Introduction by Fr. Paul Marx:

Mr. Charles Donovan is Senior Policy Advisor for the Family Research Council (FRC); Editor of Washington Watch, FRC's Monthly Newsletter; co-author of Blessed Are The Barren: The Social Policy of Planned Parenthood; has been Deputy Director of Presidential Correspondents at the White House; has appeared in ABC's Nightline, CNN, CBN, USA Radio Network, etc. Has written in USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, etc. Please join me in welcoming Mr. Charles Donovan.

Prior to 1910

Up until 1920 there is no history of sex education. We managed as a race to "replicate" ourselves quite well for centuries with nowhere near the level of family disruption we have today and we did it without ever there existing any classroom sex education. Sex education exists because of an agenda.

In the Library of Congress we find roughly a dozen books, prior to about 1910, that dealt with sex education. One was written by R. C. Bowl. It was not a sex education book as we know them today. It had a 30 or 40 page discourse on the dangers of bad companions. Its agenda was to keep people on the straight and narrow. It not a biological approach.

1915

One of the first people who introduced a very significant change in all of this was Margaret Sanger. [Note by VHI: Margaret Sanger was the founder of Planned Parenthood, the largest promoter of sex education and abortion in the U.S. and in the world.] Sanger wrote What Every Boy And Girl Should Know. In many ways it was not a major departure from the approach of other texts although it was very explicit about biological material (this was a departure).

She also included a postcript which introduced her ideas about negative eugenics: Breeding Out The Unfit; plus a section about "how moral values were changing". Sanger wrote that "the next generation of young people, leading up to the Roaring 20's, [will] direct their sexual behavior not out of fear and morality...they are going to be replaced by logic and reason; scientific guides would determine what the moral standards of that generation would be".

1922

Sanger wrote The Pivot of Civilization. It fully develops her negative eugenics ideas. Also, she wrote: "Sex can be rendered effective and valuable only as it meets and satisfies the interests and demands of the pupil himself." i.e., "a self-centered approach".

Planned Parenthood (PP) developed its programs in the 1920's; it began to provide clinical [badly called] "services", was not yet involved with adolescents. There was really not a great deal going on. It would have been very unpopular in American society to even begin to suggest the idea that contraceptives and the like and programs of sex education should be given to minors. But, PP was alert to developments around the world. For example, Sweden was probably the first place where national sex education developed to a significant degree.

1933

The National League for Sex Education was founded in Sweden with Eliesse Addison Jensen as president. In 1950 she became president of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. [Note by VHI: According to Grolier's Encyclopedia, Margaret Sanger was, in 1953, the first president of IPPF.] Sweden moved quickly to establish National Mandatory Sex Education.

1941

The Swedish League held its first Summer Institute for sex educators (invited social workers, teachers, etc.)

1946

PP sent a delegation to Sweden to attend a conference sponsored by the Swedish League: Margaret Sanger, Dr. Abraham Stone, who with his wife Dr. Hanna Stone had helped Sanger found her Medical Research Bureau in New York City, and Dr. Leena Levine. A resolution was adopted favoring the imposition of mandatory sex education for Sweden.

PP people were very thrilled with this development and they brought the resolution back to the United States. It was modified and in 1946. Later in the year, PP adopted its first formal statement on sex education. It echoed Sweden's "the right of every young person to receive sex education".

It did not at that point talk about state mandates for sex education. There were no programs by PP for adolescents at this time in the U.S. PP people were "very skittish about it". U.S. law would not have encouraged them to provide such programs for adolescents, so I think they were watching the Swedish experiment to see how it proceeded before beginning to move forward in the U.S. There were some other major events at around this time period, which PP relatively quickly tied in with:

1948, 1953- Kinsey Reports

PP was very well positioned to take advantage of what Kinsey published. [Note by VHI: Kinsey was a very influential writer in sexual matters, but whose "studies" were fraudulent and criminal. See below for more information on this.]

1953

Dr. Leena Levine had an unpublished paper-speech found in the Library of Congress. In it she "crystallizes" the two basic alternatives that society is faced with when it is dealing with the sexuality of the unwed".

1. To explain to young people that sexual happiness and sexual harmony were key to marriage in the home, and, therefore, all efforts should be spent by organizations and by society to encourage young people to save themselves sexually for marriage.

