Monica Leal Cline was graduating college at the peak of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1990s. At the time, she wasn’t a Christian but was “driven by compassion” and wanted to play a part in bettering society.
It was that set of circumstances that led Leal Cline to begin volunteering with an LGBT organization working to raise awareness about HIV prevention — a step that set her trajectory for many years to come, until her career was interrupted by an unexpected pregnancy.
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“In my eyes, at the time, with my very worldly worldview … I thought it was fantastic,” she recently explained on CBN’s “Quick Start” podcast. “I’d never seen anything like it. It was bold. And they were, in my eyes, making a difference. The government was funding this, so I fully trusted it.”
In the succeeding years, Leal Cline said she allowed herself “to be groomed” by leftist organizations — including Planned Parenthood — into teaching sex education, first in minority and at-risk communities and eventually with children after she moved from a volunteer to a paid position.
“They quickly hired me on as soon as I graduated, and then they let me know that it was time to learn how to share this message with children, and they had let me know that children were also sexually active, and that they needed this education to keep them from getting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases or becoming pregnant,” she recalled. “So they sent me to Planned Parenthood, where the director of sex education of the greater Texas area … sat me down and became my mentor.”
Leal Cline said the Planned Parenthood director trained her in how to talk about sex with minors.
After a decade in the field, Leal Cline began to realize not only the incredible damage such sex education was doing to children but also how the industry’s philosophy “was permeating vulnerable populations” and “how they were grooming people who were very vulnerable, not only to educate them within the community but also to even recruit them into working with the agency.”
“They knew — as well as the funders knew — that if this education was being taught by people in the community to people in the community, then they would be more likely to use those services,” she said. “It was all under the guise that we would be helping the community. But in reality, many years later, I began to see things differently, and I began to realize we were just slowly killing off these communities.”
This is certainly not an abstract issue.
In mid-September, a popular Instagram user, licensed clinical professional counselor Casey Tanner, using the handle “@queersextherapy,” faced backlash over a since-deleted post in which she encouraged talking to children about the “pursuit of pleasure.”
A sex education book, which has since been removed from Amazon, suggested parents invite their young children “into bed” to watch as they engage with one another sexually.
“A child should be gradually introduced to the ordinary mechanics of love-making and allowed to enter into the parent’s circle of love,” reportedly wrote Ana Leblanc in her book, Sex Education for 8-12-Year-Olds: Kids Book for Good Parents. “Instead of being shut out completely and left to wonder how daddy and mommy do it.”
Additionally, educators from a school district in Southern California are reportedly teaching children through health education textbooks that there are 10 sexual orientations and eight genders. The orientations include androsexual, demisexual, polysexual, and pansexual, among others.
What changed?
As for Leal Cline, it wasn’t until she found herself with an unplanned pregnancy that she began to see the havoc this kind of content was wreaking on younger generations.
At the time, she was so inculcated in the world of sex education she believed abortion was her only option. In her mind, it was a black-and-white issue: You get pregnant, you get an abortion, you move on.
“It was really someone very close to me from my past that humanized my child and I eventually decided to cancel that abortion and have my son and did become a single mom,” she said, acknowledging that it was hard, especially when she struggled financially without the support of her parents.
Ultimately, her family came to her aid.
“Once I became a mom, I was a fully committed mom,” Leal Cline explained. “Everything changed, even to the point of finally deciding … to become a Christian when my son was just one year old.”
“When that happened, I started to see things very differently,” she continued. “All of the sudden, I started listening to the kids [in my sex education classes] in a very different way.”
Listen to Leal Cline tell her story:
During one of those classroom sessions, a young girl raised her hand to ask a question: she wanted to know how she could better engage in a sexual activity with a boy she did not want to participate in but felt as if she had no other choice. The girl asked her explicit question plainly and confidently as her classmates listened on, unfazed by the graphic nature of her inquiry.
Because of the sex education the child had been taught, she did not know abstinence was a choice.
“The Lord started to show me how this education was truly harming the children, how it was also harming all of the families in these communities,” Leal Cline said.
She had been — at the behest of Planned Parenthood and other secular organizations — meeting children in the midst of their behavior, teaching them how to engage sexually, use condoms, and obtain abortions, should they become pregnant, rather than revealing to them that they had other options.
“When I became a Christian,” Leal Cline said, “I realized that God met me where I was at and He didn’t give me ‘risk reduction.’ He actually said, ‘I want you to have an abundant life. I want better for you. You are valuable.’ I started realizing that that’s what I needed to share with the community and with these children. … To meet them where they’re at, so not to judge them, not to be rude to them or anything like that, but to meet them where they’re at, but then love them and share Christ with them, so that they can begin a new life.”
Leal Cline has since started her own ministry, It Takes a Family, in which she raises awareness about what sex education actually entails, alerting parents to the things their children are often being taught in the classroom. To learn more about her work and to find resources, click here.
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