Planned Parenthood director pushes ‘useful’ porn literacy, says kids are ‘sexual beings’ from birth

Bill Taverner, executive director of Planned Parenthood’s Center for Sex Education, is brazenly contending that children are born “sexual beings” while pushing for sex education beginning in Kindergarten and promoting porn literacy for certain ages.

Taverner has advocated for sex education at congressional briefings and is based out of Planned Parenthood’s office in New Jersey which provides training materials across the nation and hosts the largest conference for sex educators in the country.

This is nothing new for him. Tavernor commented back in 2015, “[We have] in our society, an assumption of asexuality of people with intellectual disabilities. It’s a myth that’s perpetuated, and really we are all sexual beings from birth until death.”

His position seems to be in line with Planned Parenthood’s viewpoint on sex education. A similar statement to Tavernor’s was found in a Planned Parenthood sex education document by Fox News.

In a guide titled “Fundamentals of Teaching Sexuality,” Planned Parenthood asserted that “sexuality is a part of life through all the ages and stages. Babies, elders, and everyone in between can experience sexuality.”

Somewhere around 2012, Taverner contended that children of a certain age should be taught about and exposed to pornography in sex education. Fox News determined that he has held that position up until at least February 2021.

During a 2012 interview, Taverner stated that some “erotica” was “useful.”

“I think that there’s this yearning for information that young people have that… hasn’t changed. [The] delivery of how we get information is quite different. I think that the Internet is a major influence on how people learn about sexuality. There’s access to erotica, pornography. That was very different for young people 30 years ago. It’s certainly not as accessible, certainly not as instantaneous. So there’s a lot of information that is useful,” he remarked at the time.

The person interviewing Tavernor interjected that “some of it is wrong.”

“Some of it is wrong, a lot of it is wrong,” Taverner deflected. “But there’s good stuff out there as well.”

According to Fox News, Taverner said in a 2021 interview that sex educators never wanted pornography to be the primary source of sex education. But he noted that it needs to adapt to modern times.

He outrageously claimed that teaching students about pornography was akin to instructing children on how to use a condom.

“There’s a resistance to… if we talk about porn, [some think] is it going to make people want to watch it. Which is the same faulty kind of premise as if we teach about condoms, it’s going to make people want to have sex with condoms, or maybe that’s not a bad thing,” he stated.

“Getting back to meeting people where they are, if this is what they’re doing with their cell phones and tablets and their laptops, then we need to shift our education and stop doing the banana on a condom and think that, you know, we’ve done our thing. So we need to present opportunities for young people to think about…, for example, their values. You know, let’s do an opinion activity. Let’s do the ethics of porn. And that’s not to say that there’s a right answer .”

He is evidently all for sex education for Kindergarteners as well.

“Sexuality education is not isolated to a particular point in a person’s life, it’s a continuous process. Young children are learning about sexuality from the attitudes their parents display… When we think of K-12 education… we may be talking about what makes a family, we may be talking about disease prevention… All of that sets the foundation for a basic understanding that is useful for further conversations when we’re talking about condoms… [and] pregnancy conversations,” he continued.

“Age-appropriate sex education is so important,” Taverner insisted. “And we have to let our experts guide us.”

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