Around New England

Catholic Action League of Massachusetts Condemns Sex-Ed Bill

March 5, 2024

A sex education bill approved by the Massachusetts Senate last week “would encourage minors to engage in sexual behaviors which previous generations would have condemned, rightly, as depraved and obscene,” the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts said.

The bill, which the state Senate approved on a voice vote on Thursday, February 29, would require all public school districts in Massachusetts that teach sex education to use curriculums approved by the state Department of Secondary and Elementary Education that include presenting scenarios involving anal sex, oral sex, and masturbation to middle school students, as New Boston Post reported last week.

In February 2023, New Boston Post published excerpts from several state-approved sex education curriculums, which supporters call “comprehensive” sex education.

Supporters of the bill, which is titled “An Act Relative To Healthy Youth,” say it would provide what they call “age-appropriate” and “medically accurate” information to students, including to students who are attracted to members of the same sex or who identify with a gender that does not correspond to their biological sex.

But C.J. Doyle, executive director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts, in a written statement called the measure “extremist,” and said that if enacted the bill “will effectively preclude any public school teacher, administrator, nurse, or staff member from raising a moral objection or voicing an ethical dissent to any of the sexual behaviors celebrated and affirmed under this curriculum.”

“An Act Relative To Healthy Youth is government mandated ideological instruction under the guise of health education,” Doyle said. “It will use the authority of the law and the money of the taxpayers to impose the value system of the secular Left onto the public schoolchildren of the state.”

The Massachusetts House of Representatives has not taken up the sex education bill. House Speaker Ron Mariano (D-Quincy), who controls which bills the House votes on, said on Monday, February 26 that the sex education measure comes too soon after the adoption of sex education guidelines in September 2023 by the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.

Doyle said he hopes that if the bill ever becomes law that “significant numbers” of parents will opt out their children, as happened in the fall of 2021 in Worcester, where parents of nearly 3,000 children opted them out of a so-called comprehensive sex education curriculum adopted by the Worcester School Committee earlier that year.

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