New York Times Shocked: Parents Oppose ‘Porn Literacy’ In Schools

The New York Times rushed to defend a school counselor who taught first grade students about masturbation, instructed high school students about “porn literacy,” and said her “sex-positive” views should replace the Golden Rule. They went on to presented parent who opposed the teacher as manipulated, murder-minded pawns of inside-the-Beltway lobbyists.

On Thursday, the newspaper’s Style section featured a glowing portrait of Justine Ang Fonte, who had worked at the Dalton School. The Old Gray Lady summarized the story on Twitter: “Pornography literacy classes are supposed to teach students how to critically assess what they see on the screen. But when a sex-positive educator taught her curriculum at two elite New York City schools recently, some parents were outraged.”

Fonte showed first graders at Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School a cartoon describing masturbation. The animated feature shows an underage boy telling an adult, “Sometimes, I touch my penis, because it feels good.” An underage girl then tells the boy, “When I’m in my bath or Mom puts me to bed, I like to touch my vulva, too.”

Her high school presentation, “Pornography Literacy: An intersectional focus on mainstream porn,” became more explicit yet. As The Daily Wire’s Mairead McArdle reported:

About 120 juniors, girls and boys, at Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School were subjected to Fonte’s class, called “Pornography Literacy: An intersectional focus on mainstream porn,” which presented them with explicit material including slides.

Fonte’s class included material such as semi-nude women in bondage, porn genres including “incest-themed,” “barely legal,” and “kink and BDSM,” and the most searched pornography terms of 2019 including “creampie,” “anal,” and “gangbang.”

Parents initially heard about the objectionable first grade sex-ed classes last fall but were reportedly assured that they had “misinterpreted” what the class was about.

Parents learned about the presentations only because, due to COVID-19, many of the students watched the session on Zoom.

The readers of the New York Times would be none the wiser about Fonte’s content from reading the story. Their reporting contained not a word about her porn literacy session, but the Times reported editorialized, “While parents may not want to believe that their teenagers are viewing pornography, many of them probably are, on purpose or by accident.” Reporter Valeriya Safronova noted that sex education classes have “expanded” beyond pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) to “unhealthy relationships, body positivity, sexual orientation, reproductive justice and gender identity.” Pornography literacy classes like those taught by Fonte allegedly teach students “to critically assess what they see on the screen” and “deconstruct implicit gender roles.”

“Sex educators compare it to teaching math, or English,” the New York Times reported.

Fonte also minimized the scope of her primary school sex presentations.

“I equip them with a way that they can exercise body agency and consent, by knowing exactly what those parts are, what they are called, and how to take care of them.” Besides, technically “[t]he material for her first-grade class never used the term ‘masturbation,’” the Times reported. The assertion may be technically true but irrelevant: Fonte clearly showed 6- and 7-year-old children a video that described fondling their own genitals. Presumably, this kind of sophistry explains how so many reporters can insist K-12 schools don’t teach Critical Race Theory.

Fonte also said she merely taught the importance of consent, which she said contradicts and should replace the Golden Rule. “We’re still teaching the [G]olden [R]ule and we should be teaching the platinum rule: to treat others the way they want to be treated,” Fonte told the Times.

When parents rose up in outrage, the Times presented Fonte as a martyr. “Fonte weathered the recent attacks on her reputation, violent threats in her inbox and the experience of being doxxed,” the Times said. Fonte asserted that she had served her young charges nobly, but “it cost me my safety.”

In reality, parents objected to an overly explicit (and amoral) presentation being made to their children without their consent. One outraged parent told the New York Post, “It’s outrageous that the school is introducing pornography into a mainstream classroom and starting to indoctrinate kids. The goal of this is to disrupt families.”

That parent may not have known how right she was.

Former abortionist Carol Everett, who is now a pro-life advocate, has described how she used sex education classes to “sell abortion” to underage girls. “Sex education sells abortions, and we started in kindergarten,” she said. “You have to break down the natural modesty. You have to become the experts in their lives, and you have to separate them from their parents and their values.”

She explained that the first step begins in kindergarten by establishing that their parents’ nicknames for their private parts are not scientifically accurate, establishing sex education counselors as more knowledgeable than their family. “In kindergarten, they just put the kids in a circle, and they ask a very simple question: What do you say to call your private parts?” Since families use different nicknames, “by the time you reach the third or fourth child, it is clear to those children that their parents don’t know” the anatomically correct names of their genitalia. “But we did.”

“We’d done it,” she said. “We’d broken down the natural modesty, and we were becoming the sexperts in their lives.”

During a later sex education talk which she gave about the time the schoolchildren reached the onset of puberty, she’d ask girls whether their parents would help them get birth control if they began having sex. If not, she told them, “‘Don’t worry about that: Here’s my card.’ This is the sad part: The next day, those girls would call.”

Rather than say parents should have some say over the most intimate aspects of their children’s education at a school where they’re paying $47,000 a year, the New York Times quoted another sex education activist who said parents should “acknowledge young people’s rights to have this information.”

The Times concluded that “Fonte is planning to write children’s books” in order to “spread her message far beyond the Upper East Side.” Parents have the choice whether to purchase books for their children. Shouldn’t they have the same choice over their minor children’s education? Isn’t that the definition of “consent”?

The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

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