For immigrants, is sex education a particularly touchy subject?
In her column in this week’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Susan Paynter asserts that when we talk about sex education in America, we often forget to talk about a group that occasionally finds the subject of sex ed a bit, er, touchy: recent immigrants. Paynter tells the story of two families from Iran, both struggling to figure out what stance to take about their children’s sex education. Gov. Chris Gregoire recently signed into law the Healthy Youth Act, requiring that, as Paynter puts it, “if schools teach sex ed, it must be fully informational, including contraception.” (Would that our federal government endorsed a similar policy.) Sure, parents have the option of making their kids “opt out” of sex ed, but families like the ones she describes don’t want to completely dismiss the idea — they’re just trying to figure out how to adjust from a culture where talking about sex is taboo to one where sex is everywhere. Someireh Amirfaiz, originally from Iran, is one of the people Paynter pro
