New Minnesota Health Standards Violate Federal Law
Deadline to object is July 18th.
Compulsory Comprehensive Sex Ed (CSE) is back! Parents have been objecting to the perverse and grooming sex ed curriculum in our K-12 public schools for years now. District by district they have been confronting their school boards and school administrators. But those behind this curriculum haven’t backed down.
Eight years ago, Planned Parenthood and other national NGOs pushed state lawmakers to make CSE a state mandate for every school district, attempting to remove any choice at all for local school boards. In 2019 CPL sponsored a massive Protect Kids Rally on the steps of the state Capitol featuring nationally recognized parent advocate Karen England of the Capitol Resource Institute as the keynote speaker.
The resistance became too hard to ignore and legislators sponsoring the legislation started taking political hits. The model CSE book It’s Perfectly Normal exemplified the insidious CSE assault on our children’s emotional, physical, and spiritual health, and they found it quite difficult to explain to constituents why a sex ed book deemed “appropriate” for 10 year olds was too pornographic for adult viewing at school board meetings or on the evening news!
So Planned Parenthood, their associated NGOs, and legislative activists shifted gears. Under the 2024 Democrat trifecta, they passed a mandate for new Minnesota “Health Standards.” The politically captured Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) appointed a committee to build the “benchmarks” of what students must know and learn and began creating the standards in January. Here is their “Draft 2” for public review and for public comment.
Please consider commenting! The district provides a form that walks you through a number of questions, Health Survey Draft 2. The deadline for public comment on Draft 2 is Friday, July 18th.
As you scroll through the 8 “Anchor Standards” and then onto the specific “Benchmarks,” you will encounter numerous alarming examples, standards such as 3rd graders being required to “explain the difference between sex assigned at birth and gender identity and expression.” More examples have been itemized by Fixing Stillwater Schools. The benchmarks reveal embedded, radical gender ideology. Sex isn’t “assigned” at birth…it is CONFIRMED at birth by the reproductive organs and chromosomes of the infant.
But everything we need to know about the proposed Minnesota Health Standards is summed up in this statement: “The standards framework is based on the National Health Education Standards.” (p.1)
What are the National Health Education Standards and who created them?
The National Sexuality Education Standards were created by a consortium of Planned Parenthood-associated NGOs, including the National Education Association, Advocates for Youth (A4Y), and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS).
It would be difficult to find more extreme organizations.
In 2021, CPL wrote:
SIECUS is the most notorious proponent of the explicit, offensive Comprehensive Sex Education (CSE) in the country. SIECUS calls itself “SIECUS: Sex Ed for Social Change.” They proudly announce that “SIECUS advances sex education as a vehicle for social change.” Between Advocates for Youth and SIECUS, they use Sex Education to indoctrinate our youth with a highly politicized ideological agenda that incorporates the entire “Equity/CRT” worldview and focuses on training students to become political activists.
The National Sex Education Standards begin with a link to the Advocates for Youth website which in turn opens with a commitment to “social justice” activism. (“Social Justice” is the euphemism for “dismantling systems of oppression” in an irredeemably racist, sexist system. The “system” they are dismantling is our constitutional Republic.) The website reads:
“Young people understand that reproductive and sexual health and rights are inextricably tied to social justice and the fight for liberation. Join thousands of youth activists and adult allies as we build a better and more equitable world.”
The Advocates for Youth Activist Toolkit begins: “Young people are leading the movement for change. They are marching in the streets for equal rights. They’re walking out of classrooms for climate change. They’re standing up for people killed by guns. They are ending stigma around abortion. And they’re rewriting the script that tells us how to think, behave, and treat one another.”
Does this sound like health education or radical indoctrination?
One look at the SIECUS home page confirms the answer. They aren’t even trying to hide it anymore.
A complete overview of the National Sexuality Education Standards is available at StopCSE.org. They identify many of the gender activist groups that have lent their support:
The national standards were reviewed by officials from GLSEN, Gender Spectrum, Teaching Tolerance (A Project of the Southern Poverty Law Center), Women of Color Sexual Health Network, and American Sexual Health Association. They are endorsed by GLSEN, Gender Spectrum, Sex Education Collaborative, Human Rights Campaign, and Center for Human Sexuality Studies, among others.
This is not what Minnesota parents want!
