This story is great.
A West Virginia high school student is filing an injunction against her principal, who she claims is threatening to punish her for speaking out against a factually inaccurate abstinence assembly at her school. Katelyn Campbell, who is the student body vice president at George Washington High School, alleges her principal threatened to call the college where she’s been accepted to report that she has “bad character.”
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But it didn’t end with a simple difference of opinion among Campbell and her principal. The high school senior alleges that Aulenbacher threatened to call Wellesley College, where Campbell has been accepted to study in the fall, after she spoke to the press about her objections to the assembly. According to Campbell, her principal said, “How would you feel if I called your college and told them what bad character you have and what a backstabber you are?” Campbell alleges that Aulenbacher continued to berate her in his office, eventually driving her to tears. “He threatened me and my future in order to put forth his own personal agenda and make teachers and students feel they cant speak up because of fear of retaliation,” she said of the incident.
Despite being threatened, Campbell is not backing down. She hopes that filing this injunction will protect her freedom of speech to continue advocating for comprehensive sexual health resources for West Virginia’s youth. “West Virginia has the ninth highest pregnancy rate in the U.S.,” Campbell told the Gazette. “I should be able to be informed in my school what birth control is and how I can get it. With the policy at GW, under George Aulenbacher, information about birth control and sex education has been suppressed. Our nurse wasn’t allowed to talk about where you can get birth control for free in the city of Charleston.”
So, first and foremost, the kids are OK. Despite adults lying to them, they know what’s up. That’s true of sex. It’s true of drugs. It’s true of plenty of life. Lying to people you’re trying to educate can’t work out well.
But here, I want to say that even if you accept the principal’s and the assembly speaker’s notion that abstinence only education will lead to people waiting until marriage to have sex, and you think that’s a good thing that it’s not a good thing to teach.
Imagine someone who attended that assembly and waited until they were married to have sex because of it. Wouldn’t they still want to know how effective birth control was for real? If their partner had had sex before they married our hypothetical student and had got a disease, wouldn’t they want to know what was effective at preventing getting it? I mean this seems pretty basic. If you keep that sort of info from them until they’re married, it doesn’t just magically become available on their wedding night.