Cardinal exhorts parents to demand removal of controversial textbooks on sexuality

Mexico City, Mexico, Sep 13, 2006 / 22:00 pm

Cardinal Juan Sandoval Iniquez of Guadalajara, Mexico, has called on parents “not to let their guard down” and to demand that the removal of high school biology textbooks that encourage sexual permissiveness among teenagers.

In his column for the diocesan newspaper, “El Semanario,” the cardinal denounced officials from the Department of Education for distributing the textbooks at high schools and said they “are already causing harm” to minors, inciting them to permissiveness and confusing them “about values related to sex and marriage.”

The cardinal said the State is using secularism to justify the action.  He warned that “a secularist State cannot ignore moral values or trample upon natural rights.”

He noted that a secular State is one in which no specific religion is promoted. However, the state, “would do well to respect the sentiments and moral values of a people that, as in Mexico, is majority Catholic.”  He reiterated as well that the rights of parents to educate their children “is not a religious issue, it is an issue of natural law.”

The cardinal said such problems exist in Mexico because of remnants of “totalitarian practices, similar to those of a dictatorship,” that are still present in the government, and because the “State is weak and under pressure from international groups opposed to life, the family, and morality.”

He urged parents to demand the textbooks be withdrawn and that children be given “a true sexual education” in which they are not only informed but also taught to “correctly and morally appreciate that gift which God has given to all for the transmission of life, for love expressed fully in marriage.”