California implemented the “California Healthy Youth Act,” also known as the sex education law, in January 2016. However, it was only after several years that people discovered the falsehood behind it – that 89% of parents actually did not support schools teaching sex education classes.
The grassroots organization “Settlement Project” held a community event in Orange County on the 13th of this month to discuss how to eliminate the imposition of “woke” ideology in California’s school education. Brenda Lebsack, a member of the Santa Ana Unified School District board, was one of the nine guest speakers at the event. She mentioned that she reached out to a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who conducted the aforementioned survey and obtained the survey questionnaire. Shockingly, there was not a single question about gender identity in the survey, nor did it touch on the controversies surrounding the California Department of Education’s promotion of sex education curriculum.
Lebsack has been involved in public education for 25 years, teaching alternative education, elementary education, special education in middle and high schools, and currently teaching adaptive physical education. She has also worked as a peace officer for the Orange County juvenile probation department.
In January 2016, California enacted the AB329 law, known as the “California Healthy Youth Act,” proposed by current Secretary of State Shirley Weber. It mandates the teaching of comprehensive sexual health education once in grades 7-12 in middle and high schools and optionally in grades K-6.
In 2018, the State Department of Education introduced the draft “California Health Framework.” Lebsack, who was then a school board member in the City of Orange Unified School District, was surprised by many aspects of the draft, stating that definitions, such as those related to the LGBTQ community, were continuously expanding and evolving without boundaries.
“We had a 60-day public comment period. I provided community feedback and asked the California Department of Education if they could exclude ‘pedophilia’ or ‘minors’ from the evolving sexual orientations in the future, but they refused,” Lebsack said. She also pointed out a term she had never seen before – ‘spiritual abuse,’ defined as advocating for rigid gender roles using religion. She expressed her disbelief, noting that this was labeled as spiritual abuse, categorizing those who adhere to traditional gender beliefs as dangerous and harmful.
Lebsack mentioned that some books tell children that gender can change based on their feelings, promoting concepts like “gender fluidity” and polyamory. She immediately realized that parents were unaware of this type of education being imparted to their children and that it was crucial to inform the community about it, as even members of the school board were surprised by it.
“The school board held an emergency meeting to halt the sex education classes,” Lebsack mentioned. “During that meeting, union members wearing the union’s orange shirts read out the mandate to the board. Two days later, members of the ACLU sent threatening letters to every school board member, claiming that parents had no authority to decide their children’s curriculum in public schools.”
The draft of the “California Health Framework” also recommends providing gender identity guidelines to preschool to 3rd-grade students, informing them that gender is not limited to male and female but is a spectrum continuously expanding and infinite. Additionally, teaching gender and sexual orientation according to the framework is not bound by parental “opt-in” and “opt-out” policies.
The implementation of AB329 has been slow in various school districts, with the ACLU threatening districts, including through litigation. In the City of Orange Unified School District, a representative of the alliance stated that being a French community, 89% of California parents want their children to receive sexual education in schools.
Lebsack reached out to the professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who conducted the survey and obtained the questionnaire, which was a crucial basis for the passage of AB329. She discovered that the survey did not include questions regarding gender identity and did not contain many of the alarming concepts mentioned.
She emphasized that simply providing the option to “opt-out” of sex education classes is insufficient. These laws were passed based on false pretenses, bypassing adults to influence vulnerable children and alter societal attitudes.
In 2020, minority Republican members of the California legislature proposed SB673 to amend AB329, requiring parental “opt-in” for sexual health and HIV prevention education for grades below 7th. However, the proposal was prematurely terminated during the group discussion.
Looking back, Lebsack mentioned that SB673 received support from various religious denominations, though grassroots individuals did not fully comprehend it. Subsequently, the ACLU used another study on middle school drug prevention to conclude that parents did not want to “opt-in.” This finding was also unrelated to sex education or gender identity and did not represent elementary students.
Although both studies were unrelated to sex education issues, several organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Child Therapist Association (CTA), and the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), followed suit with the ACLU, citing the same “survey results.”