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In the curriculum for Grade 8, there’s a section that talks about thinking in advance about sexual activity and what your limits are and why. “I would be less likely to be caught off guard and have to react without having thought through the options and possible consequences,” an imaginary student says in a sample dialogue, on the value of thinking ahead.

In the hands of the protest organizers, this is an exhortation to “make a personal sexual plan” and stick to it, which sounds like teachers will lecture 13-year-olds on the importance of really mastering French kissing before they hazard light petting. This makes exactly as much sense as saying the curriculum promotes eating junk food and being indolent by talking about them in the context of not doing them.

Being this dishonest is hard work. The curriculum’s critics have to have read the document closely: it’s 245 pages long and the sex parts are pretty brief and scattered across it. They’ve thought about which pieces to cherry-pick and distort.

There’s a section in Grade 7 about how you can catch HIV, including sex and using needle drugs. The curriculum points out that various kinds of sexual activity can transit the virus. And so, the demonstrators say, Ontario will be teaching 12-year-olds about anal sex.

Yes: in exactly the same terms as we’ll teach them about shooting heroin (anal sex comes up nowhere else in the curriculum). Do they say that Ontario will be teaching kids how to use hard drugs? No, because that would be laughable and nobody would believe it, though it’s exactly as true as saying we’re teaching them anal sex.

This isn’t honest disagreement about difficult passages or even innocent confusion. It’s lying about what’s being taught to do political damage to the Liberal government — at the expense of the children the demonstrators say they’re desperate to protect.