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"When I see a statement to Grade 6, and a teacher is telling them, 'You can explore yourself and it's not harmful,' well, we know a lot of researchers that say masturbation is harmful when it goes beyond a certain level," Marish said to astonishment from around the table.According to Marish, masturbating is an addiction, and when kids start doing it they don't stop there! They become sex-crazed monsters intent on fornicating with everyone they see. One has to wonder if he thinks that of all masturbation or only of masturbation given the tepid approval of a public-school teacher."They're gonna get even more and more charged, and they're gonna start becoming sex offenders," he said, citing a "November 24, 2015" case from the UK wherein a young boy raped a classmate after a sex ed class.
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Marish says he "absolutely" agrees that there's a difference between promoting and teaching about sex, before essentially disagreeing completely. The new sex ed curriculum is "promoting [sex], because there are adults that are not able to control themselves."Here, Marish has deployed the time-honoured tradition of putting two things together and pretending they're connected. "This is promoting sex rather than teaching about sex" is not at all related to the idea that "there are adults who can't or don't control themselves sexually." Those are just two separate ideas floating in the universe, like "my favourite day is Thursday" and "chocolate is sweet." While those two things may be true, I can't reasonably argue that chocolate is sweet because my favourite day is Thursday."There are resources out there that we all receive in our emails, that talks about using vegetables to try masturbation, or doing this or doing that. What kind of a classroom would that be?" (8:30)
Are there? Do we all receive these "resources"? Is he talking about porn?
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One of the most upsetting aspects of this panel has to be that Michael Coren, formerly a reliable arch-conservative, was forcefully and consistently on the side of reason. He took a well-placed shot at the Catholic church from which he's only recently converted (to Anglicanism, so he's not exactly starting an anarcho-atheist commune), he called out the homophobia undergirding the curriculum's opposition, and he repeatedly pointed to the curriculum as fact-based and mainstream. He even cited Europe as an example to follow, for god's sake.Is Coren finally shedding the hideous pupa of conservatism to reveal his beautiful socialist butterfly wings? Only time will tell.It's cheap and easy to assume that people who disagree with you are intellectually lazy or inferior, and if your aim is to build some sort of consensus or working relationship across ideological lines, it's not helpful. But Marish's statements, which echo larger concerns in the anti-sex-ed-reform movement, just don't make sense. Faced with opposition so misinformed—or, perhaps worse, willfully ignorant—it's hard to know what to do other than throw up your hands in despair and keep teaching kids about sex.Hopefully the kids educated under this new regime won't be so prudish about using vegetables as teaching instruments.Follow Tannara Yelland on Twitter.