The Polish government wants to introduce compulsory left-liberal sex education

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The day of the decisive battle for the innocence of Polish children has arrived. Donald Tusk’s government has unveiled a radical proposal for compulsory sex education in the schools. On October 31, the Polish Ministry of Education published the core curriculum for a new school subject, “Health Education,” which has led to a great deal of controversy. This is because this new subject’s program also covers issues related to sex education. In this regard, compulsory Health Education is to replace the current optional subject entitled “Family Life Education,” which will cease to exist.

The Ordo Iuris Institute, along with its partners from the Coalition to Save the Polish School, thus encourages Poles to attend the protest which will be called “Yes for Education, No for Depravation,” and which will take place on December 1 in Warsaw.

Why is the Tusk government’s “health education” so controversial in Poland?

The first controversial thing about the Tusk government’s “health education” is the very fact that sexuality is no longer going to be presented within the context of procreation and the family, but rather as a health issue.

The second important point is the compulsory nature of this new form of sex education, unlike the current program of Family Life Education. Even those parts that are described as optional in the new program and that concern sex education will be optional for the teachers teaching the subject, but not for the child or his parents. It will be up to the teacher to decide whether to address these topics and under what conditions.

This new core curriculum thus removes all the safeguards currently in place in Poland against the indoctrination of children into the LGBT ideology in the schools they attend. On the basis of this new “Health Education” subject, early sexualization and indoctrination will be justified according to the demands of the LGBT lobby and gender ideology, and parents will no longer be able to oppose it.

As many Polish teachers have noted, when it comes to the core curriculum of this new style of health education, it is really only the sex education curriculum that is new. The rest will remain as it is, on the whole, although as part of the core curriculum of other subjects. This indicates a deliberate effort by the Polish government to avoid comparisons to the shocking guidelines for sex education in Europe that were published in 2010 by the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Europe, in cooperation with Germany’s Federal Center for Health Education (BZgA).

Polish children soon to be taught “early childhood masturbation” at the age of 3?

Among the shocking elements of the WHO’s guidelines for Europe, we read that children between the ages of 0 and 4 should be taught about the “enjoyment and pleasure of touching one’s own body,” as well as “early childhood masturbation.” It further says that what should be developed in young children is the ability to “gain awareness of one’s gender identity” and “express their own needs and boundaries, as in, for example, the context of ‘playing doctor.’”

Representatives of those political parties that nowadays make up the left-liberal governing coalition led by Donald Tusk have nevertheless explicitly referred to these same WHO guidelines as being desirable for implementation in Poland in previous years. For example, the Civic Platform and Left MPs did so in their response to the Resolution of the European Parliament of November 14, 2019 on the criminalization of sexual education in Poland, and Warsaw’s Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski also did so as part of his famous “LGBT+ Declaration” for the city that was announced in early 2019. Trzaskowski is now the candidate of Donald Tusk’s Civic Platform for next year’s presidential election. It’s also hard not to notice that the new style of sex education being introduced by Education Minister Barbara Nowacka as part of the health curriculum is at least partially consistent with these WHO guidelines.

Another reason behind the Donald Tusk left-liberal government’s ploy to smuggle sex education into the curriculum within a broader package of proposals under the rubric of “Health Education” is arguably to circumvent the constitutional principle that parents have the right to raise their children according to their own beliefs. Given the fact that the way in which sex education is conducted in the schools may very well clash with parents’ right to decide how to raise their children, Minister Nowacka prefers to put it this way: “We are now in such a mental health crisis that I don’t know how cruel one has to be to insist that a child not participate in an educational process that will give him or her a basic immunity to mental crises as well.”

In addition to the state coercion associated with the fact that sex education is to become part of a broader compulsory subject, there is thus a very clear case of moral blackmail against all those who criticize these plans of Donald Tusk’s government.

This constitutes yet another attempt to violate the Constitution and the rule of law on the part of the left-liberal coalition, which, when it was in opposition for eight years from 2015 to 2023, was constantly accusing the conservative Law and Justice governments of disrespecting the rule of law.

What, specifically, does the new subject entail?

The new “Health Education” program that Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s left-liberal coalition wants to introduce into Polish schools is to be mandatory for both state and private schools, including the Catholic ones.

The published draft of the core curriculum, for example, describes among its assumptions the idea that a student in grades IV-VI – i.e., aged between 9-10 and 11-12  - should be taught to “identify pubertal changes falling within the medical norm, among which auto-erotic behavior will be mentioned.” In other words, such a student will be taught about masturbation as a medical norm, thus undermining any evaluation of such behavior in moral terms.

