Among the many crusades which gathered new steam during the 1960s was the crusade to
spread sex education into the public schools and through other channels.
Among the first acts of the Office of Economic Opportunity in 1964 was making a grant to
a Planned Parenthood unit in Texas.
From a total expenditure of less than half a million dollars in fiscal year 1965, O.E.O.
expanded its financing of sex education more than five-fold by fiscal year 1966.
Not only did the federal government begin in the late 1960s to greatly expand its own
expenditures on sex education—often known as “family planning” or by other euphemisms—but
it also began to mandate that states promote such programs as well.
The number of patients served by “family planning” clinics increased approximately
five-fold between 1968 and 1978.
As early as 1968, the National Education Association in its NEA Journal was saying that a federally
funded project in a Washington school “demonstrated the need for sex education as an integral
part of school curriculum beginning in the early grades.”
Some of the pregnant girls counseled “reported feeling that if they had studied human sexuality
with understanding teachers during elementary school, they would not have become pregnant.”
Sex education and “family planning” clinics—so-called despite their being established to prevent
having babies—not only grew rapidly but also changed in the clientele they served.
As a study of this era put it: Family planning services grew phenomenally from the mid-60s
to the mid-70s.
In 1964, the federal government made its first family planning grant, which served only married
women.
By 1970, Congress had passed the first national family planning and population legislation.
Federal expenditures grew from $16 million to close to $200 million.
In 1969, there were less than a quarter of a million teenagers using family planning
clinics; by 1976 this had swollen to 1.2 million.
According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a leading research and advocacy organization
promoting sex education, the federal government’s support of “family planning services”
rose from less than $14 million in 1968 to $279 million a decade later—nearly a twenty-fold
increase.
By the early 1980s, nearly two-thirds of the money received by “family planning” agencies
came from the federal government.
What was the purpose of all this activity?
“Sex education is considered one of the primary tools to help adolescents avoid unwanted
pregnancy,” according to a typical comment of the period.
Once more, we have the four-stage pattern: STAGE 1: THE “CRISIS”: In 1968, it was
claimed that “contraception education and counseling is now urgently needed to help
prevent pregnancy and illegitimacy in high school girls.”
The head of Planned Parenthood testified before a Congressional subcommittee in 1966 as to
the need for sex education “to assist our young people in reducing the incidence of
out-of-wedlock births and early marriage necessitated by pregnancy.”
The incidence of venereal disease among young people was cited by the head of the New York
City Board of Education as showing the need for “a crash educational program.”
An article in the American School Board Journal in 1969 depicted sex education as a way of
combatting “illegitimacy and venereal disease.”
PTA Magazine likewise urged sex education to combat “the spiraling rate of venereal
diseases, the pregnancies before marriage, the emotionally disastrous results of irresponsible
sexual behavior.”
Similar statements abounded from a variety of sources.
But what was in fact the situation when this kind of “crisis” mentality was being used
to push for more sex education in the schools?
Fertility rates among teenage girls had been declining for more than a decade since 1957.
Venereal disease was also declining.
The rate of infection for gonorrhea, for example, declined every year from 1950 through 1959,
and the rate of syphilis infection was, by 1960, less than half of what it had been in
1950.
This was the “crisis” which federal aid was to solve.
STAGE 2: THE “SOLUTION”: Massive federal aid to sex education programs in the schools,
and to “family planning” clinics, was advocated to combat teenage pregnancy and
venereal disease.
After sex education, according to a “Professor of Family Life,” a boy “will find decreased
need for casual, irresponsible and self-centered experimentation with sex.”
Critics opposed such actions on various grounds, including a belief that sex education would
lead to more sexual activity, rather than less, and to more teenage pregnancy as well.
Such views were dismissed in the media and in politics, as well as by the advocates of
sex education.
The New York Times editorially rejected “emotions and unexamined tradition” in this area and
its education editor declared: “To fear that sex education will become synonymous
with greater sexual permissiveness is to misunderstand the fundamental purpose of the entire enterprise.”
As in many other cases, intentions were the touchstone of the vision of the anointed.
STAGE 3: THE RESULTS: As early as 1968, nearly half of all schools in the country—public
and private, religious and secular—had sex education, and it was rapidly growing.
As sex education programs spread widely through the American educational system during the
1970s, the pregnancy rate among 15 to 19 year old females rose from approximately 68 per
thousand in 1970 to approximately 96 per thousand by 1980.
Among unmarried girls in the 15 to 17 year old bracket, birth rates rose 29 percent between
1970 and 1984, despite a massive increase in abortions, which more than doubled during
the same period.