2. Our alternate solution, she said, is to be ready, as educators and parents, to help young people obtain sex satisfaction before marriage. By sanctioning sex before marriage we will prevent fear and guilt. We must relieve those who have them of their fears and guilt feelings. Also, she went on to say, we must do more than that, we also had to provide contraceptives. Though abortion is not mentioned, the use of contraceptives leads the way to arrive at abortion.

PP chose the second alternative. Society is trying to do both. It's an impossible task. Only the first one ought to be done.

1957

Sweden mandated sex education nationwide. The 1933's Founding Statement about the right to sex education became an unavoidable duty for every Swedish school child.

PP's National Medical Committee debated whether to initiate "services" for adolescents. PP at this time was very, very tentative in its work with adolescents. It was a single affiliate that instituted a marriage preparation course. It was the first time they were dealing with unwed couples. Basically, still the PP message was about contraception, [but as bad as this was] it was oriented toward the marital unit, at least to the extent that they were dealing with engaged couples. Efforts were made repeatedly, however, to get the National Medical Committee and the entire establishment of PP to endorse an outreach to minor children in which sex education would play a part.

1953-1965

Dr. Mary Calderone, became Director of the National Medical Committee of PP. Internal memos show she brought resolutions to the floor. They were very anxious to attempt to keep it on a medical basis, to deal only with minors who had come to them who were sexually active; and they kept it within the confines of a local affiliate. Obviously, they were concerned about the legal issues involved in providing these "services" to minors.

In the Summer of 1964, Dr. Calderone moved away from PP, at least a half-step, and co-founded and became Executive Director of the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS). The Board of Directors was announced in January of 1965. It included:

Lester Kirkendall, President of PP-Oregon.

Wardell Pomeroy, co-author of the Kinsey Reports.

One of the major points about the development of sex education, at least until very recent history, where things have gotten considerably more muddled, is that the organization of laws and public policy related to modern sex education came from the top-down, not from teachers, not from doctors, certainly not from parents. It was not a grass-roots effort. Even up to the 1960s, in Christian and Catholic ethics texts on the subject, the presumption was that classroom sex education was an extremely bad idea.

PP was very, very shrewd in getting endorsements for sex education and also in fusing sex education with population control. PP's major impetus in terms of a social movement after mid century was more in the area of government directed population control. Dr. Calderone was very, very important in all these developments. She pleaded for years with the American Medical Association (AMA) to establish a Task Force Report and Resolution dealing with the responsibility of physicians to provide sex information and to be a source of population control. She was rebuffed time and again, but finally in 1962 she persuaded the Board of Trustees of the AMA to establish an 8-member committee of which she was a member and she got at least one other easily-identified PP physician involved with it. They issued a Task Force Report which said that the physicians role in handing out information about sexual matters and in population control should be primary.

1964

That Task Force Report was taken in resolution form to the American Medical Association House of Delegates where it was passed. It took about more than a decade for that conviction to be sunk into the leadership of the AMA. It was done from the top down.

1966

The National Education Association (NEA) established its first resolution endorsing sex education. It has been updated and made much more specific as time has passed.

Up to this time there hadn't been much government involvement. The government tended to reflect the wishes of the people. But then Wilbur Cohen, Under secretary of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), wrote a report entitled Family Planning; One Aspect: A Freedom to Choose. It was about sex education. It looked at a District of Columbia program. Cohen said that the need for sex education, as an integral part of the school curriculum, must begin at the earliest grades. It was a pretty radical statement for a federal official at the time. It was simply an education branch of government deciding to launch itself into an area and using the pedestal of a local District of Columbia program to do it.

Then the HEW supplied SIECUS with federal funds to give a conference. SIECUS also received federal funds to develop the first Teacher Training Manual. Throughout the last three decades, whenever these organizations have wanted to extend their influence they have looked to the federal treasury to help them do it. The funding granted for the Teacher Training Manual put SIECUS on the map as a federally-approved national organization. SIECUS was more aggressive than PP in the sex education field. PP's reluctance to deal with minors continued.

