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When Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that made abortion legal throughout the US, passed its 30th anniversary on January 22, 2003, the usual multitude streamed into Washington, DC for the March for Life. According to organizer Nellie Gray, this year's annual protest drew 100,000 people. Although crowd estimates echoed those of previous right-to-life marches, observers sensed a shift in demographics.

March for Life participants appeared to be getting younger, with a notable rise in the number of contingents coming from colleges, high schools, teen ministries, and youth organizations. In the march and subsequent rally on the Mall, many demonstrators seemed as eager to advertise chastity as to condemn legal abortion. Groups of adolescents who have vowed to retain their virginity until marriage had high visibility. Many wore buttons emblazoned with slogans like "i'm worth waiting for" and "PET YOUR DOG, NOT YOUR DATE."

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Many of these youthful activists had incubated their perceptions of sexuality and reproduction in sex-education programs focused on not having sex. At a time when the US has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in the developed world (ten times that of the Netherlands, where sex education is routine), American sex-ed courses have steadily withdrawn from frank considerations of sexual activity and contraception. In an era when most parents favor comprehensive sex education, many schools, public and private, are abandoning sex-ed programs altogether-- or substituting programs that present "abstinence-only-until-marriage" as the only viable means of avoiding disease, anguish, and sin. "Today, the embrace of abstinence appears nearly unanimous," writes Judith Levine in Harmful to Minors. "The only thing left to debate is whether abstinence is the only thing to teach."

Peeping thru window of opportunity

For more than 25 years, the Theocratic Right has been manipulating America's deeply rooted erotophobia in order to broaden its power base. The right-wing attack on sex education is on a continuum with efforts to curb the teaching of abortion procedures in medical schools; make information on abortion, contraception, and sexual safety less available to adults; shut down family planning clinics; encourage prejudice against sexual minorities; confine women to traditional roles; and inculcate the message that sex outside marriage kills. The endeavor is more than just a component of the campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade and push "traditional" morality. It is the linchpin of the Right's attack on America's "secular humanist" public education system.

More broadly, it is a tool for redefining the terms of American culture. This effort, founded on the recognition that whoever sets a society's rules for sexuality substantially controls that society, has been widely successful. As Janice Irvine states in Talk About Sex: The Battles over Sex Education in the United States, "The rise of the Right did not simply trigger bitter conflicts over sexuality; it was partly accomplished through them."

Public anxiety over sexual matters has helped expand the membership bases of groups like James Dobson's Focus on the Family, which soft-sells its "pro-family" message in ways that mask its fundamentalist origins. In Christian bestsellers like A Nation Without a Conscience (1994), evangelical opinion-makers Tim and Beverly LaHaye have helped mold the sentiments of many American parents outside the conservative fold. "Our educational system is almost completely anti-Christian and antimoral," the LaHayes warn, "contrary to the original purpose of the founding fathers." This critique rewrites history to deny the authorship of the US constitution by deists-- 18th-century products of the Age of Reason-- who believed in separation of church and state, but it plays well to an unsophisticated audience hungry for simple answers, wary of social change, and fearful of pedagogical interference with cherished beliefs.

The militant virgins of the contemporary abstinence movement evoke an Orwellian future, complete with Anti-Sex League, but they espouse a return to the imagined moral rectitude of the past. The retreat from liberation hid its stride in the early '80s, when AIDS panic fused with conservative backlash to produce a resurgence of sanctimonious prudery. Ronald Reagan's Presidency made political capital out of "Just say no" approaches to sex as well as drugs. Purity zealots like Kathy DiFiore, the future founder of Chastitycall, were welcomed at the White House. First Lady Nancy Reagan was at one point supposed to oversee the creation of a $20 million nationwide chain of federally financed "chastity centers."

In 1981, newly elected, born-again Senator Jeremiah Denton (R.-Alabama) introduced the Adolescent Family Life Act (AFLA), aimed at encouraging Christian fundamentalist standards of chastity by funding programs, many of them church-sponsored and explicitly sectarian, that "prevent adolescent sexual relations." The bill sailed through Congress and became law. But since AFLA amounted to a system of federal funding for religious groups, this legislation, which the New York Times described as "benighted," presented obvious constitutional problems. The ACLU mounted a legal challenge, but church-and-state issues inherent in the new law weren't addressed until 12 years later when, in Kendrick v. Heckler, the US Supreme Court determined that AFLA was constitutional, but that AFLA programs should be advised to drop religious terminology.

