Asked by President Reagan to report on the dangers
of AIDS, Surgeon General Everett Koop has responded
by proposing instruction in bugger-y for schoolchildren
as young as the third grade on the spurious grounds
that the problem is one of ignorance and not morality

Sex Education Is
Just No Business
Of The Governm'bnt

BY ROBERT W. LEE

I N FEBRUARY, President Reagan
asked U.S. Surgeon General C.
Everett Koop to evaluate AIDS

and report to the American people on
the scope of, and methods for coping
with. that burgeoning and deadly dis-
ease. The Koop Report was released
on October 22, 1986.

Much guesswork, tempered by polit-
ical considerations, has been mixed
with the scientific pronouncements of
the Koop Report. For instance, we are
assured by the Surgeon General at
one point: "There is no danger of
infection with AIDS virus by casual
social contact." Elsewhere. however,
he is more specific: `There is no ktww
risk of non-sexual infection in tnosf
of the situations we encounter in our
daily lives." (Emphasis added.) Need-
less to say, simply because a risk may
not be known with scientific certainty
is far from conclusive proof that it
does not exist.* And "most" is a cru-
January, 1987

cial qualifier, especially since even
the Koop Report admits that "AIDS
is still a mysterious disease in many
ways . . ."

In another nod to homosexual poli-
tics, statistics cited by the Surgeon
General in a statement accompanying

*Similarly. the Koop Report states: "Al-
though the AIDS virus has been found in
tears and saliva, no instance of transmis-
sion from thcsc body fluids has been
reported." It also claims: "Thcrc arc no
known casts of AIDS transmission hy in-
sects. such as moquitocs." Yet it con-
tinues to acknowlcdgc at least three in-
stances whcrc health-cart workers tcstcd
AIDS-positive after accidentally sticking
thcmsclves with nccdlcs used in the cart
of AIDS patients. If nccdlcs, why not mos-
quitoes which, after dining on .AlDS vic-
tims, promptly flit to others'.' Indeed. la\t
August, Jean-Claude Chermann of the
pastcur Imtitutc in Paris rcportcd discov-
cry of the AIDS virus in insects captured
in ZaYrc

9t


CONSERVATIVE DfCEST

GOVERNMENT SEX EDUCATION

the Koop Report are used to magnify
heterosexual responsibility for AIDS
well beyond anything that is even
remotely justified. For instance, a
total of 26,199 cases of AIDS had
been reported to the Centers for
Disease control as of October 20,
1986. Of these, about two-thirds
(17,197) involved homosexual or bi-
sexual males. Another seventeen per-
cent (4,452) were intravenous drug
abusers. And yet another eight per-
cent (2,063) were homosexual male
drug abusers.

  Four Frcent (999) of the cases were
classified as "heterosexual." But a ftmt-
note informs us that the number in-
cludes "446 persons (74 men, 372
women) who have had heterosexual
contact with a person with AIDS or
at risk for AIDS and 553 persons (446
men, 107 women) without other iden-
tified risks who were born in coun-
tries [such us Huiti md in Cetttrctl
Africa] in which heterosexual trans-
mission is believed to play a major
role although precise means of trans-
mission have not yet been fully
defined."

In other words, every one of the
so-called "heterosexual" cases in-
volved persons who either had con-
tact with someone already having
AIDS (or at high risk for AIDS), or
are from pathetically poor countries
with virtually no public sanitation
where it is only guessed that their
AIDS was heterosexually transmitted.
As Wushittgtott Times columnist Wes-
ley Pruden has noted, "Moving them
from a separate category to `hetero-
sexual' might, in fact, be correct. But
92

it was a political decision. not a med-
ical one."

Sex Training. When it comes to
protecting pre-adolescents from AIDS,
Dr. Koop declares: "We can no longer
afford to sidestep frank, open dis-
cushions about sexual practices -
homosexual and heterosexual." He
claims that what is needed is more
sex education in the schools, starting
"at the lowest grade possible ."
Indeed, Koop claims, there "is now
no doubt that we need sex education
in schools" which "should include
information on sexual practices that
may put our children at risk for AIDS."
No doubt? What there is "no doubt"
about is that neither Dr. Koop nor
anyone else can point to any com-
munity in the country where school
sex instruction has improved sexual
behavior. To the contrary, the mas-
sive increases in sexual delinquency,
venereal disease, illegitimate births,
abortions - and now AIDS - have
occurred in the very period during
which sex education has been most
extensively provided in schools through-
out the nation.