1967

PP approved its first national policy statement on providing birth control services to minors. This would apply to all of its affiliates. I think it was beginning to feel its oats because it now had the imprimatur of the federal government behind it; something that Margaret Sanger dreamed of in her time but had been unable to achieve. Even so, you can find evidence looking at some of the documents that were deposited by Dr. Alan Guttmacher at the Harvard Medical Library that suggest that SIECUS was very concerned to push PP ahead a little in the area of providing more sex education. Key memoranda at the Harvard Medical Library shed light into how PP and SIECUS came to work in unison. They had all sorts of organizational ties and people who wrote in each other's publications, but had not been cooperating on a plan of action. It took a little while for them to get that project together.

1970

The federal Title X funding of PP programs began. It opened the federal funding floodgates for PP programs.

A series of meetings throughout that Summer began to take place between PP and SIECUS in New York. These meetings were "spawned" by a SIECUS constituent's letter. The writer had used a SIECUS program in a local program and he suggested that SIECUS and PP were natural allies and expressed his surprised at the fact that they didn't work together more. He argued that sex education was the wedge for PP to obtain clientele in its clinics. The letter was received by Gerald Sanctuary who thought it was "a wonderful idea".

He wrote to Dr. Alan Guttmacher, president of PP at the time, to suggest that PP should work with SIECUS and "form a cooperative strategy". They apparently had not done that at the national level, though probably at the local level. Guttmacher agreed and put Dorothy Millstone on it. Millstone wrote a memo to Guttmacher telling him that it was amazing they hadn't thought of doing this before and that SIECUS could take the brunt of the controversial issues in the schools while PP would stand back with the nets in the schools to receive the young people who would be coming to them in droves. She said that the cooperation with SIECUS offered significant advantages. If SIECUS did not exist it would be necessary to invent it.

The result of these meetings was that SIECUS would be the primary lobbying force for sex education while PP would begin to adopt and promote more of its materials in its clinic work, so the teenager would be getting the same message in the schools as they were getting once they arrived at the PP clinic.

Dr. Harold Leif, who became president of SIECUS in 1970, was key to this cooperation. Leif had also been a longtime member of PP's National Medical Committee. He wrote a memo saying that it was very important that SIECUS would be able to absorb some of the shock and controversy that would arise over sex education in the schools and that the two groups needed to find ways to work behind the scenes together. At this same time, the PP Medical Committee formally recommended that PP incorporate sex education in all of its programs.

During this same year of 1970, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) gave a grant to Dr. Leif to fund training for PP sex educators.

So, in just this 4-year period:

-- SIECUS got its Training Manual out of the federal treasury.

-- PP got its first training program for in-clinic sex educators out of a different portion of the federal treasury. (The training program was first conducted in Philadelphia.)

The training program always began with a mini-marathon of pornography designed, as it explicitly said in the grant, "to desensitize the participants and to get them to accept a variety of sexual behaviors". This was the basic mode of this training session and it was replicated time and again in training programs sponsored in medical schools and other higher education institutions across the country.

This is also, essentially, the same approach that PP/SIECUS-type programs use now with adolescents and children. (Ditto for teachers and workers at PP clinics.)

So we begin to see the federal treasury really being opened up via the Title X Program to fund clinical "services" as well as the development of educational material. Most Americans did not have the slightest clue this was going on! Neither did they know that this was a top-down operation and not a grass-roots phenomenon.

We also find a memo by Dr. Leif in the archives at Harvard, which reported that PP was in serious financial difficulty in 1970. But all their problems were solved by the funding that came from the federal government.

1974

SIECUS was pretty much feeling its oats. They had Roe v. Wade behind them in 1973. They had Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), which gave to the unmarried the false "right" to obtain contraceptives . They were able to distribute materials to minors. The Comstock Laws (which prohibited contraception) were long and far behind us. So, they updated their Statement of Belief about sexuality. Their earlier statements tended to be a little harder to pin down. Now they endorsed:

-- Homosexuality,

-- The distribution of contraceptives to children without parental consent,

-- Pornography. They relied on Nixon's Presidential Commission on Pornography which, incredibly, found that pornography did not cause harm!! SIECUS statement added "Pornography can serve a variety of important needs in the lives of individuals". [How untrue and shameful!!]

