Remarks in Opposition To the Northern Kentucky Board of Health’s
Proposal to Replace Sex Education in the Public Schools
With Abstinence and Morals Training

by Edwin Kagin

March 28, 2001

Members of the Board:

My name is Edwin Kagin. I am an attorney in Union, Kentucky, the father of four children, and a former college instructor who has taught students training to be teachers in the public schools.

I speak tonight, while one still can, against the proposal to educate students in human sexuality by not educating them in human sexuality and by substituting for factual information religious views regarding proper moral behavior that are not shared by all citizens whose children attend our public schools.

The proposal must be rejected because it is patently unlawful and because it is profoundly immoral.

It is patently unlawful because it is yet another attempt by zealots to mandate that their religious opinions become required teachings in public schools, funded by the taxes of all. It is unlawful because it is a violation of Section 5 of the Constitution of Kentucky, which forbids the state from funding any religion, or enlarging or diminishing the rights of any person "…on account of his belief or disbelief of any religious tenet, dogma or teaching." It is a violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which, in the first words of our Bill of Rights, prohibits the state from establishing a religion or from preferring one religion over another religion, or of giving preference to religion over non-religion. The proposed scheme rejects the very system that has kept us a free people. It mocks the opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court that, "…we have staked the very existence of our country on the faith that complete separation between the state and religion is best for the state and best for religion."

The proposal is profoundly immoral because it denies our children, who are our only future, necessary information about the nature and functioning of their own bodies. It would deny them knowledge of that which makes us human. It seeks to substitute rules for knowledge. Lack of information can be deadly. Ignorance can kill you. Don’t handicap our children with your hang-ups. Curb your dogma.

Under the moronically flawed reasoning of your "Human Sexuality Committee Report," a pooling of nonsense and religious babel, if young people are just taught moral rules, and schools eliminate health-based, medically factual, sexuality education programs in favor of abstinence-until-marriage programs, then we can prevent sexually transmitted disease and pregnancy. Right! Simple; straightforward; stupid. Under this brave new educational reasoning, we should similarly abolish Driver’s Education in our schools. Then our young people won’t have automobile accidents.

Members of the Board, you cannot do this. We the People will not tolerate it. We have met and crushed this serpent before. We intend to seek the promises of the future, not the errors of our authoritarian past.

Let this latest threatened inquisition hear free people say, "You shall not press down upon the brow of education this crown of thorns. You shall not crucify our children on this cross of control."

Last updated: 25 January 2005