My mom and I found out that I had a crisis pregnancy center in my school, teaching a
biased and religious sex ed.
They were having our kids sign a purity agreement, and giving them a gold ring to wear around
school and telling them that girls who have had sex are equivalent to a chewed piece of gum.
How many weeks were you gone?
Was this week six or week seven?
I can’t remember.
And you missed me so much, all the crying you did.
I thought maybe you’d miss me a little!
I do miss you!
I’m very content being home!
Aly just started, it’s her freshman year, and she’s home this weekend because it’s
homecoming weekend.
We have a great relationship.
She’s pretty much my best friend, but I’m definitely a mom.
I want to make apple crisp.
We talk about everything at our house and so the sex ed thing was very natural for us
to talk about.
One day she literally grabbed a banana and she put a condom on it.
She’s like, “You don’t know how to do this- you need to know how to do this.”
My best friend had never gotten that education before, and here she is my kitchen, getting
it from my mom.
Which just seems wrong.
If you tell me you have a comprehensive sex ed that you’re providing and you also tell
me that you’re not providing kids the opportunity to practice putting on condoms,
I don’t believe you.
So what’s going on here in Central NY?
We have crisis pregnancy centers that are being invited into our public schools to teach sex ed.
We never got a letter home telling us that a crisis pregnancy was coming to educate our
kids about sex.
So I found this out when our own school district had a CPC coming in called New Hope Family Services.
I didn’t understand that they were part of a bigger movement
run all throughout the United States.
In fact, there are more crisis pregnancy centers throughout the United States
than there are pregnancy centers.
And they’re very sly about how they’re getting into schools.
I had heard a rumor from a friend of mine that they were coming in and giving these
two lessons that really bothered me.
One was they were having our kids sign a purity agreement and giving them a gold ring to wear
around school and the second was a lesson telling them that girls who have had sex
are equivalent to a chewed piece of gum.
We had no sex ed, like, briefing before this outside group came in.
When they came in, it was like, a two-day session.
So on the first day, I went home and I was like,
“Mom. I think this is the group that’s going to do the analogy.”
And she’s like, “Ok, can you record tomorrow?”
And I was like, “Absolutely.”
Doesn’t she come home that night and she said, “It happened.They did the chewed gum lesson.”
And I said, “No way.”
Yep.
So the woman went up and she called up two male volunteers.
She went to one of the boys and she was like “flirting” with them.
She was holding, like, a box in her hand and then she’s like,
“I think I’m ready to give you my gift.”
This is her “giving her virginity away” to this boy.
Giving her “gift” away.
And this gift is a box with gum in it.
And she’s having him chew the gum at this moment.
While he’s doing that, she goes over to the other kid and she starts flirting him up.
So she’s like, “I really like you.
I have some unsettled business to take care of.
Can I go do that and I’ll be right back?”
And he goes, “sure.”
So she goes back over.
So she asks for the gift back.
And how she did that was she had him spit the gum back into the box
and then she took the box.
Brought it over to the other guy,
and now she’s trying to give the gift to the other guy.
“I’ve already given it away, I want you to have it, you are the one.”
She says “I wouldn’t let you chew it anyways.”
And she’s having this represent virginity.
And the kids got that from that lesson.
She just went on and on and on about virginity and the value of virginity.
Because it was a woman in the middle and she was giving her gift away to the males, that
was degrading to the women because it was slut-shaming her.
But it was also justifying the behavior of the men towards the woman.
To put it on a girl that she is less worthy if she’s had sex is just disgusting.
And especially because it’s just on the girl.
This goes to the larger picture of this pervasive stigma that we put on women in our society
today and that is that they’re the ones that have to prove that the boy
has done something wrong.
Often the victim is extremely intoxicated and she is not aware of her surroundings
This man came and groped me, and I told the teacher cause I was terrified and she was
like, “Well, you are wearing shorts.”
Former Stanford swimmer convicted after attacking an unconscious young woman.
But it was his six-month sentence that provoked national outrage.
Now after serving just half his jail term, he’s free.
His father complained the verdict was a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action.”
Thursday’s explosive testimony made an impact locally.
Telling phone calls that came into us, several around Kavanaugh and how this was a triggering
event for them.
The National Sexual Assault Hotline says it saw a spike in calls.
And then when you’ve got a lesson in your school that’s perpetuating that.
It kills me, it kills me, it kills me.
I cannot say it enough.
I went to our school board, and they rescinded the invitation to New Hope Family Services,
so they are not allowed back in Baldwinsville Public Schools.
After a few weeks though, I thought fixing my little ten-minute radius was not enough.
There’s a list of the other schools that they’re still in on their website.
It’s going to keep going unless moms like me get mad and speak out.
Do you want one right now?
I kind of want to eat one right now, yeah.
Oh, they’re good.
Oh, it’s good. It’s sweet.
Sex ed should be completely neutral, it should be comprehensive, it should be inclusive,
accurate and medical.
Sex ed in our schools justifies and stereotypes the behaviors of men and women and everything
in between and makes it ok to do not-ok things.
I’ve started an organization called Stop the Shaming.
What we’re trying to do is create a comprehensive sex ed movement in Central New York.
So this morning we’re going to the library and I’ve invited a few of my cohorts that
run organizations that have goals very similar to ours.
Even the most liberal people, they don’t want to say ‘vagina’ and ‘erection.’
They don’t want to talk about it!
My main goal right now is to get crisis pregnancy centers out of our public schools.
I’m not saying I want my teen to have sex.
I don’t.
And that's not what this is about.
But it’s about reasonable expectations and not shaming girls.
I lied to my doctor for years about being sexually active.
Right, because you were ashamed.
Yeah, I was a teenager!
I didn’t want to talk to anyone about sex.
The few lessons that we do get are not accurate.
That needs to change because we are not getting the education that we should be getting from
those classes.
It’s religious, it’s abstinence-only, it’s “you’re a slut if you have sex
before marriage.”
I know a lot of people that have premarital sex and it’s not -
if you tell a kid not to do something, it’s just going to make them want to do it more.
So you might as well prepare them to do that correctly and safely.
They should be providing the most cutting-edge information!
I did not expect to become a sex ed advocate, at all.
This whole path I’ve been on has been interesting and fulfilling and probably the most important
thing I’ve ever done.
We’ve gotten a lot of backlash from people all around and like, that’s not easy.
So to go through that together, I think that’s really interesting, that’s really cool.
And like, it has brought us closer together, yeah.
She has the motivation and the bravery to start something like this, I find that really
inspiring because it’s like, well I want to follow that, I want to do that, too.
This is wrong, how come nobody else has pointed it out before that?
Let’s be the people to do that.
I think it’s been a great learning experience for her.
Especially at 18, now.
I can’t wait to see what she does!