…For revolutionaries, the failure to sexualize childhood explains why the sexual revolution has not advanced further. Therefore, many are adopting a new brand of comprehensive sex education that begins earlier and encourages actual sexual activity. Revolutionaries peddle early sex education under the relatively moderate banners of halting pregnancy, preventing abuse, and stopping sexually transmitted diseases. Their ultimate goal is for public institutions to normalize treating children as sexual beings. Early sex education, they hope, will affect the habits and affections of children and shape their actions and attitudes.

Our tech giants are encouraging childhood sexuality. Netflix’s recent Cuties may do for childhood sexuality what Will and Grace did for same-sex marriage. Who can forget “Desmond is Amazing”—the story of an eleven-year-old drag performer? Advertisers long ago abandoned the idea that pre-teens are sexually innocent.

And age of consent laws are changing. California is the leader. While it remains a crime, for instance, for an eighteen-year-old to have sex with a twelve-year-old, judges can now call such sex voluntary but not consensual and lower the penalty for the perpetrator (as long as the age gap is ten years or less). Thus, legal support for maintaining the sexual innocence of children is eroding. Soon enough, age of consent laws will fall into desuetude, much like earlier forms of sexual regulation.

The 2020 Democratic platform supports “medically accurate, LGBTQ+ inclusive, age-appropriate sex education.” In Boise, the mayor’s task force on building a more equitable city aims to “establish sex education at pre-k level–12th” grade. This is happening throughout the country. Biden’s campaign website promises to pursue universal pre-K education for all American three- and four-year-olds. Will that include sex education? More than half the states mandate sex education in Kindergarten. State boards of education are also blessing such approaches.

The new comprehensive sex ed emphasizes tolerance for sexual fluidity and alternative lifestyles. It instructs young kids in “sexual pleasure, their nascent sexual bodies, and sexual intimacy,” as one writer puts it. Kids can learn about consent by practicing sexual intimacy in grade school, as they have done in Germany. As schools adopt early sexual education, sexual intimacy will be taught earlier and exploration of the body will go from discouraged, to optional, to encouraged. If children are by nature sexual beings, expect their sexual nature to be revealed ever earlier: If children are innately sexual, revolutionaries can never say “that is too early….”

The above comes from a Sept. 24 story in First Things.