Not so long ago, American high - school students were educated in "sex hygiene." They were told, "Save the conjugal act until marriage or you'll get horrid diseases; if you're a girl, you might become pregnant; and, boys, don't marry an easy girl." The lessons yielded low rates of STDs, illegitimacy, abortions, fatherless households, and welfare dependency. They saw high rates of virginity (even Hugh Hefner was a virgin in college) and social stability.
But after World War II, a new "science" arose that transformed sex education into an ally for the sexual revolution. Leading the radicals was the closeted sexual psychopath, Professor Alfred C. Kinsey, "the father of the sexual revolution." Backed by Indiana University and the Rockefeller Foundation, Kinsey's pseudo-scientific claims in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953) would displace the Judeo-Christian worldview in sexual criminal law, public policy, medicine, art, and entertainment, and would lead to the creation of a new "sex education" field.
Kinsey's books went viral and were translated into a dozen languages. According to Lena Lennerhed, a professor of gender studies at Södertörn University near Stockholm, the Swedes even spurned Freud for Kinsey during legislative debates in the 1960s:
Alfred Kinsey . . . was the scientific authority. Kinsey's rejection of Freud's sublimation theory was interpreted as an argument for the right among the young, even teenagers, to have an unrestricted sex life . . . and evidence that traditional moral standards were outdated and contrary to human nature.1 (emphasis added)
This opinion was parroted by professors everywhere. Newly minted college "sexperts" began teaching wide-eyed students that sexual self-expression was healthy and that self-control was repression and psychologically bad for you.
By 1955, Kinsey's sexual worldview had shaped the American Law Institute's Model Penal Code, which urged all 50 states to view our sex laws as "outdated and contrary to human nature." Conversely, the institute report spurred lawyerly claims that "sex education" would reduce sex crimes and diseases.
Sexual libertinism became the leading scholarly opinion. In 1964, as New York University began awarding degrees in "sexual health," "brave pioneers"2 met at the Kinsey Institute to allot "sex education" to the newly formed Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S. (SIECUS). This organization joined with Planned Parenthood in attacking sexual morality on a global scale. Both groups were funded by the Playboy Foundation to train children about sexual "health."
In 1968, a book by Kinsey's co-author and sometime lover Wardell Pomeroy, Boys and Sex, appeared as a school sex-ed text nationwide, normalizing sodomy, prostitution, sadomasochism, and homosexuality. It even described bestiality as "a loving sexual relationship with an animal." Pomeroy advised children that "premarital intercourse does have its definite values as a training ground."3
By the 1970s, public schools in the U.S. were flooded with radical sex "education." Thomas Sowell and others have noted that teen "pregnancies soared as 'sex education' spread pervasively throughout the public schools."4
This all helped to erode the barriers to legalized abortion, until Roe v. Wade wiped them out in 1973. That same year, Planned Parenthood's president, Alan Guttmacher, noted, "The only avenue the International Planned Parenthood Federation and its allies could travel to win the battle for abortion on demand is through sex education."5
At that time, "sex positive" education rarely mentioned condoms, an omission that likely helped lead to an increase in teen pregnancies that ended in abortion - which in turn increased the "need" for more school sex education.
By 1974, Planned Parenthood was mass-distributing a booklet called "You've Changed the Combination." It was a full-blown, frontal assault on traditional American sexual morality, including marriage. The authors told our children, "Sex is best between friends. . . . Have sexual relationships only with friends. . . . If she's young, always ask." The booklet also normalized homosexuality and ridiculed marriage: "Do you want a virgin to marry? Buy one. There are girls in that business,too. Marriage is the price you'll pay, and you'll get the virgin. Very temporarily."
Today, Planned Parenthood dominates public-school sex education. It battles every attempt at abstinence education, for a resurgence in teen chastity would reduce teen pregnancies and threaten Planned Parenthood's lucrative abortion business and its pharmaceutical profits.
Today, the United Kingdom seems to have run ahead of the U.S. in sex education, as evidenced by a new program forced on British schoolchildren. It starts with seven-year-olds, despite parents' protests. One reporter tried to put a light spin on his description of an animated film shown to children at a village primary school:
Among the saucy scenes that seared the school children's innocent eyes was one of a couple chasing each other around a bed before knuckling down to some nookie. During the erotic action, a voice-over describes it as "exciting."6
In the film, a naked young boy and girl stand alongside a naked adult man and woman. The woman slides over to the man as a voice-over says they think they like each other. Already naked, they don't sip tea and chat, but hop onto a bed where they have missionary-style sexual intercourse (with red hearts floating above). The new friends then copulate woman atop. The educators know that this film will shape children's brains, minds, memories, imaginations, and conduct. Some, tragically, will try out the "exciting" red-heart event on other children.
Sadly, they won't be the first. In April 1997, the Washington Post reported that local police had "ended their investigation into a sexual incident at a Southeast Washington elementary school, concluding that a group of fourth-graders left unsupervised for up to an hour on Monday had engaged in consensual sex."
Moreover, since lowering children's sexual inhibitions and introducing and demonstrating sex to children are identified by the FBI as methods used by sexual predators to "groom" prospective victims, some percentage of "sex educated" children will be more easily seduced by predators.7
Groomed at younger and younger ages to be sexually active, the students of modern sex education are being set up for exploitation by predators even as they are taught to exploit each other. And they will continue to suffer the consequences. As long ago as 1994, even the Guttmacher Institute acknowledged that approximately one in four sexually active teens were contracting a sexually transmitted disease each year.8
Today, the liberal AIDS Healthcare Foundation admits:
The relatively conservative lifestyles that America practiced prior to the '60s kept the number of STDs at a much lower level than they are today. For the most part, 15-year-old kids were not having as much sex as they are having today. And most adults did not have as many sexual partners as they do now. . . . Nineteen million STD infections in the United States every year is a staggering number.9
You would think the solution, then, would be obvious. Yet the same author goes on to proclaim:
The next sexual revolution has begun - it is the battle for sexual health. We have a right to a sexual life that is as free from disease as it can possibly be. We know that the more sexual partners we have, the more risk we are taking - that is a fact.
We know that STDs will never disappear. However, society should take the business of making sex safe as seriously as it does fighting the flu.
So what is the new plan? Well, more "condom promotion and distribution . . . and routine screening" and, especially, "quality sex education." In other words, more grooming for sexual exploitation. But isn't doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results the very definition of insanity?
1 Lena Lennerhed, "The Pursuit of Pleasure: Sex liberalism [ sic ] in Sweden in the 1960s": www.iisg.nl/womhist/lennerhed.doc. Also see Lennerhed's "Taking the Middle Way: Sex Education Debates in Sweden in the Early Twentieth Century," in Shaping Sexual Knowledge: A Cultural History of Sex Education in Twentieth Century Europe, Lutz Sauerteig and Roger Davidson, eds. (Routledge, 2009). [Back]
2 SIECUS: http://tinyurl.com/8bvsqgt. [Back]
3 Wardell Pomeroy, Boys and Sex (Delacorte Press, 1981), pp. 117, 171. [Back]
4 Thomas Sowell, "The Big Lie," Forbes (Dec. 23, 1991), p. 5. [Back]
5 Alan Guttmacher quote of May 3, 1973, cited in Humanity (Aug./Sept.1979), p. 11. [Back]
6 Metro News: http://tinyurl.com/8gpk6gq. [Back]
7 FBI testimony: http://tinyurl.com/ athodc4. [Back]
8 Sex and America's Teenagers (Alan Guttmacher Institute, 1994). [Back]
9 AIDS Healthcare Foundation: http://tinyurl.com/9o87wpc. [Back]