In the Fifties, for instance, the gov-
ernment ("public") schools in Wash-
ington, D.C., were among the first
in the nation to institute a kindergar-
ten-through- I2th-grade program of sex
education. In the Seventies, the Na-
tional Capital became the first major
U.S. city where the numberofout-of-
wedlock births exceeded those born
within the marriage covenant,  and
where the number of unborn babies
killed by abortion exceeded the number
of live births.

January, 1987

And it was also in the Seventies
that the "San Francisco School Board

. unanimously approved inclusion
of gay lifestyles studies in high school
sex-education ChSSf3." (~`a.dJitJglot?
Srar, May 26, 1977) As the nation's
homosexual heartland, San Francisco
has been hit especially hard by the
AIDS plague. And in all of California
(as of July 1986) "there were 5,200
reported AlDS victims," and "State
public health officials estimate as many
as 500,000 people may have been in-
fected with AIDS and developed anti-
bodies to the disease." (hbd~ingWr~
Times, October 30, 1986)
A lack of information is not the
problem. Physicians, for example,
know more about the physical and
emotional aspects of sex than just about
anyone else, yet there is no evidence
that they are sexually better adjusted
than, say, accountants, editors, law-
yers, taxi drivers, or teachers. Prob-
lems such as AIDS result from a lack
of moral training and restraint of the
sort which the schools are neither qual-
ified nor (at least in the case of gov-
ernmenl schools) allowed to advocate.
It is the right and responsibility of
parents to instruct their children in
this unusually sensitive area, and if
some parents neglect that duty, com-
mandeering the rights of all parents
is hardly the solution.

School sex classes tend to erode
the spiritual values and moral stabil-
ity of children, while weakening the
family relationship. After all, chil-
dren in the same grade may be roughly
the same age chronologically, but they
will inevitably differ widely in their
January, 1987

nental age, emotional maturity, and
noral beliefs and attitudes. The poten-
ial harm likely to occur to some mem-
3ers of a grade or class, when all are
subjected to the same degree of sex
[raining, should be apparent.
Even the best-intentioned projects
can have dreadful consequences, as
when the birth of hamsters in one.
first-grade class turned from joy to
horror as the new mother, apparently
excited by the spectators, suddenly
devoured her offspring. The mother
of one child (who had favored school
sex education, by the way) subse-
quently told a reporter that the grisly
experience "created doubts about
mother love that a six-year-old isn't
prepared to handle." Indeed, her daugh-
ter "kept drawing pictures of animals
eating their babies."

What sort of pictures will third-
graders be drawing in the wake of
graphic descriptions of the sort of
homosexual perversions which lead
to AIDS?

Instruction. It is simply not nec-
essary to discuss the explicit details
of either `*normal" sex or perversions
to keep young people from being
seduced or perverted. Indeed, public
discussion of sexual intimacy tends
to promote, rather than inhibit, im-
moral behavior. Group instruction
about sex embarrasses some pupils,
creates callousness in others, and en-
courages others to experiment. Today,
there is more sex education in more
schools than ever before, yet prob-
lems related to sexual improprieties
are more extreme and threatening than
ever before - much more so than
                     93


CONSERWATlYE DIGEST

before the national crusade was
launched nearly three decades ago to
subject students to sex training under
the guise of dealing with the conse-
quences of sexual license.
Clearly, the evidence to date, if it
leads to any conclusions at all, points
to school sex education as part of the
problem, not the solution. Adding
AIDS, and details about how it is
contracted, to the list of values-neu-
tral and graphically described scx-educa-
tion topics could be (indeed, is likely
to be) a disaster. Especially when we
are talking about providing such in-
struction to very young children.
When government assumes the
authority to compel parents by the
full force of law to send their children
to school, it must guard against expos-
ing those children to instruction which
parents have reason to find morally
abhorrent. A positive step in that direc-
tion occurred in Tennessee on October
24, 1986, when a federal judge ruled
that schools could not compel chil-
dren to read textbooks containing
themes offensive to their family's reli-
gious beliefs. Attempts to provide in-
struction in pederasty and bugger-y will
undoubtedly be met with court ac-
tion.

