The Archdiocese, New York’s Shittiest Landlord, Bans Public School Tenants from Teaching Sex Ed

If the Catholic Church was your landlord, it almost definitely wouldn’t let you masturbate in your apartment. You’d have to sneak away to a public park, like some sort of deviant. The Catholic Church, in other words, would make a pretty overbearing landlord, something that is being proved right now in New York, where public schools renting classroom space from the Church are being forced to teach sex-ed off site in order to accommodate the Church’s disdain for the human organism.

According to the Daily News, city officials have a longstanding (but little-known) agreement with the Church: in exchange for classroom space, public school teachers must take their students off site for sex ed classes. The city has rented space in parochial schools since 2005, and, all told, will pay about $27 million in rent for 40 public schools housed in buildings owned by the Archdiocese of New York.

The ban on sex ed has been in place since the city struck its agreement with the archdiocese, but students and teachers are all generally irked that they can’t get through the uncomfortable middle school march through the human reproductive system without first embarking on a march of shame out of their regular classrooms and into some designated “sex learning” zone. In 1987, New York State law began requiring city schools to teach lessons on HIV/AIDS to every student in each grade at least once a year. In 2011, city officials also mandated a two-pronged sex ed program for public school students — sex ed lessons were required for students in either sixth or seventh grade, then again in either ninth or tenth.

The Diocese of New York has insisted that it’s perfectly justified in banishing sex ed from its properties, and while that’s probably true, it doesn’t make the Church seem like any less of an uncharitable dick, albeit one that’s crowned with a fancy, gold-embroidered mitre.

[NYDN]