Let’s Keep Talking About Sex: Challenging Justifications for Limiting Comprehensive Sexuality Education

There have been strong and passionate objections to the teaching, learning and educating on this subject in schools. These campaigns were centred around arguments that the content of CSE curriculum—women’s sexuality and diversity in sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sexual characteristics (SOGIESC)—was not only inappropriate but was harmful. These protests and campaigns against CSE are slowly starting to make their way to the courtroom. These legal cases can range from procedural dimensions of CSE, such as property zoning for protests, to demands for exemptions to CSE to the removal of specific content on the basis of freedom of religion and belief or the right of parents to oversee their child’s education. Globally, there are diverging outcomes to these cases.

This article dives into these debates by examining an understudied feature of both the discourse and the litigation on CSE: justification. The rights at stake in CSE are not absolute and the state is permitted to incur on them to achieve competing objectives. If it is established that mandatory CSE violates religious freedom rights or parental rights over education, or if a court accepts that content restrictions are a breach of equality, the court must still evaluate if that violation or breach is justified. This article considers whether restrictions on the mandatory nature and the comprehensiveness of CSE could be justified. It concludes that it cannot. Adopting a contextual and relational approach to justification, grounded in feminist theory, exposes weaknesses embedded in the arguments that religious or parental rights are harmed by CSE and brings into sharp focus the significance of the equality wrongs in limiting CSE.