Meanwhile. what screening process
exists to determine if a teacher is an
appropriate sex instructor`? It is en-
tirely possible that the verv teachers
most likely to volunteer for the job
are the ones least lihcly to be person-
ally modest and view sex as a subject
involving personal morality. What bar-
riers keep v,erbal exhibitionists away
from the classroom'! Remember, it
94

takes doctors and nurses and years of
education, training, and experience to
develop the matter-of-fact, scientif-
ically unemotional attitude toward sex
which many advocates of sex educa-
tion in the schools expect teachers
and children to have when the topic
is discussed in the classroom.
It is crucial to keep in mind that
dishonest or ignorant information dis-
pensed by teachers can do fbr more
longer-lasting harm than anything a
youngster might pick up from friends
or even on the street. Information
received in school, from such a sig-
nificant authority figure as a teacher,
is presumed to be correct. But not so
with that gleaned from schoolmates
and other peers, whose accounts tend
to be discounted and taken with the
proverbial "grain of salt."
Ethics And Morality. This whole
business is a bucket of worms. Sex
education predicated on situation ethics
rather than a God-centered morality
has already affected even some court
decisions. A few years ago, for in-
stance. the New Mexico court of Ap-
peals ruled that a 23-year-old woman,
by engaging in sexual intercourse with
a IS-year-old boy, contributed to his
XX education, rather than to his delin-
quency. The judge who wrote the opin-
ion in the case noted: "Today sexual
intercourse is recognized as normal
conduct in the development of a human
being. As a result. this subject is taught
IO children in the public schools."
And he ruled: "A consensual act of
sexual intercourse engaged in by a
young man is nothing more than sex
education and necessary in his growth
         January, 1987

GOVERNMENT SEX EDUCATlON

of so frightful mein,/As to be hated
toward maturity and subsequent domes-

needs but to be seen;/ Yet seen too
oft, familiar with her face,/ We first
tic family life."

endure, then pity, then embrace."
Now note that the introduction to
the Surgeon General's Report asserts:
Which undoubtedly reminded some

"At the beginning of the AlDS epi-
observers of Alexander Pope's oft-

demic many Americans had little sym-
pathy for people with AIDS. The feel-
quoted quatrain: "Vice is a monster

ing was that somehow people from
certain groups `deserved' their illness.
Let us put those feelings behind us.
We are fighting a disease, not people."
In a very real sense, however, we are
"fighting" both: a "disease," to be
sure, but one inflicted on our society
by "people" who have arrogantly and
irresponsibly engaged in licentious pat-
terns of sexual behavior, which many
even now refuse to modify, and which
portend to cost society a fortune, most
of which will be extracted from cit-
izens whose "sexual preferences" nei-
ther created nor contribute to the AIDS
epidemic.

The Report predicts: "The changes
in our society will be economic and
political and will affect our social insti-
tutions, our educational practices, and
our health care. Although AIDS may
never touch you personally, the soci-
etal impact certainly will."

With that in mind. it may be difl`i-
cult indeed for most Americans to
take the Koop Report's advice not to
use AIDS "as an excuse to discrim-
nate against any group or individual."
January, 7987

many of the wildly destructive effects
of modifying our reaction towards per-
version from one of disgust to tolera-
Is it wise to propagandize in the

tion? Indeed, hasn't that switch itself
schools for toleration of perversions

tended to undemrine an important pro-
tective defense against possible i~voIvc-
and those who practice them? Com-

rrrerrt in perversion? As one medical
doctor phrased it. "The excessive tol-
passion is commendable, to be sure,

erance of perversion is not in the best
interests of schoolchildren or society."
but are we not already experiencing

The Educrats. It is no secret that
contempt for strong religious values
within families, and for parents who
strive to instill those values in their
children, permeates the writings and
comments of key sex educators. Even
a U.S. Commissioner of Education
(James B. Allen, who served in the
Nixon Administration) angrily declared
on one occasion: "The biggest prob-
lem in sex education is not the chil-
dren, but the damn parents!"
A symposium on sex education at
the University of California Medical
School, published in 1967 under the
title .%.I- Erlumtiot~ & Thr Teetqrr,
contains an essay by Dr. Ben Ard,
then a Professor of Counseling at San
Francisco State College. This essay
is typical of the anti-morality tirades
of the "experts" who have shaped
American sex education. According
to Dr. Ard: "Certainly most of the
problems with regard to sex education
would be resolvable if people could
only become free of their moralistic
judgments regarding sex
                      95