Throughout the 1970's the federal involvement with SIECUS and PP exploded. During the Carter Administration, in 1978, they went back to reauthorize the federal Title X Program and they explicitly put an authorization in to provide services for teenagers. This was reported as the first federal initiative to deal with teenage pregnancy. A totally incredible statement because the federal initiative had been under way. This was simply ratifying what was already being done. So if you sometimes hear that everything that went wrong with adolescent behavior in the 1970's happened before this authorization took place, you can be sure it is not true, for in fact, all that was a ratification of existing programs.

1980s

This decade brought a very confused picture because there began to be reactions: the work of organizations like Human Life International, parents who began to be concerned about what was going on in the schools and polls showed that the type of sex education parents favored was not the type being promoted by SIECUS and PP. Also, dramatic electoral changes in congress and the White House took place.

The year of 1980 saw the first discussion of an Adolescent Family Life Act. It was an abstinence-based federal program that was created the following year. It promoted abstinence and adoption. Sen. Jeremiah Denton championed the cause and pushed it to successful passage at much political cost to himself. PP/SIECUS resisted the competition but could not stop it.

Politically what happened in the 1980s in Congress, with respect to these issues, was a stalemate of sorts. The Title X Program, after 1984, was not reauthorized and its funding levels, due to inflation, began to actually taper off. The Adolescent Family Life Program at the same time had a very flagging commitment from the Reagan Administration and funding for it actually peaked in the middle of the decade and declined for the rest of the decade.

But PP did have to deal with the intellectual arguments for abstinence. They took five or six different strategies to try to defuse the abstinence movement or any public support for it..

1. One of them was to redefine abstinence. They redefined it as outer course; that's a euphemistic term to describe sexual activity that did not include normal intercourse.

2. Another strategy was to exploit the development of the AIDS virus. This is a crucial aspect, really, of the whole issue that drove off parental consent and parental notification in these areas. Venereal disease had been a long standing exception in many states to rules about treatment of minors. For public health reasons it was argued that an adolescent who might have the venereal disease would not seek treatment if the first thing they would have to do was to inform their parents. So many states waived all parental notification and consent in this area with the objective of treating venereal disease.

AIDS provided yet another stepping stone because here we were talking about a disease that, as far as we know, is invariable lethal. So the advent of the AIDS virus was used time and again, including by some people whom we had reason to believe would be friendly to us; that is, those of us who believe that virtue ought to come in first place in our public policy. C. Everett Koop, for example, who unfortunately felt that the advent of the AIDS virus suggested we ought to have very explicit education about sexuality in lower and lower grades.

3. A third strategy was to sue the abstinence-based programs in federal courts, or local courts and charge (falsely) that abstinence was a purely religious concept. Now, as a public health concept abstinence stands very, very well, but if you could convince the courts that only a religious person could possibly believe that abstinence was an ideal, or even a good suggestion, you could get such programs thrown out; and they have had some mixed success in doing that.

4. The fourth strategy was to repeal the Adolescent Family Life Act. Various efforts were made to do that. Senator Kennedy made that effort for years, but, to date, he has been unsuccessful in that.

5. The fifth strategy was to redefine abstinence into what is now called abstinence-plus. In this type of process you have an abstinence element side by side with a value-free sex education program; so that you say you are offering a smorsgarsboard to teens, they get to sample it all.

6. The sixth strategy consisted in taking the fear-based route. They dismissed abstinence education as fear-based education. Interestingly enough, most of the sex education movement, the radical-liberal sex education movement, was promulgated on a fear basis: fear of foreigners, fear of intellectually-inferior types, fear on the part of parents that, if they did not provide these things --contraceptive drugs, abortions, information to their children, then their children (they would falsely claim) would get sick, or die, or rebel. A totally fear-based approach. There is no affirmation in these programs of anything that society traditionally considered holy or good. While they are founded on fear-based education, this was the rap against abstinence education; that it was simply designed to make young people fearful about their healthy sexuality.

But the major thing they did in the period was to ignore the data. The data uniformly suggested that sex education was, and is, in addition to being a moral invasion, a public policy disaster. There were certain people within the sex education agenda that had to recognize that everything was going haywire, that teenage pregnancy was up, that abortion was through the roof, that the U.S. had the worst statistics outside of the Soviet Union, etc.

They had to deal with that, so the suggestion really was that we now had to bring the mountain to Mohammed. According to them, the problem really wasn't sex education, the new approach, the collapse of traditional morality, the attack on marriage or divorce reform; the problem was, they claimed that we didn't have the PP clinics right there in the schools. Because, after all, the real problem was that young people could not be trusted to swallow the SIECUS sex education message and then cross town or go next door to the PP clinic.

