 1960s. The war continued as abortion was declared a woman’s right by the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe v. Wade in 1973. The court then legalized homosexual acts in 2003 and same-sex “marriage” in 2015. Now, men can compete in women’s sports, elementary students are taught about perverse sexual acts, a teacher can be fired for not referring to his female student as “he,” and the list goes on and on.
In our free booklet Redefining Family, Trumpet managing editor Joel Hilliker writes, “[E]ven though [homosexual rights] proponents are winning battle after battle, and homosexual rights are advancing at a breathless pace, they are far from content. They are only growing bolder and angrier. They will never be satisfied ….”
Homosexuality has been normalized. Transsexuality is rapidly advancing along the same road. We have reached the point where leaders in the highest courts of the land willingly accept someone’s sexual self-identification. Lawyers, judges and journalists alike refer to men as women and women as men without a second thought. Yet proponents of this war against family are not yet satisfied. They still want transgender ideology pumped into our youngest children, with no room for dissension.
Why is this community never satisfied? Hilliker continues, “They will never be satisfied, because—although they are woefully ignorant of this fact—the true leader of the movement is driving as hard and as fast as he can toward the complete and utter destruction of the family as God created it! … The homosexual agenda is a full-out, satanic war on marriage and family.” The true leader of the war on family is Satan himself.
Why does the devil want to destroy the family? It all has to do with God’s purpose in creating family.
Mr. Armstrong wrote in his free book The Missing Dimension in Sex, “Man’s destiny is to be born into the very God Family.”
Perversions of the physical family are an attack on God and His Family. But the Family of God is the greatest hope that exists for humanity. The physical family, as God created it—consisting of a father, mother and children—is a beautiful type of God’s Family that He wants to open up to all of mankind.
In his free book The Incredible Human Potential, Mr. Armstrong wrote:
[The book of Romans] speaks of Christ as God’s Son: “… that he might be the firstborn among many brethren” (Romans 8:29). Humans having God’s Holy Spirit are heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ—who, alone of all humans, has already been born as God’s Son by a resurrection from the dead (Romans 1:4). He is the first of the human family to be born into the Family of God—the Kingdom of God. He is our Pioneer who has gone on before.
The Bible uses clear, familial language—nothing could be more plain! God is the Father, Christ is His Son, and humans—who have and are led by God’s Holy Spirit—are potential sons of God! (Romans 8:9, 14, 16; John 1:12-13; Galatians 3:26).
That is why the Equality Act and the Health Education Framework are so perverse. They are weapons used by Satan the devil to destroy potential members of God’s Family. He wants to twist minds as early as possible so that people cannot understand the concept of a normal, nuclear family. Thankfully, Satan’s deceitful tactics will eventually fail. The Incredible Human Potential explains how God’s exciting, inspiring family plan will come to fruition.
To understand the full agenda behind the sexual revolution and transgender trends in our society, read our free booklet Redefining Family and request a free copy of The Missing Dimension in Sex, by Herbert W. Armstrong.