Here’s a story that prompted Duane Lester to allude to Huxley’s Brave New World. It may seem like satirical science fiction — as if, like Woody Allen in Sleeper, we had awakened to discover it is 2173 — but it is an all-too-real fact: “Experts” have determined that what’s wrong with our education system is that kids aren’t taught enough about sex:
“Oral sex, masturbation, and orgasms need to be taught in education,” Diane Schneider told the audience at a [United Nations conference] panel on combating homophobia and transphobia. Schneider, representing the National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers union in the US, advocated for more “inclusive” sex education in US schools. . . . She claimed that the idea of sex education remains an oxymoron if it is abstinence-based, or if students are still able to opt-out.
Comprehensive sex education is “the only way to combat heterosexism and gender conformity,” Schneider proclaimed, “and we must make these issues a part of every middle and high-school student’s agenda.” . . .
A panel sponsored in part by the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) advocated for “comprehensive sex education” not only as a tool to combat “gender oppression,” but also as the key to achieving all of the Millennium Development Goals.
Whenever I see something like this — extraordinary statements made by someone I never heard of before — my first thought is, “Who is this person saying these things?” So who is Diane Schneider? The first thing I discovered was that she had presented an NEA workshop on gay-rights advocacy in schools at a 2010 “Prideworks for LGBT Youth” conference:
Next, I learned that Schneider is a leader of GLSEN (Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network) in New York’s Hudson Valley region:
And then, finally, I found this biography:
Diane is a high school health educator in Spring Valley New York. She is very active with GLSEN in the Rockland County area, where she is its co-chair. She is also proud of the GSA that she advises in her high school. She is an online professor and has been active with the Health Education Leadership Team for NY State. She brings you this workshop as part of her training from the National Education Association’s (NEA’s) LGBT Trainer of Trainers.
Hmmm. A bit more searching found Diane Schneider quoted in a 2009 New York Times story about transvestite students:
Typically during “Mix ’n’ Match Day,” at Ramapo High School in Spring Valley, N.Y., students might wear polka dots with stripes, said Diane Schneider, a teacher who is a chairwoman of the Hudson Valley chapter of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network. But this year, she said, “about 50 kids came as cross-dressers.”
And here is Diane Schneider’s official page at Ramapo High School’s Web site. Perhaps parents and taxpayers in Rockland County, N.Y., have no problem at all with Schneider’s advocacy. For all I know, the school’s slogan could be “We’re Here! We’re Queer! We’re Ramapo!” and their football team proudly takes the field in rainbow uniforms.
The relevant question is, how was GLSEN activist Schneider chosen to present the National Education Association’s official position on “inclusive” sex education to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women?
Think about it: Of all the problems affecting the world, America’s leading organization of teachers is urging the United Nations “to combat heterosexism and gender conformity” by teaching “oral sex, masturbation, and orgasms”? Because that’s exactly what’s needed by impoverished villagers in Bolivia, Botswana, Belize and Burkina Faso.
Meanwhile, you will be pleased to learn, in her official statement to the U.N. conference, Melanne Verveer, U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues (and “one of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton ’s closest associates“), devoted separate sections to “Women and Green Jobs” and “Gender and Climate Change.”
So that’s the “women’s agenda” the United States is now promoting worldwide: Orgasms for kids, green jobs and fighting climate change.
Indeed, it is a Brave New World.
UPDATE: Now a Memeorandum thread. Linked by the Lonely Conservative, Nice Deb and Protein Wisdom, and thanks to Maggie’s Notebook for pointing out this connection:
‘FistGate’ Goes Global: GLSEN Activist
Promotes Masturbation at U.N. Conference