As the Reagan era wore on, the commitment to take sex out of sex education grew in scope and definition. In the jargon of moral crusaders, the more saleable term abstinence began to supplant chastity, a word with a quaint, Old Testament ring. Senator Denton's agenda enjoyed wide support in the Reagan Administration, notably from Education Secretary William Bennett and the religious conservatives who populated his bureaucratic fiefdom. In the mid-'80s, a curriculum called "Sex Respect," developed by Catholic abstinence-only-until-marriage pioneer Colleen Kelly Mast, attracted official approval for its insistence on monogamous heterosexual marriage as the only acceptable context for sex. Religious ideologues warmly embraced the program and plugged it into Denton's funding apparatus. Today the curriculum is employed, at taxpayers' expense, in nearly all 50 states.

Many educators were-- and are-- appalled by the inadequacies of programs like Sex Respect. When AFLA was new, the National Education Association (NEA), which had helped sex education attain respectability early in the 20th century, responded to its biases by passing a resolution reaffirming "that sensitive sex education can be a positive force in promoting physical, mental, and social health, and that the public school must assume an increasingly important role in providing the instruction." To conservatives, this was a provocation coming from a body whose abolition they would have welcomed.

Under President Clinton, a Democratic "centrist," the federal government continued rewarding abstinence-only sex education with preferential subsidies, and using fiscal pressures to stifle curricula teaching responsible use of contraceptives or safer approaches to sex. Under the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, legislation crafted by the archconservative Heritage Foundation, Congress set up an entitlement program allocating $250 million for abstinence-only programs over a five-year period. This Title V funding is contingent on cooperative efforts by state governments, which are all but blackmailed into endorsing abstinence ed. Toward the end of Clinton's second term, the Special Projects of Regional and National Significance-Community-Based Abstinence Education program (SPRANS-CBAE) was set up to stimulate grassroots abstinence promotion.

In September 2000, the Alan Guttmacher Institute published a study, "Changing Emphases in Sexuality Education in US Public Secondary Schools, 1988-1999," that measured the rise of abstinence-only sex ed through the Clinton years. The study showed that by 1999, "23% of [sex-ed] teachers taught abstinence as the only way of preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), compared with 2% in 1988." Although 93% of teachers favored covering contraception in sex-ed classes, more than a quarter of those teachers were forbidden to deal with the topic at all. Sixty percent of teachers using abstinence-only curricula never mentioned contraceptives or always portrayed them as ineffective.

Relentlessly under fire from the Right, the Clinton Administration just as relentlessly tried to appease its detractors. In one egregious instance, Clinton bowed to reactionary demands and sacked his Surgeon General, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, for stating that masturbation was an appropriate topic to be included in sex education. Since right-wing morality enforcers later insured that every eight-year-old in America knew about Bill Clinton's penchant for blowjobs and Oval Office playmate Monica Lewinsky's cleverness with a cigar, the Right's doggedly coercive chilling of speech on behalf of the abstinence movement seems ironic.

In Belton, Missouri, not long ago, a teacher was suspended for answering a question about oral sex in her seventh grade health class. In Leander, Texas, in response to parental anger over a new sex-ed curriculum, school officials have forbidden teachers to discuss oral or anal sex-- or to utter those terms. In Naples, Florida, where condoms are banned from classrooms, sex-education teacher Colin Nicholas was recently fired for demonstrating how condoms work by unrolling one onto a banana.

High on the American Library Association's current list of proscribed or challenged books are It's Perfectly Normal and It's So Amazing, sex-education picture books for young readers by Robie Harris and illustrator Michael Emberley. In Franklin County, North Carolina, chapters at variance with abstinence-only education have been scissored out of ninth- grade health textbooks. "Discovering Your Sexuality," a four-page supplement to a Weekly Reader series on health, was recently removed from classrooms in Kohala, Hawaii, because Christian parents objected to its tolerance of homosexuality, and its matter-of-fact citation of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) and the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) as resources.

Mounting a response

SIECUS, founded in 1964, is a private, nonprofit organization that advocates comprehensive, age-appropriate sex education beginning in kindergarten and continuing through high school. Dr. Mary Calderone, its tireless, outspoken co-founder, had previously been medical director of Planned Parenthood. Both SIECUS and PPFA figure prominently in right-wing propaganda claiming that adherents of "secular humanism"-- a godless, socialistic ideology steeped in the theories of 20th-century educational reformer John Dewey-- are threatening morality and social order.