So one of the major responses was to establish the School Based Clinics (SBC) movement. This movement travels under a larger agenda which they found comfortable: to provide many health services in a way that would be totally non-controversial.

The SBC movement had its roots in the 1970s. In 1984 there were only 12 School Based Clinics in the United States. A year later they had jumped in number to 31. By 1990 there were 150 nationwide.

The latest round in this battle is the Clinton Administration's effort to incorporate School Based Clinics in its "health" reform program.

1989

At the state level we continued to see a movement toward mandatory sex education, as Sweden did over a period of twenty five years, this was the goal for the United States as well. This goal of establishing mandatory sex education in all States of the U.S. had mixed success. There was a report from the Alan Guttmacher Institute called Risk and Responsibility. According to this report, in 1989, seventeen states plus the District of Columbia mandated sex education; six of them had done so by 1980, so it doubled during the 1980s. Twenty three other states recommended that local school boards have such programs; and there were only ten states out of the fifty states in 1989 that did neither of those things. Thirteen of the fifty states had statewide curricula; there were plenty of other bad curricula out, but in terms of mandated state curricula, there were only thirteen.

Since that time, other states have moved from that direction, including Virginia. PP did complain in this report that only two of the fifty states required the local school district to actually have birth control devices in the classroom and to display them and distribute them. None of the programs, according to PP, would actually tell adolescents where they could get such devices. I didn't believe that when I read that in the report, but that's what it said.

In broad secular terms, that's where we stand today [1994]. There is certainly a pronounced and accelerating movement towards these programs; the goal is to mandate sex education programs. Dr. Joycelyn Elders has made clear that the goal is certainly to begin these things with explicit sex education, in grade K and before; and certainly that's being done in a number of areas.

Catholic Sex Education in the U.S.

1. We began with the presumption that's cardinal in Catholic teaching and in the pastoral expressions of Catholic teaching that sex education, taught in a very delicate and moral manner, was the role of the parents, exclusively. Moreover, in most of the materials from earlier decades, the idea of treating sexuality separately from the other commandments, from the other responsibilities to practice self-discipline and moral virtue, simply hadn't occurred to them. In a sense it was the species of all Catholic teaching that the temptations of the flesh would have to be resisted, and that young people would need guidance, primarily from the parents supported by a Church that recognized the subsidiary role in which other institutions besides the family played; and that this was the way in which this information was to be communicated.

2. We moved from that to increasing signs throughout the XX Century that sex education should be dealt with separately; but again, still with the presumption that parents have the primary role, if not the exclusive role.

3. The third thing would be what we have experienced in the last thirty years with increasing frequency, and that is that the primary educator in fact, if not in expressed terms, is the school; and that the parents are secondary. This is against Church teaching. Let me give you a few examples.

1906

There is a beautiful thick volume called The Manual of the Holy Catholic Church. It's a beautiful volume that was published in 1906 by the Catholic Art & Publication Office in Chicago, under then Bishop Quigley. It was written by Fr. James McGovern, who was the editor of a magazine called Chicago Catholic Home.

It has a long section about the education of children. Neither sex nor sex education were mentioned in this book. Here is a sample of what this document says: "If your children do not succeed,...[it] depends to a very great extent on the Christian education which you (parents) give them. In order to give them this education you must instruct them, watch over them, correct them, above all give them good example."

1919-1924

A book titled Christian Ethics, by Ross, talked in very delicate terms about the need for our young people to gain some understanding of the place for sexuality. It said that "there are two good reasons why children should be informed on such topics by their parents or by some superior standing in the place of parents when the parents are incompetent.

Again and again, up until the mid 1960s, the burden of proof was on those who would usurp or take some portion of the parental role; and in this case the parents must be incompetent.

1929

Pius XI, in his Encyclical Divini Illius Magistri ("The Christian Education of Youth"), opposed the advent of naturalistic sex education because it promoted "a so-called sex education, falsely imagining that they (the sex educators) can forewarn youth against the dangers of sensuality".

