A child is a human being, and, as such, is a rights bearing individual. Stop.
A child has the same fundamental rights as an adult. Point.
All children are people whose rights are not dependent on the desires of anyone else, including their parents. End of story.
So, do we all have that simple lesson down? I can quiz everyone and they’ll get 100%? No? There are people in Quebec who still have it wrong? Well, damn. Time to blog angrily about it then.
Sexual education is one of my personal crusades. The debates over American abstinence-only education during the Bush era drew me in and reflections on my own lack of sex ed opened my eyes to see how disastrously and ineptly handled the topic is in Canada. My ideals surrounding sexual education are tied up with my beliefs concerning issues such as feminism, human rights and diverse sexualities. Hence why when Ontario announced that it had revamped its sexual education curriculum for public schools and the changes were good, I wanted to weep for joy! A Canadian government doing something progressive and concrete? Such incidents have been in a sorry lack of supply in my country lately.
The rise of Obama to power in the US was supposed to represent a new direction in US domestic and international policy, shifting away from Evangelical Christian based morality. Unfortunately, those hoping for more progressive and innovative policies have been sorely disappointed. Which leads me to this lovely commercial recently released (in Fall 2009) by the Obama administration (in specific, the US Department of Health and Human Services).
Maggie Gordon's Blog 