Planned Parenthood Center for Sex Education Executive Director Bill Taverner is facing severe backlash after clips surfaced of him claiming that babies are “sexual from birth” and that children should be given pornography.
Taverner, who has spoken about sex education at congressional hearings, claimed in 2015 that “we are all sexual beings from birth to death.”
“[We have] in our society, an assumption of asexuality of people with intellectual disabilities,” Taverner said. “It’s a myth that’s perpetuated, and really we are all sexual beings from birth until death.”
Planned Parenthood ran with Taverner’s extremist and creepy take, writing in a guide to sexual education called “Fundamentals of Teaching Sexuality” that “sexuality is a part of life through all the ages and stages.”
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“Babies, elders, and everyone in between can experience sexuality,” the guide added, according to a report from the Daily Mail.
Around 2012, according to a report from Fox News, Taverner said “children of a certain age should be taught about pornography in sex education,” the article points out that this is a position he has maintained up until at least February 2021.
Taverner said, “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.”
The interviewer interjected that “some of it is wrong.”
“Some of it is wrong, a lot of it is wrong,” Taverner said. “But there’s good stuff out there as well.”
When reached by Fox News, Taverner claimed that “teaching about pornography in classrooms is similar 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,” Taverner said.
Taverner continued, “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.”
Additonally, Taverner has advocated for sex education to begin in Kindergarten.
“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 said.
“Age-appropriate sex education is so important,” he said. “And we have to let our experts guide us.”