The latest SCOTUS ruling is a game changer and it pertains to the health standards.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled on Friday, June 27th in Mahmoud v. Taylor that parents have a right to opt their children out of this kind of content, and schools have an obligation to inform them they may opt out. This case is extremely important. The 6-3 decision ruled that “the Board’s introduction of the ‘LGBTQ+-inclusive’ storybooks, along with its decision to withhold opt-outs, places an unconstitutional burden on the parents’ rights to the free exercise of their religion.” They clarified that parents’ right “to guide the religious future and education of their children” was “established beyond debate.” The entire ruling is here.
Justice Thomas wrote further in a concurring opinion that this policy of so-called “inclusion” “imposes conformity with a view that undermines parents’ religious beliefs and thus interferes with the parents’ right to ‘direct the religious upbringing of their children.’” [emphasis added] He wrote:
Instead of incorporating materials focused on health and reproduction, for example, the Board chose the storybooks based on factors such as whether they “reinforced or disrupted” “heteronormativity,” “cisnormativity,” and “power hierarchies that uphold the dominant culture.”
The Board further provided teachers with guidance about how to conduct “LGBTQ+-inclusive” instruction, which, among other things, suggested that teachers should “[d]isrupt” their students’ “either/or thinking” about sexuality and gender. App. to Pet. for Cert. 629a, 633a. In the Board’s view, these instructional directives helped advance its objective of “educational equity”—that is, viewing each student’s “[g]ender identity and expression,” “[s]exual orientation,” and other specified “individual characteristics as valuable.”…
The curriculum itself also betrays an attempt to impose ideological conformity with specific views on sexuality and gender. The storybooks are, “[l]ike many books targeted at young children, . . . unmistakably normative.” … [Emphasis added.]
The Board’s exclusion of traditional religious views, coupled with a curriculum that “pressure[s students] to conform,” Yoder, 406 U. S., at 211, constitute an impermissible attempt to “standardize” the views of students … [Emphasis added.]
The Board may not insulate itself from First Amendment liability by “weav[ing]” religiously offensive material throughout its curriculum and thereby significantly increase the difficulty and complexity of remedying parents’ constitutional injuries. Were it otherwise, the State could nullify parents’ First Amendment rights simply by saturating public schools’ core curricula with material that undermines “family decisions in the area of religious training.” Yoder, 406 U. S., at 231. The “Framers intended” for “free exercise of religion to flourish.” Espinoza, 591 U. S., at 497 (THOMAS, J., concurring). Insofar as schools or boards attempt to employ their curricula to interfere with religious exercise, courts should carefully police such “ingenious defiance of the Constitution” no less than they do in other contexts. [Emphasis added.]
These SCOTUS rulings are now the law of the land and provide critical support for parents. While Minnesota statute currently provides an opt-out option, parents find it completely inadequate and unsatisfactory, because schools “saturate the core curriculum with material that undermines family decisions in the area of religious training.” A recent Minnesota Public Radio interview with Iman Hassan, the Advocacy Director for Minnesota’s radical activist group, Gender Justice, recognized this. She called the ruling “a very, very radical change to legal jurisprudence.”
It will have a chilling effect on how school districts use books that create affirmative and diverse look[s] into literature for students to prepare themselves to become part of a civil community and become students that are prepared for the real world with diverse family structures.
We also are very nervous about the harm it will have. When we see students opt out, it creates, definitely, an internalization for students that are part of the community– LGBTQ+ community. What does it say when you don’t want to read Uncle Bobby’s Wedding…
The SCOTUS ruling in Mahmoud v. Taylor is about more than books. Parents cannot be forced to have their children exposed to material that violates their religious beliefs, and Gender Justice sees this.
Clearly the new Minnesota Health standards normalize gender ideological conformity that the SCOTUS ruling prohibits. In fact, the foundations of gender dominance have shifted dramatically.
In another sign of the times, the Department of Health & Human Services announced it will be defunding programs promoting radical gender ideology, sexually explicit material and medically inaccurate information currently funded under the cover of “teen pregnancy prevention.” The grooming of teens and pre-teens by left-wing nonprofits and programs is also a target under the HHS Department led by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
All this tells us is that now is the time to be extraordinarily vocal against Minnesota’s aggressive violation of our children. Minnesota is clinging stubbornly to its crumbling power, but it is on the wrong side of this issue and federal law. The standards commission is an appointed board, so elections have real consequences. But the tides are turning. Stay engaged. Be active. Share this article. Inform your friends. And above all, fight to protect your kids from this radical indoctrination.