This Encyclical also urged that a good father, while discussing with his son, "not descend to details". It was not to be a biological discussion, it was on a higher plane, on the plane of morality and virtues. The Holy Office reaffirmed this teaching clearly in 1931 in answer to an inquiry.

1944

"Bishop Thomas Toolan, of Mobile, Alabama called sex education "a pagan doctrine". He explicitly stated that it was anti-ethical to soldiers who, at that time, were fighting for in WW II.

1949

The New York Catholic Conference, then called The Welfare Conference, went to battle over two sex education films called "Human Growth" and "Human Reproduction" in the New York public school system. The bishops had not forgotten Pius XI, they quoted him on the dangers of classroom teaching. These were biological films and the bishops were opposed on the grounds that these films usurped parental prerogative and that they did not belong in the schools.

Bishop Joseph Flanelly in the presence of Cardinal Spellman, in St. Parick's Cathedral, that same year, called one of the films "immoral, bad, an invasion of parental rights".

1951

Pius XII in an allocution to fathers of families talked about the growing sex education movement. And I have to think that it was probably the European manifestation that brought the most concern at the time. He said: join with them (that is, those who oppose value-free sex education) "of course, under the direction of your bishops, in order that you may cripple and bring to naught the campaigns, under whatever name they go, under whatever auspices they mask themselves".

1962

It wasn't just, however, the Popes speaking in succession. In 1962 a book titled The Mysteries of Marriage, from Sheed and Ward, the great Catholic Publishing House, written by Joseph A. Braigg, had this to say: "Sex is a holy and happy thing if we make it to serve God as it should; and not only fills the Earth, it fills Heaven with more and more saints." He went on to say: "The initiative in sex education should come from the children". What he meant by that was that their natural curiosity would lead them to questions and that it was a violation of their innocence, their latency period, for an outside authority to presume the competence to eject this information into their lives. And he suggested: "If parents had gotten in the habit of discussing God, the Commandments, the Bible, virtue, all the various virtues with their children; their children, out of natural curiosity would have no hesitation at all to come to their parents for this advice as well".

1963

Fides Publication, in Notre Dame, Indiana, published a book titled The Christian Couple, written by Fr. Daniel Planck. It was a marriage manual for counselors and priests doing pastoral work with couples about to marry. He indicated that there was a great danger in overemphasizing sexuality because it would threaten the hierarchy of values in marriage; it would threaten to take too predominant a place in terms of producing a sound and happy marriage. He went on to say that his manual "should never be given too soon; even to a couple intending to marry". This was very much a mainstream book in 1963 in Catholic circles: to treat sexuality in a delicate manner.

1966

This year saw the publication of a book by Ignaice Lepp, who was a Communist who converted to Catholicism. He was also a psychologist, so he took a very psychological approach to sex education. His book did worry about the fact that, in his view, women were under-informed as they approach marriage, relative to men, on these topics. That their marriage days were very often a shock to them, and he was very concerned that there be some imparting of information.

Even in this case, talking about sex education in 1966, he wrote: "As experience has shown, so-called sex education is really the beginning of many painful traumas in countries where it is generally taught collectively in the classroom". He was strongly opposed to it. He felt that it was best that mother teach it, particularly to daughters. The biggest danger being the demystification of sex and the placing of sexuality on the plane of the every day and the pedestrian.

So given this emphasis in papal teaching, in Christian ethics, in university texts, marriage counseling, and the like, how did we get Catholic school sex education to the degree that we have it now? Well, again, with a slightly different institutional set of arrangements, it came from above, not from a grass-roots movement.

Bob Marshall [see the note at the end of this article] went to the National Catholic News Service, to their archives on sex education, and got himself an education about the rapidity of change in the Catholic approach.

The first reference Bob Marshall found to a Catholic position endorsing sex education by any prominent Catholic on a public forum was by Sister Mary Jacob of St. Vincent's Hospital in Philadelphia. She attended a regional meeting of the Americam College of Obstetrics and Gynecology. As a result, she endorsed early classroom sex education as a "prevention" of unwed teenage pregnancies.

This caught the eye of the National Catholic News Service which got the word around the country. It was new. There were others who followed behind this.