It is also stipulated for these classes that the student “knows the rights of the child and the duties of the parents to the child,” but no mention is made of the child’s duty toward the parents, such as the duty of obedience, which in turn can foster an attitude of entitlement (“After all, I’m entitled to it!”), thus undermining their authority and possibly even leading to attempts at blackmail (“I will tell the school that my parents are not fulfilling their duties toward me!”).

The program’s description goes on to say that in the new core curriculum, the student will participate in “discussions of family models,” which of course opens the door to introducing LGBT topics into the core curriculum. This is because its wording suggests that, among the models discussed, there may also be those in which children have “two mommies” or “two daddies.” All of this is being introduced as a new standard.

Moving on, already in grades VII-VIII (meaning children aged 12-13 to 13-14), students will “discuss the concept of psychosexual orientation and the possible directions of its development (heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or asexual); and learn the concepts of gender identity: cisgender, transgender.” All of this will be presented as equally natural and commonplace, and as phenomena that can be discovered by any young person in himself or herself. All of this falls within the norm. If a student finds that he was born in the wrong body, it’s all right; he is simply a “transgender” person rather than a “cisgender” person (two “norms”). It’s all a matter of individual feeling that determines whether one is a boy or a girl. If anything, there will be doctors who will adjust his body to match his psyche. It is also worth noting that the term “cisgender” comes straight out of the newspeak of gender ideology and should not be used in a Polish government regulation.

For those students in this age range, it is further mentioned that they will be “taught the criteria for informed consent, and discuss the elements of mature and conscious preparation for becoming sexually active.” In contrast, other criteria for evaluating sexual behaviors are not even mentioned by the Ministry of Education. It fails to mention, for example, emotional commitment, a lasting relationship based on love, responsibility, or love as enshrined in a marriage vow. Informed, mutual, situational consent is the only criterion for evaluating sexual activity, according to the Ministry. When there is such consent, then sexual activity is good (or at least acceptable); if there is no such consent, then sex is bad (unacceptable). The logical consequence of this position is that all sexual behavior is considered good as long as it is undertaken with the consent of the parties involved (e.g. masturbation, casual sex, early sexual activity, homosexual activity, bisexual activity, sadomasochistic sex, etc.). It is worth noting that the long-term effect of adopting situational informed consent as the sole criterion for evaluating sexual activity is the weakening of the natural barriers in children and adolescents to engaging in intercourse with adults (pedophilia) or in paid sex (prostitution).

In high school, on the other hand, the student will “learn about the legal and social issues related to an LGBTQ+ affiliation” and “discuss the issue of sexual pleasure and those factors that influence libido, as well as the various forms of sexual activity.” These points not only open the floodgates to indoctrinating children into supporting the demands and assumptions of the LGBT lobby, but also provide an incentive to engage in sexual activity in the broadest sense at a young age – i.e., before reaching adulthood –  in order to experiment and seek out ever more powerful sensations. What will be included within “various forms of sexual activity” will be homosexual intercourse, as well as anal sex, oral sex, and other forms of “intercourse” that are described, among other things, on the websites of those NGOs which claim that it is their “mission” to educate young people about sexuality. Sexuality is thus portrayed as something that is primarily intended to give pleasure and satisfaction. The element of building a lasting relationship, as well as the sexual act’s procreative function, is completely ignored. The prospect of conceiving a child is even shown in terms of a threat against which one must protect oneself with contraceptives.

What does all of this mean, and what can Poles do about it?

What we are dealing with here is not teaching, but upbringing – and what is more, education in the moral sphere within the context of sexuality. The message that will be received in such classes may influence the students’ future life decisions, such as whether to get married or not or whether to instead remain in an informal relationship – which, after all, is being shown to be just as valuable. Besides this, instead of talking about sexuality in the singular, there will be talk about sexualities, where any kind of sexuality, as long as it is practiced without coercion, is just as good as any other.

In the “conditions and method of implementation” of this program within the framework of health education, it is explicitly stated: “The teacher will play the role of guide and mentor in this process, working with students and supporting them in the formation of attitudes and values.” Thus, what we have here is an encroachment into an area that is strictly concerned with upbringing, and where it is in fact parents who ought to take precedence. The compulsory nature of these classes will lead to a situation where the child may receive different messages at school than at home. This therefore leads to a violation of the constitutional principle of the prioritization of parents in education, as well as an undermining of parental authority. This will certainly not be good for the child.

Sunday’s protest in Warsaw will show, by its size, whether Poles, many of whom are practicing Catholics, are ready to offer real resistance to the liberal Left’s plans to transform this relatively conservative Central European society.

Jerzy Kwaśniewski - president of Ordo Iuris