Among girls under 15, the number of abortions surpassed the number of live births by 1974.
The reason was not hard to find: According to the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the percentage
of unmarried teenage girls who had engaged in sex was higher at every age from 15 though
19 by 1976 than it was just five years earlier.
The rate of teenage gonorrhea tripled between 1956 and 1975.
Sargent Shriver, former head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, which led the early
charge for more sex education and “family planning” clinics, testified candidly to
a Congressional Committee in 1978: “Just as venereal disease has skyrocketed 350% in
the last 15 years when we have had more clinics, more pills, and more sex education than ever
in history, teen-age pregnancy has risen.”
Such candor was, however, the exception rather than the rule among those who had pushed for
sex education and birth control (“family planning”) clinics.
STAGE 4: THE RESPONSE: Sex education advocates continue to treat as axiomatic the need for
more sex education to combat teenage pregnancy and venereal disease.
As late as 1980, and in spite of mounting evidence, the Alan Guttmacher Institute proclaimed:
“Teenage pregnancy can, through better education and preventive services, be, if not altogether
avoided, at least reduced, and through better maternity, abortion and social services, be
reduced in its personal impact on the teenager who does get pregnant.”
Opposition to sex education continued to be dismissed as a “simplistic view” in The
American Biology Teacher journal.
Congressman James H. Scheuer of New York found that the alarming statistics on rising teenage
pregnancy only “highlights the need for strong leadership by the Federal Government
in solving this problem.”
The very possibility that “strong” federal “leadership” might have worsened the situation
was not even mentioned.
To the Alan Guttmacher Institute as well, an “almost quadrupling” of venereal disease
between 1960 and 1972 only showed that more “broadly based national programs channeled
through the public school system are needed and are long overdue.”
Opposition to sex education has been depicted as “a threat to a democratic society.”
When confronted with the evidence that pregnancy and abortions increased during the 1970s,
sex education advocates often deny that sex education was widespread during that decade,
by restricting the term “sex education” to compulsory sex education, which tended
to be mandated later.
Although sex education programs have been sold to the public, to Congress, and to education
officials as ways of reducing such tangible social ills as teenage pregnancy and venereal
disease, many of the leaders of this movement have long had a more expansive agenda.
As a Congressional committee report noted gingerly: The primary objective of Federal
efforts in family life and sex education has been to reduce unwanted pregnancy rates among
teenagers, while the primary goal of most sex educators appears to be encouragement
of healthy attitudes about sex and sexuality.
In short, however politically useful public concern about teenage pregnancy and venereal
disease might be in obtaining government money and access to a captive audience in the public
schools, the real goal was to change students’ attitudes—put bluntly, to brainwash them
with the vision of the anointed, in order to supplant the values they had been taught
at home.
In the words of an article in The Journal of School Health, sex education presents “an
exciting opportunity to develop new norms.”
Only in the light of this agenda does it make sense that so-called “sex education” should
be advocated to take place throughout the school years—from kindergarten to college—when
it could not possibly take that much time to teach basic biological or medical information
about sex.
What takes that long is a constant indoctrination in new attitudes.
An example of such indoctrination may be useful: A popular sex instructional program for junior
high school students, aged 13 and 14, shows film strips of four naked couples, two homosexual
and two heterosexual, performing a variety of sexually explicit acts, and teachers are
warned with a cautionary note from the sex educators not to show the material to parents
or friends: “Many of the materials of this program shown to people outside the context
of the program itself can evoke misunderstanding and difficulties.
” Parents who learned of this program and protested were quickly labeled “fundamentalists”
and “right-wing extremists,” even though they were in fact affluent Episcopalians in
Connecticut.
Here is an almost textbook example of the vision of the anointed, pre-empting the decisions
of parents as to when and how their own children shall be introduced to sex—and dismissing
out of hand those with different views.
Nor was this episode peculiar to this particular school.
Similar things have happened all over the country.
Parents are denigrated both in discussions of public policy and in the materials given
to students in the schools.
A typical comment from “experts” is that “sex and sexuality have become far too complex
and technical to leave to the typical parent, who is either uninformed or too bashful to
share useful sexual information with his child.”
This utter certainty of being right, even to the point of circumventing parents, is
completely consistent with the vision, however inconsistent it is with decades of empirical
evidence on the actual consequences of “healthy attitudes about sex” as promoted by “experts.”
The key point about the sex education crusade, from the standpoint of understanding the vision
of the anointed, is that evidence proved to be as irrelevant here as on other issues.