The school system in the United States is under fire for refusing to teach students about what’s known as the “sexual deviant education” (SED) curriculum that encourages students to think about sexual deviancy.
“There are no kids in that class that’s in any way abnormal,” said David H. Koch, an educator who teaches at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, who testified at the hearing.
The students at the center of the debate are in grades 7 through 12, with the first-grader’s textbook reading: “You’re going to be a little bit gay.”
But the textbook also says that “being gay is not an illness, it’s a choice.”
“It’s a real, serious, mental health condition that affects everyone who is gay,” Koch said.
The SED curriculum, which was developed by a private company called GLSEN, has been criticized by many educators as promoting a narrow definition of sexual orientation.
In the US, as in many other countries, students are required to take a sex education class at school.
But the GLSED curriculum was created in 2013 by a group of conservative religious conservatives, led by evangelical pastor James Dobson, who have called for a ban on teaching the SED to children.
They claim that it teaches kids to think in a way that makes them less moral and less able to respect other people.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the GSSEN website lists Dobson as its president and says he is “a leading voice in the fight against the homosexual agenda.”
In his testimony, Koch said that the SES curriculum is based on the premise that homosexuality is a choice, but he believes that it is a very real mental illness.
He said he once tried to teach a class in which a student asked the class leader if he could kiss her, and the teacher said no.
The teacher told the student to keep asking for kisses, but that was enough for him.
But in the classroom, he was able to get his students to see how much they needed to respect others to be able to enjoy life, Koch told the committee.
Koch said he’s seen his students struggle with the sexual deviance curriculum because it’s so hard to teach about it, and he’s also seen them struggle with what’s taught in other schools.
Koch testified that he believes the SEL curriculum is an “invisible assault” on the LGBTQ community.
He said that he has heard from many LGBTQ students who were not given the information they needed about their sexuality and their identities.
He said that’s why he is not comfortable with the curriculum.
Students who struggle with their sexuality, Koch testified, often say they don’t know how to talk about their experiences and how they feel, because they don’st want to talk to their parents about it.
The GLSE curriculum is a version of the SEN curriculum, a series of self-help books developed by conservative Christians.
It’s similar to the SID curriculum in that it includes topics such as “love” and “sexual pleasure.”
According to The New York Times, GLSEP curriculum teaches students that the two terms are interchangeable, because both are used interchangeably in the curriculum, and there is no specific curriculum requirement for either.
Many of the students in the SELS class were “completely unaware of the actual teaching of the [sexual deviancies] curriculum,” Koch testified.
According a 2014 report by the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, about one in five students in America is LGBTQ.
One of the main issues in the GELSEN controversy is that the curriculum does not require that students learn about same-sex attraction, said Karen Paz-Weskey, executive director of the GLEN.
She said that students who are struggling with the SEX education class are not being taught about the harmful ways that people can be sexually attracted to other people and that this curriculum should not be part of school curriculum.
Paz-Wskey told the Committee that the issue is not about whether or not students should be exposed to the material.
It is about whether they should be taught about their own feelings about same sex attraction, she said.
While the Gelsen curriculum is being challenged in the US by the Department of Education, it is not being challenged at the federal level, according to Paz -WesKey.
The department has not responded to requests for comment from Fox News.