CONSERVATIVE DIGEST

"We need to avoid the sanctirnoni-
ous, sacred. saccharine. sentimental
approach to sex education which has
been with us for so long . In other
words, we need to get away from sex
education which emphasizes the repro-
ductive, repressive, religious approach.
"Essentially I have been suggest-
ing that if we want our sex education
to be better and more effective in the
future than it has been in the past,
then we must change the underlying
value assumptions from those of our
traditional. moralistic sex code to a
more rational. pluralistic sex ethics."
So emphatic was Dr. Ard in his
denunciation of conventional moral
and religious traditions that, in answer
to what individuals can do to provide
appropriate sex education of the young,
he counseled: "Ignore all opinions that
are moralistic and try to draw your
conclusions from data rather than from
dogma."

And you wonder why we are today
confronted with so many crises (and
in the case of AIDS, a potential
catastrophe) related to sexual ethics?

Writing in Tlrr Hurwnist for Novem-
ber/December, 1986, sex educator
Sol Gordon" updated the anti-moratis-
tic pitch as follows: "There is a vast
difference between being moral and
being moralistic For example, a
teacher could state that it is a health
hazard for young people to smoke.
This is a statement of a moral posi-
tion. It would be moralistic for the
teacher to declare, `It is a sin to smoke.
Moralistic statements clearly are inap-
propriate for public schools . . ."

Perhaps so, which is yet another
96

reason why AIDS education in such
schools would likely be harmful rather
than helpful. The perversions primar-
ily responsible for the transmission
of AIDS. for instance, colrld not bc
condemned as morally wrong or sin-
ful. Unwise, perhaps, or potentially
unhealthy, or whatever other purely
pragmatic argument might come to
mind. But n~nrcrll~ n'rotrg or sinf~rl?
Pity the poor teacher who attempts to
make the Biblical case for chastity
and cIgLlirr.sr sodomy. fornication,
and/or adultery.

A Campaign. So what is this all
about? One week following release
of the Surgeon General's Report, the
Committee on a National Strategy for
AIDS (comprised of sundry scientists
and public-health experts) released its
own findings and proposals in a 277-
page report which called for the expen-

*Dr. Gordon rcfircd last year as Director
of Syracuse Univcrvits's Institute for Family
Research and Educat;on. In the Seventies,
he authored (amonE other things) the notori-
ous "Zing Sex Comix," ahout which Dr.
Susan Huck (hcrsclf a Syracuse tlnivcrsity
graduate. who is today a CONSEKVA I'IVI.
D~ots.~ Contributing Editor) has written:
.I  these things were uniformly cheap.
drcadfulty drawn, and extrcrnely offen-
sive. At a glance one S;IW the boorish
jokes. suhhumarr charaotcrs, sick messages,
and the dash of radical political propa-
ganda. La!er, actuaJiy wf~chrg the stuff, l
found it appalling trash The idea of
children having dirty comic books thrust
upon them by the schools, so that they
could read ahou~, for instance. `oral and
anal sex,' was something I found quite
sickening _" (Amc,ricun UPirriorr,
Seplembcr 1974. Page 15)
         January, 1987

GOVERNMENT SEX EDUCATION

diture of around $2 billion annually
on AIDS research and education by
1990. The report also proposed the
creation of a national commission on
AIDS to track the epidemic and coor-
dinate anti-AIDS activities, us ncll
us u nm' federul office e.uclusive!\
devoted to AIDS-prevention c)durution

And, lest there be any remaining
doubt that the AIDS problem is being
used by collectivists to push for ever-
more government spending and bu-
reaucracy, the AJDS project's director,
Dr. Roy Widdus (who is also director
of the international health division of
the Institute of Medicine, which spon-
sored the study along with the Na-
tional Academy of Sciences) asserted
that the Committee believes everyone
who contracts AIDS deserves health
care, but "]u]nfortunately we recog-
nize that many AIDS patients - par-
ticularly intravenous drug users - are
not employed and thus do not have
adequate health insurance."

