By Journalist Sweety Patel (OU)
Representative Jolliff From TU introduced the “Mandatory Sex Education” Act of 2023 (TU-502). This bill aims to provide mandatory sex education for grade schools in Oklahoma.
The Importance of Access to Comprehensive Sex Education was published by the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2023. This article dives into the importance of having sex education in today’s world. They discuss how learning about sexuality can help individuals understand themselves and their connection to the world whether this be with their community, peers, mental health, romantic partners, or family members.
The author came up with this bill as she was asked to do a research paper on a controversial piece by a professor. Via her research on this topic, she learned about how sex education is still deficient on the totem pole of topics that are taught. In the author’s case, she had a positive experience with sex education through high school, but when she talked to other people she found out that it wasn’t the case for everyone.
“A lot of the talk about a disease prevention has some pretty derogatory language towards homosexuality and I always just thought that that was really disturbing to me because you’re looking down on those groups and that always bothers me”, said Jolliff.
With Oklahoma being very low on the list of states that are educated, paying attention to if and what type of sex education is given is important. This bill aims to help raise awareness about the topic.
“Kids need to know these things and sex is a part of life, Most people will have sex in in their lifetime and I think people need to know what they’re getting into, the precautions they need to know, there things can be scary and I think that we need to have talks about consent in school and we need to have talks about disease prevention and we need to have talks about different sexuality so I think that it’s just a very it’s an important topic that I think everyone should be included in”, said Jolliff.