Beware the anti-sex-ed backlash that boomerangs.

With thousands of anti-sex-ed protesters converging on Queen’s Park again, it’s worth asking what they really want. Not just what they say they want.

The sign speaks volumes: “My child, my choice.”

That’s the banner waved Sunday by many parents demanding the right to exempt their children from the updated curriculum. It’s also the name of an anti-sex-ed umbrella group that unites various ethnic, cultural and religious movements that wants parents empowered to shield their children from what’s taught in Ontario schools.

Thing is, they already can. In the spirit of reasonable accommodation, parents have long been permitted to withdraw their children from sex-ed classes they find objectionable.

Apparently that’s no longer enough. Now, the protest movement wants to prevent everyone else’s children from hearing the updated Health and Physical Education Curriculum — an update strongly supported by teachers in the public and separate school systems, and broadly supported by parents who want the best for their children.

When demands for “reasonable accommodation” become unreasonable, societies risk becoming unaccommodating. Hence the risk of blowback from an anti-sex-ed backlash.

To be clear, the protesters are not only demanding a right that they already have — an exemption from the curriculum — but are insisting that everyone else hew to their world views of sexuality, pedagogy and ideology. They want to water down a curriculum prepared by experts after years of deliberation and consultation in order to accommodate their own interpretation of sex education in 2015.

In other words, “My child, my choice” translates to: “Your child, no choice.”

Restricting choice and imposing morality has long been the currency of social conservatives — so-called so-cons — who believe their religious or social values can be imposed on a secular, liberal society, all these centuries after the separation of church and state. Whether it’s opposition to sex outside marriage or the rights of gays, lesbians and transgenders, the undercurrent of hostility and homophobia is unmistakable.

Look at any anti-sex-ed protest and behold the gay-baiting placards, the mockery of transgender issues, and the obsession with masturbation — as if schoolchildren will get hands-on instruction. The protests manifest a toxic blend of ignorance and intolerance, prejudice and paranoia.

For the record, masturbation is not part of the curriculum. It is, however, included in the so-called “teacher prompts” that equip instructors to answer questions if students raise the topic of masturbation, so that they aren’t caught flat-footed. The suggested answer for teachers, when asked, is that masturbation “is common and is not harmful and is one way of learning about your body.”

Critics of the curriculum are either opposed to sex-education outright, or hide behind the slogan that the update is not “age appropriate.” They call for more consultations, as if that would magically resolve matters.

At the most recent protest, the darling of the anti-sex-ed movement, MPP and recent PC leadership candidate Monte McNaughton once again took the microphone to proclaim his fidelity to the cause. Significantly, he brought “greetings” from Patrick Brown, the new leader he helped elect at last month’s Tory convention.

Both McNaughton and Brown have declared they would ditch the curriculum. But what would replace it?

How would they determine what is “age appropriate” in the age of sexting, cyberbullying and online pornography? Critics like McNaughton keep dodging the question, preferring to get down and dirty about particular sex acts without saying where they would redraw the line.

Public support goes up and down depending on how the issue is framed — inflammatory or informational. Recent internal polling for the government — which posed an uncontroversial question about “updating the sexual education curriculum to include healthy relationships, consent, online safety and the risks of ‘sexting’ ” — showed two-thirds of Ontarians supportive, with only one in 10 opposed.

Will the incipient sex-ed backlash take us backwards, toward a Kulturkampf that pits various cultures at war against one another? Can we agree to disagree without being discriminatory?

Keep a close eye on Brown, who assiduously courted social conservatives to become PC leader — marking himself as anti-abortion, anti-gay-marriage and anti-sex-ed. Will he continue to bank on wedge politics, or finally come clean — and call off McNaughton’s phony war?

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For too long, Brown and his so-con lieutenant have played both sides by flirting with the anti-sex-ed slogan, “My child, my choice.”

Now, it’s his party. His choice.

Martin Regg Cohn’s Ontario politics column appears Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. mcohn@thestar.ca , Twitter: @reggcohn

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