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Many of those at Tuesday’s protest said the government was introducing ideas like same sex relationships and masturbation too early for some kids, but others brandished signs with more extreme messages.

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Still, the knowledge of how it all works seemed to be passed on to me fairly successfully, and my wife and I have raised four children who also seem to be well informed about the birds and the bees. Only one of them is young enough to be exposed to the new Ontario sex education curriculum, although she would never read the thing I felt obliged to plough through, as it is mostly a clumsily didactic and dust-dry document. It’s pregnant — forgive the term — with instructions about the coddling of kids and has an obsession with physical and emotional safety, but the gender fluidity and oral and anal sex that its detractors have spoken of is hardly mentioned at all.

It’s almost 250 pages long and you have to read through forests of advice about not smoking, not doing drugs, eating vegetables and keeping fit before getting to the good bits. What is does do, however, is acknowledge that some children feel as if their physical bodies do not represent their psychological and sexual feelings and acknowledges that, whether parents approve or not, anal and oral sex take place. It’s more discussion and explanation than recommendation and indoctrination. In fact most of the curriculum is more banality than Bolshevism and while some of it is surprising to adult eyes, it’s not especially radical or misplaced.