SIECUS and Planned Parenthood have been on the front lines of sex-education battles for many years; their policies and programs routinely enrage the Right. Both organizations dispute claims that a recent drop in teenage pregnancy rates reflects the success of abstinence programs, maintaining instead that despite the best efforts of anti-condom campaigners, more teens are using condoms. The medical information SIECUS and PPFA publish on contraception and sexually transmitted disease refutes abstinence adherents' most durable myths, like the notion that latex condoms are too porous to provide protection against HIV.

Last August-- after George W. Bush announced his intention to seek an additional $135 million for federal programs facilitating abstinence indoctrination-- SIECUS, Planned Parenthood, and Advocates for Youth launched a "No New Money" campaign aimed at putting an end to such funding. "By funding abstinence-only-until-marriage programs," SIECUS president Tamara Kreinin told the press, "our elected officials in Washington, led by President Bush, are promoting a conservative ideological agenda at the expense of sound public health policy, the health and well-being of our nation's youth, and the will of the American people."

Despite evidence that half of all teenagers, both straight and gay, are sexually active by the time they complete high school, federally-funded sex-ed programs are not just withholding information about birth control, they're blocking factual considerations of sexual orientation and HIV. The homophobia embedded in most abstinence-only curricula reveals the religious-conservative bias of their authors. The gay and lesbian advocacy group Lambda Legal notes that Kelly Mast's widely used Sex Respect workbook contains passages like, "Homosexual activity involves an especially high risk for AIDS infections [because] body openings are used in ways for which they are not designed. During such unnatural behaviors, additional damage is done to blood vessels and other body parts."

Its single-sidedness and outright suppression of data make no-sex sex education of special concern to First Amendment activists. In 1998, the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) formed a panel to analyze and address the problem. The result was Abstinence-Only Education? A Joint Statement signed by the NCAC and 44 other anti-censorship and pro-choice organizations four years later. "In a free democratic society," the 10-page publication begins, "sex education shouldn't be censored. The government has no business restricting access to knowledge." The report condemns abstinence-only sex education as propagandistic and grossly ineffective.

The NCAC's panel found student ignorance endemic. In one study, "Knowledge about Reproduction, Contraception, and Sexually Transmitted Diseases among Young Adolescents in American Cities," published in the Spring 2000 issue of Social Policy, teenagers scored an average grade of 40% on a series of 75 basic questions about sexuality. About a fourth of the test subjects thought a girl could not get pregnant if she only had sex once in a while. "Is it possible to masturbate to orgasm?" reads one typical question posted in the "Kids Speak Out" pages of the www.allaboutsex.org website. The NCAC cites the case of a boy in Granite Bay, California, who wanted to know where his cervix was located.

The present Bush Administration's commitment to ignorance has remained intransigent. Government sponsorship of constitutionally dubious "faith-based initiatives" has aided the proliferation of up-with-chastity entities locally and nationally. These organizations and programs, many of them closely tied to churches, have names like SHARE (Sexuality, Health, and Relationship Education), RSVP (Responsible Social Values Program), Teen Aid, Free Teens, Friends First, and Not Me Not Now.

In Georgia, Title V funds have been applied to chastity rallies sponsored by a "Bible-based, Christ-centered, Holy Spirit-led" youth outreach, the Turner County Health Coalition. In Florida, United Students for Abstinence furthers its agenda through grants from the Florida Department of Health. In Illinois, a Chicago-based tax-exempt advocacy group called Project Reality uses a battery of programs, products, speakers, and written material to encourage abstinence. The reigning Miss America, Erika Harold, is a Project Reality spokesperson who has clashed with Miss America Pageant organizers over her strident championship of virginity.

Abstinence campaigns can be lucrative merchandising operations. Sex Respect hawks mugs, bumper stickers, T-shirts, buttons, and Chastity Rings. True Love Waits (TLW), a youth ministry created a decade ago by Nashville's LifeWay Christian Resources, an organization linked to the Southern Baptist Purchasing Alliance, pushes sterling silver purity bracelets, official TLW Bibles, and other paraphernalia. Thousands of young people turn up at chastity rallies wearing TLW T-shirts. But TLW's most successful product is its message. More than two million people have signed the basic True Love Waits pledge: "Believing that true love waits, I make a commitment to God, myself, my family, my friends, my future mate, and my future children to a lifetime of purity including sexual abstinence from this day until the day I enter a Biblical marriage relationship."

