Planned Parenthood sex ed executive director advocates for porn, calls children ‘sexual’

Bill Taverner, Executive Director at the Center for Sex Education, has claimed that children are born “sexual,” according to Fox News Digital. The Center for Sex Education is Planned Parenthood of Northern, Central, and Southern New Jersey’s sex education arm, and hosts the largest national conference for sex educators.

“[W]e are all sexual beings from birth until death,” Taverner said in a 2015 interview. This position is in alignment with Planned Parenthood’s. That organization’s “Fundamentals of Teaching Sexuality” pamphlet states, “Sexuality is a central, complex, and lifelong aspect of being human,” and, “Sexuality is a part of life through all the ages and stages. Babies, elders, and everyone in between can experience sexuality.”

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In a 2012 interview, Taverner said that children of a certain age should be taught about pornography in sex ed.

“I think that there’s this yearning for information that young people have that… hasn’t changed. [The] delivery of how we get information is quite different. I think that the internet is a major influence on how people learn about sexuality,” he said. “There’s access to erotica, pornography. That was very different for young people 30 years ago. It’s certainly not as accessible, certainly not as instantaneous. So there’s a lot of information that is useful.” 

“Some of it is wrong,” the interviewer, a member of the National Organization for Women, interrupted.

“Some of it is wrong, a lot of it is wrong,” Taverner replied. “But there’s good [pornography] out there as well.”

In a 2021 interview, Taverner posited that teaching about pornography in schools is similar to teaching kids how to use condoms. “If we talk about porn, is it going to make people want to watch it? Which is the same faulty kind of premise as if we teach about condoms, it’s going to make people want to have sex with condoms, or maybe that’s not a bad thing.”

He continued: “[I]f this is what they’re doing with their cell phones and tablets and their laptops, then we need to shift our education and stop doing the banana on a condom and think that, you know, we’ve done our thing. So we need to present opportunities for young people to think about … their values. You know, let’s do an opinion activity. Let’s do the ethics of porn. And that’s not to say that there’s a right answer.”