On Tuesday, the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) required Wyoming’s Department of Health (WDH) to delete gender ideology from the curriculum that is supposed to promote personal responsibility.
It’s an example of how well-meaning government programs can be hijacked for uses that were never authorized or anticipated. The story goes back at least a quarter-century. I wrote about it on these pages last June.
In 1996, Congress passed – overwhelmingly - the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. The backbone of this legislation was its recognition of the numerous harms to children and society when children are born out of wedlock. It found that:
· Medically speaking, children born out of wedlock have a lower average birth weight.
· Domestically, they are more likely to suffer child abuse and neglect.
· Educationally, these children tend to have lower cognitive scores.
· Socially, they are more likely to conceive children out of wedlock and less likely to have intact marriages themselves.
· Fiscally, all these factors mean that children born out of wedlock are three times more likely to be on public welfare.
To prevent the harms that affect children born out of wedlock, the federal government has created numerous programs. Among these are Title V Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage, Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, Sexual-Risk Avoidance Education, and the Personal Responsibility Education Program (PREP)—which is the subject of last Tuesday’s letter.
As the name implies, PREP was created to teach about the birds and the bees. Despite the hyper-sexualization of everything, adolescents supposedly don’t know enough about sex. So, PREP pays the Wyoming Department of Health to give them “The Talk.” Every year, this federal program hands out $55.25 million to teach where babies come from.
The federal Administration for Children and Families (ACF) is supposed to ensure that the WDH uses the grant money according to the law (42 USC 713). So, last April, it asked Wyoming’s Department of Health to submit its PREP curriculum for review.
The report card came back this week. WDH got sent to the principal’s office.
The ACF spent two pages pointing out that significant portions of the curriculum had nothing to do with birds and bees. Instead, the WDH curriculum jumped into the culture wars and propounded gender ideology.
For instance, the WDH curriculum teaches that some people “may identify as male, female, or transgender.” It then defines “transgender” as “different from the sex they were assigned at birth.” One wonders if the sex assigned at birth has anything to do with impregnating or being impregnated.
In another instance, the curriculum includes a classroom exercise where students are told to role-play “Lee and Lee as a couple without specifying genders, by not differentiating between the two Lee’s (sic) lines using stereotypical male and female voices, and by leaving it open as to which Lee is pressuring and which does not want to have sex.”
Later on, the teachers’ manual makes it clear that such role-playing is not optional. “Let students know that every student in the class will, at some point, be doing a role-play with a classmate of a different gender and with a classmate of the same gender.”
After these and other examples, the federal Administration for Children and Families admonished the WDH to stay on task.
PREP is “a program that is designed to educate adolescents on—(i) both abstinence and contraception for the prevention of pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections…” As such, “The statute neither requires, supports, or authorizes teaching students that gender identity is distinct from biological sex.”
The ACF concluded that “gender ideology is outside the scope of the authorizing statute and any expenditures associated with gender ideology are not allowable, reasonable, or allocable to the PREP grant.” Thus, “Wyoming’s current PREP curricula and program materials are out of compliance with the PREP statute and HHS regulations and must be modified.”
It gave the WDH until October 27, 2025 to “remove all content concerning gender ideology from its curricula.” And clarifies: “We are not setting forth all the problematic language in this letter but are providing a general description and examples so that you understand what needs to be removed from the curricula and program materials.”
Parents should be grateful that the feds are reigning in a hijacked program. They should also be skeptical the next time some politician assures them that such things “aren’t happening here.”
Jonathan Lange is a Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod pastor in Evanston and Kemmerer and serves the Wyoming Pastors Network. Follow his blog at https://jonathanlange.substack.com/. Email: JLange64@protonmail.com.
