KNOXVILLE, Tennessee, January 27, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Catholic Diocese of Knoxville has teamed up with a local mom to spread awareness of a Planned Parenthood “abstinence” class that one teen said taught anything but.
Kym McCormick learned of Planned Parenthood’s teaching material after her daughter Alaynna, a student at Hardin Valley Academy, came home last October in tears over the material presented in the class.
“I’m tired of everyone treating us like animals who can’t control themselves,” Alaynna told her mother, according to an East Tennessee Catholic News (ECTN) report. McCormick’s outrage increased after she discovered extremely explicit material directed at teens on Planned Parenthood’s website.
“Very clearly [on one of the Planned Parenthood websites], it says, ‘There is no right or wrong time to become sexually active.’ And a little bit further down, it says, ‘There are no right or wrong answers to these questions,’” Mrs. McCormick told the Catholic newspaper. “I think there are a lot of parents who believe there are right and wrong answers.”
Planned Parenthood’s website, in addition to giving explicit details on masturbation and anal sex, admonishes parents to “give babies a sense of themselves, their sexuality, and their bodies from birth” and to teach children starting at seven years old that “that people experience sexual pleasure in a number of different ways.”
McCormick said her daughter complained that a class purported to discuss abstinence, but “not one time did they say anything about abstinence.” ECTN reports that one element of Planned Parenthood’s abstinence program is to describe “outercourse” — which encompasses virtually all forms of sexual contact short of intercourse. McCormick said her attempts to discuss the material with Knox County high school officials have often been ignored.
The diocese announced it would host a meeting Thursday where Alaynna would share information on Planned Parenthood’s program – of which her parents had been given no prior notice. A Metro Pulse report claimed that a member of the school’s faculty forgot to send home the parental notification letters for the class, taught as part of the state’s required Lifetime Wellness curriculum.
Ginny Winters, a community health educator for Planned Parenthood’s Knoxville office, told Metro Pulse that Planned Parenthood is “absolutely not promoting sex” and claimed the sophomore girl was merely upset that the class controverted information she had been taught on natural family planning.
Knoxville Bishop Richard F. Stika has written mayor Bill Haslam expressing his opposition to the abortion giant’s teaching presence, calling their curriculum “a thinly veiled attempt to legitimize and promote its deadly agenda.”