Which is undoubtedly true, so tax-
payers are expected to pay. One pos-
sibility cited by Dr. Widdus would
be national catastrophic health insur-
ance, "an issue being considered by
[t/w fedwcrl Dcprtrwr~t 04 ] Health
and Human Services." Another would
be for stutrs to provide insurance.
"We need to move rapidly in this area,"
Dr. Widdus claimed.

Regarding Surgeon General Koop's
call for sex education in the schools,
Dr. Roy Widdus declared: "Debat-
ing about what grade IO start it in is
irrelevant. The critical thing is to get
this information to people IchikdrPrr]
as they become .YPXII(III~ ucti~~e or
January, 1987

before that time." As soon as possi-
ble.

Let us pause to consider that fasci-
nating phrase "sexually active." We
have no idea who first coined it, but
suspect that he or she is first cousin
to the semantic sabotage artist who
first applied the term "gay'.' to homo-
sexuals. In both instances, language
has been perverted in-a way which
tends to camouflage and promote il-
licit sex. "Sexually active" is white-
wash for what is in fact fornication,
buggery, adultery, pedaphilia, sodomy,
and/or other terms which properly
apply to the sundry manifestations of
premarital and extramarital sexual
license. Applying such a positive
phrase to such irresponsible behavior
tends subtly to protnotr that behavior.
After all, who would not prefer to be
known as "sexually active" rather than
the implied alternative - "sexually
comatose"?

The time has come to condemn the
phrase "sexually active" and to use
more precise terms.

In a recent letter to the Il/trshingro~~
Times, one righteously (and rightly)
indignant mother wrote: "We have kin-
dergarten through I?th-grade Death
and Suicide Education, Drug Educa-
tion, Sex Education, Child Molesta-
tion Education; and now we'll have
AJDS Education. Good Grief! By the
time a child is 10 years old. he or she
will be suffering from manic-depres-
sion and neurosis just from going to
school. All of this will undoubtedly
be used to justify the bringing of kin-
dergarten through t2th-grade Stress
Education once the children are thor-

97


CONSERVATIVE DlGESt

oughly depressed from these non-
academic topics."

Lessons Of History. Historian Will
Durant once observed: "No one man,
however brilliant or well-informed, can
come in one lifetime to such fullness
of understanding as to safely judge
and dismiss the customs or institutions
of his society, for these are the wisdom
of generations after centuries of exper-
iment in the laboratory of history. A
youth boiling with hormones will
wonder why he should not give full
freedom 10 his sexual desires; and if
he is unchecked by custom, morals,
or laws, he may ruin his life before
he matures sufficiently to understand
that sex is a river of fire that must be

banked and cooled by a hundred
restraints if it is not to consume in
chaos both the individual and the
group."

That is one of the Duwnts' LPS-
sons OjHistnry (the title of the book
from which that warning is excerpted)
which has been widely flouted in this
so-called "modem" age. And as Amer-
ican philosopher and novelist George
Santayana perceptively pointed out,
those who refuse to learn the lessons
of history are condemned to repeat
them.

The new drive for increased sex
education in the schools to cope with
AIDS should be opposed by conserva-
tives without compromise.

Britannia Rues The Waves

THE PAS M'~KE enormous as Queen Victoria made her way toward Ireland.
One wave was so giganric, in fact, that Ihe ship shifted violently and almost
knocked her Britannic Majesty IO the deck. As the monarch recovered she told a
nearby attendant: "Go up to the bridge. give the admiral my compliments, and
tell him he.5 not IO Ict that happen again."

The Long And Short Of It

ONI: OF `I HE richest mcmbcrs of the legendary Rothschild family was a&cd:
"How did all the mcmhcrs of your f;lmily amass such foonuncs?" With a smile,
the Baron said: "By always selling mo soon."

A Lame Duck Flies To The South Pole

  A C`OKGKI:SSMAN scching re-clcclion had been badly bcalcn just before hc
wa4 IO spcah to thr Dutch Trcnt Club in h'ew York. Franh Croxninshicld dud his
hcht to inlroducc the Lnnc duck. "Gcnflcman." hc began. "our next bpcakcr bcarr
a xtrong rcszmblancc to the cardi. You will recall that the earth is not a perfect
aphcroid. bccau~ in i> llaltcncd at ths poles. That's prcckcl) what happcncd to
our next 5pcakcr."
98                             January, 7987