A Jesuit priest named Fr. Francis Phillus, who helped design Chicago's anti-venereal disease program, also called for incorporating sex education in the Catholic classroom in seventh grade. But even he took pains to argue that this was not sex education; basically, to pin it in terms of the social hygiene approach of the previous century. So, while it broke that one barrier, (putting this education in the schools, and out of the hands of parents), it was not a full step towards what we now call comprehensive sex education. But, unfortunately, it was a step.

In 1966, there was the first diocesan-wide sex education program that we could find reference to. It was in the state of New Jersey. Fr. James Pindertall, of the New Jersey Education Association; that is, the public one, not the Catholic one, said: "The home has fallen down on the job and as a result the schools must step in". [Note by VHI: Another unfortunate and wrong step.]

This truly went national, however, with Fr. James McHugh, who was director of the U.S. Catholic Conference (USCC) of Bishops' Family Life Bureau. In 1966, he organized, at the Catholic University of America, what he considered the first major conference for sex education in the Catholic Church in the United States The goal was to create a complete program of education in sexuality. I don't know whether innocently or not, but Fr. John Thomas, a member of SIECUS, was on the program for that initial session.

1969

The same Family Life Bureau and the National Catholic Education Association combined to issue national sex education guidelines. The Family Life Directors, as a group, later issued a statement of support for the guidelines. At that point in time, roughly 19 to 20 dioceses had programs in the United States. It was a variant of what I would call the all-of-you-have-to-stay-after-school approach. The mindset was that since "there are some parents, a few parents, who don't do their job, all of us are going to stay in school and do sex education." [Note by VHI: Very wrong.]

1970

By the end of 1970, one third of U.S. Catholic dioceses had sex education, according to Fr. McHugh. Now, there were some road blocks in the 1970s.

1976

In 1976, Ramondo Mancini, the editor of L'Osservatore Romano, attacked proposals in Italy for in-school sex education legislation and he vigorously defended the prerogatives of parents. That message apparently was heard in the United States, so that there was some slowing of the process toward universal sex education in Catholic schools. But in 1980, unfortunately, this would change.

1980

The USCC announced that it planned to update its sex ed guidelines.

Also, the New Jersey's bishops endorsed the New Jersey's legislation mandating sex education. The State of New Jersey had proceeded further than virtually any other state in what it concerns the degree of explicitness in the program and the ages at which it was offered. The State of New Jersey was also the state with the first diocesan-wide sex education program.

Now, there were no meaningful evaluations of almost any sex education program. One would think that the proponents of sex education would want to be able to point to the state that had sex education programs to say that these programs were working. In fact, the opposite is true. I did a study looking at data on what happened to teenage pregnancy, age 15-19, and abortion in the 1980s. New Jersey, which had mandated sex education in 1980, had the highest rate of pregnancy increase among teenagers aged 15 to 19: 25%. And this was predominantly out-of-wedlock pregnancy. Not only that, its abortion rate climbed by 42%! That should tell us something about sex education in the schools.

1981

USCC released its sex ed guidelines. The Louisiana's bishops also endorsed that state's sex education program which applied to the private schools, but left the content of the program with local option.

1987

The Bishops' Education Committee announced that it was updating the 1981 guidelines.

Some Somber Thoughts

I think that, with this whole area of sex education, we are stepping into a post-Christian era. In my view, a post-Christian era is not going to look very different from a pre-Christian era. In fact, I would suggest that we are probably, in a sense, at an almost pre-historic era. And we are beginning to pay the price for it.

To put it in terms of geologic time, we entered upon an age, with the sexual revolution, of what I would call Jurassic Sex: it's the Velociraptor Model. You can find it in every PP manual that says sex is good when you are "ready" for it; sex is basically good when you decide you are "responsible" and you want to do it. The same attitude a Velociraptor would have about lunch and a smaller dinosaur.

Going back even further in pre-historic time we entered the Cambrian Time. This is the era of the marine invertebrates; these are creatures without backbones, the spineless politicians floating in a sea of primordial value soup, unable to stand against the tide of liberation and destined, most of them, for extinction.

Stepping back even further, we are in the Pre Cambrian Era in which few fossils exist. Now with the fusion of sex education and population education, the record begins to become slim, human beings begin to decrease in number, family size collapses, more families are unwed, and it becomes harder and harder to see anything but a trend toward self-destruction; and certainly the countries of Europe, and our own, which have taken this course are finding that they are headed toward a literal depopulation.