"Teaching sex education without moral principles," assert Tim and Beverly LaHaye in The Act of Marriage, "is like pouring gasoline on a fire." Some abstinence-only proponents prefer to teach moral principles without covering sex. Abstinence-only courses devote much time to fulfilling eight requirements set by the Welfare Reform Act. To qualify for federal funding, an abstinence-only program must 1) be exclusively devoted to "the social psychological, and health gains to be realized by abstaining from sexual activity" 2) teach abstinence from sex outside marriage as "the expected standard for school-age children" 3) demonstrate how only abstinence reliably prevents disease and pregnancy 4) teach that "a mutually faithful monogamous relationship is the expected standard of human sexual activity" 5) show the "harmful psychological and physical effects" of sex outside marriage 6) describe the "harmful consequences" of out-of-wedlock pregnancy 7) show how to reject sexual advances 8) teach the "importance of attaining self-sufficiency" before becoming sexually active.

If condoms are mentioned at all in such programs, they are described in terms of their failure. Some courses stress "refusal skills" taught through role-playing and other techniques; others indulge in pro-life proselytizing. Students are encouraged to translate what they've learned into action. Consider Jason Buck, whose profile on the www.abortionaborted.org website states, "Jason realizes that, as a teenager, integral to his pro-life stand is a commitment to chastity." Buck earns praise for organizing "Malvern Men for Life" at the Augustinian high school he attends in Malvern, Pennsylvania.

In Concord, California, some parents of public school students are fighting "CryBabies," an abstinence-only program developed by First Resort, a Christian pregnancy counseling program. Using graphic material, CryBabies stresses the purported horrors of abortion. Students are given dolls that cry naggingly at regular intervals, perhaps to reinforce the impression that parenthood is a fitting punishment for having sex.

Programs like CryBabies draw formidable support from the mobilized Right. Sex education is a constant target of Rev. Donald Wildmon's American Family Association Journal, and of Family Voice, the monthly magazine of founder Beverly LaHaye's Concerned Women for America (CWA). Focus on the Family churns out screeds with titles like "Planned Parenthood Wants Medical Accuracy? What a Joke!" Through the 1990s, organizations like the Family Research Council fostered grassroots "parents' rights" groups whose mission was to police sex education in communities nationwide. The fundamentalist Rutherford Institute of Charlottesville, Virginia, has been lending legal aid to widespread efforts to stop condom distribution, block dissemination of birth control information, and censor sex-ed curricula. The American Center for Law and Justice, a spinoff of the Christian Coalition, offers similar services.

Gagged-- not in a fun, SM way

For many right-wing activists, the financial rewards of such efforts are bounteous. South Carolina has been funneling all its abstinence-only federal grant money-- $1.3 million in 1999 alone-- into the anti-abortion group Heritage Community Services (HCS), whose programs reach an estimated 24,000 adolescents and young adults in 37 cities and towns. HCS, anointed as "one of the finest abstinence education programs in the nation" by George W. Bush, has used its government windfalls to expand into other states, beginning with Kentucky and Florida.

The current Presidential administration has been implementing its abstinence agenda in a host of ways. Reagan-era gag rules on family planning information have been restored. The Center for Disease Control's (CDC) statements on condoms have been censored. Bush has appointed abstinence-only promoter Patricia Ware to head the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS (PACHA); slipped anti-condom zealots into other PACHA openings; named abstinence-only advocate Freda McKissic Bush to the CDC Advisory Committee on HIV; and named abstinence-only proponent Alma Golden to oversee Title X family planning programs.

SIECUS and its allies cite statistics revealing that over 90% of American parents endorse a more comprehensive approach to sex education, but the battle to determine whose competing vision of America will prevail is being won by their foes. Addressing the 2003 March for Life rally by phone hookup, the President assured the crowd, "We are committed to abstinence." Bush was making an atypical understatement. Born in the Age of Reason, the government of the US has arrived at a far-flung opposite pole in the Age of Bush, an epoch of rampant reactionary mythmaking.

"Sex education teachers and other adults," Jerry Falwell has complained, "seem to conclude that teenagers are hardly more than animals and they are going to have intercourse regardless of what they say, so they might as well promote 'safe sex.'" In reality, as Judith Levine has written, "The idea that sex is a normative-- and, heaven forfend, positive-- part of adolescent life is unutterable in America's public forum."

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com