News and Opinion

Today's headlines focus on the matter noted in yesterday's post - that the government has watered down its own bill on future personal sex and relationship education by caving in to pressure from the religious schools lobby. The bill does advance the cause of good sex and relationship education by establishing for the first time certain requirements on all state schools to address issues of sex and relationships. However, the requirement to give sex education in a way that encourages the acceptance of sexual diversity and with information about abortion and contraception has now been qualified by an amendment that allows religious (faith) schools to teach such matters in accordance with their own religious ethos. A discussion between John Humphries and Ed Balls, Schools Secretary, on his amendment this morning brought out the problems. For example, a Catholic school (which already separates out and identifies its pupils as different from others, as believers in the 'one ...

Last night’s talk at Secular Hall was an unusual one – all about sexual pleasure. Well, not exactly, but about how one city’s health authority, Sheffield’s, pioneered work on promoting health education about the benefits of sexual pleasure for young people, amongst all the other dire warnings about the dangers of sex. Steve Slack talked about the pamphlet that led to a furore last summer (I must have been out of the country), with headlines in the papers like ‘an orgasm a day on the NHS’, or similar. He was right about one thing, that outside of explicitly pornographic material very few people are comfortable talking about sexual pleasure – despite it being the main reason most of us take part in sex and without which one has to wonder whether there would be a human race at all. Even in the world of humour, where comedians make frequent references to issues around sex, to much laughter, the humour always seems to rely on either straightforward smut or daring allusions to what we all kn...