Against that, we have had some brave efforts. Some, perhaps most, well intended, to bring us a new Bronze Age in which people reinvent the wheel of sex education: abstinence programs, new techniques, videos and films and the like. The basic problem (with reinventing the sex-ed wheel) is that it attempts to rebuild a Christian civilization without Christ at the center. It cannot be done.

Signs of Hope

John Paul's Letter to Families on the Year of the Family (1994) is very clear about the rights of parents. He says: "Parents are the first and most important educators of their own children. And they also possess a fundamental competence in this area. They are educators because they are parents." He goes on to restate the Principle of Subsidiarity giving parents primacy in this area and then says: "This implies the legitimacy and indeed the need of giving assistance to the parents, but [this assistance] finds its intrinsic and absolute limit in their prevailing right and their actual capabilities [of the parents." [Note by VHI: This basically means that those who assists parents must do so with the parents' knowledge and wishes, with moral values (never using eroticism or explicitness in any way) and always respecting the parent's right-duty to be the first and main educators of their own children.]

I would like to cover a couple of two other signs of hope. One is that t you can only run from the data for so long. PP is having a hard time running from it. They are even beginning to have to publish some of it. In the May/June 1994 Family Planning Perspectives issue, they published a study that showed that the age at which young men initiate sexual intercourse is tied to sex education, whether they had biological-based sex education or some other form of sex education. It also showed that if the mother is not present in the home during the sensitive ages of 5 to 15, at least among blacks, they are 89% more likely to initiate sexual intercourse. The same thing happens with exposure to a biologically-based sex education program: it is predictive of early initiation of sexual intercourse.

Even the Atlantic Monthly, a secular magazine par excellence, published last month an article entitled "The Failure of Sex Education", by Barbara Whitehead. I have some problems with the article, but it basically does focus on the New Jersey example, and suggests quite clearly that these programs do not work.

The new University of Chicago study attacks some of the premises and some of the findings of the Kinsey study and so did, from a different perspective, a new film from Family Research Council called "The Children of Table 34". I would urge all of you to have a look at this film. What the University of Chicago study does to debunk some of the myths, at least, in the Kinsey study; this film, obviously built upon Dr. Reisman's outstanding work and discoveries, goes beyond that to show that Kinsey's work was riddled with fraud and possibly criminal activity. [Note by VHI: Mr. Donovan is referring here to the book Dr. Judith Reisman co-authored, titled Kinsey: Sex and Fraud, available at VHI.]

Finally, I think we are living in an age where we've found it's very difficult to stop an avalanche standing halfway or two thirds of the way down the slippery slope. If you are going to stop all of the negative consequences of sexual activity outside of marriage (and, obviously, earlier generations would have scorned at such a mechanistic term as sexual activity) the place to start is at the top of the hill where the first rock is thrown. And I think that in our case we had a reverse of the David and Goliath situation. The first rock that was thrown was the rock that we threw at God. And we are standing at the bottom of the hill on the slippery slope and catching the rock, and the debris, and all of the harms and problems that ensue from the mistakes that were made.

It may also be that, in a sense, as the New Testament suggests to us, that little children will lead us. There is some evidence in the data that we are looking at now at Family Research Council to suggest that there's been a sharp decline in sexual activity among the young, even a SIECUS study, although they want to discount it, tends to suggest this. I don't know all the reasons for it, but I think we can be encouraged by the "True Love Waits" Campaign, by the pledge by hundreds of thousands of young people to remain pure until marriage. And, it may be that, after having been taken down the path of destruction by the flower generation, young people will be wiser than that previous generation has been.

In all this I think we can draw hope and comfort from the Scriptures. Hebrews 4:14 happened to be the reading at last Sunday's, so I had no trouble incorporating it here. I think it gives us strong advice about where we are to turn to for strength in dealing with all kinds of temptations. It says: "Since, therefore, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God; let us hold fast to our profession of faith. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who was tempted in every way that we are, yet never sinned.

So let us confidently approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and favor and to find help in time of need." I think that's where we do find timely help in all circumstances and situations; not in the Chair of Moral Theology at the University of Notre Dame, not in the prestigious imprints of a publishing houses, but at the throne of grace. There we find the answers and the truths that are timeless and that protect us from our own worst natures. So, thank you very much.