Following a meeting held in Vilnius between Cardinal Audrys J. Backis and Arturas Zuokas, respectively archbishop and mayor of the Lithuanian capital, in recent days, a UN-backed programme of sex education for adolescents was cancelled. The meeting was the result of a petition addressed by over a hundred parents and by the archbishop himself to Zuokas, who is appealed to “in his role as mayor and as father of a family”. Cardinal Backis urged the mayor to “reconsider the implementation” of the programme, which “provides inappropriate sex education and demolishes traditional family values”. According to the cardinal, the programme “ignores the rights and responsibilities of parents prescribed by the law of the Lithuanian Republic”. The psychologists and educationalists present at the meeting also expressed misgivings about the programme. The mayor of Vilnius, for his part, criticised it for its “tendency to marginalize the educational role of parents” and denounced its “educational approach that entails treating the question in almost the same way for children at the age of ten as for young adults over the age of twenty”. For these reasons the programme was cancelled.
