Facts of life: The case for sexuality education

Read the sidebar article on church-based sex ed

When Chicka Merino, a sex education teacher in Minneapolis, gave me the chance to meet with one of her classes, I couldn’t resist asking the teenagers a question: What has been the most memorable part of sex ed for you? The first hand to go up belonged to a Somali-American girl in a gray hijab whom I’ll call Amina.

“For me,” she said, “it was probably the day when Chicka made us play with condoms. I’d never seen or touched one. We opened them up, took them out of their packages and blew them up like balloons. Then we tossed them around the room. . . . I learned that a condom is just a thing. I’m not scared of it anymore.”