The Christian Crusade was involved in the Anaheim controversy from the start. For the first two weeks of October 1968, Drake and Hargis worked in California to launch a statewide organization opposing sex education, California Families United. Both men were honored at a dinner at Knott’s Berry Farm on October 18, which happened to be the very day after the special session with slide show had taken place. They met with the activists who would later put pressure on the California State Board of Education. Even when they were not physically present, they remained influential, since, throughout this period, local activists continued to lift talking points out of Drake’s pamphlet in their activist efforts to get sex education out of their schools.49
Anaheim was far from the only such local fight. With something close to 50 percent of US public school districts embroiled in conflict over sex education, the influence of writers like Drake and Hargis was vast. They visited many other towns during this period and sought similar action to what had happened in Anaheim by encouraging the formation of new opposition groups and advising sex ed opponents on the best strategy for triumphing over the opposition. Drake joined a group of Tulsa parents in a lawsuit against the school board there, which had instituted a sex education program.50
Aware of his own growing influence, Drake published yet another tract on sex education with Christian Crusade in 1969, titled SIECUS—Corrupter of Youth. Although his name did not appear on the cover, a number of internal references make clear that Drake was the author. The book repeated many of the charges he’d already committed to print but embellished them still further and added a number of salacious details. Describing Calderone’s recommendation of Kirkendall’s book Premarital Intercourse and Interpersonal Relationships, for instance, Drake could not stop himself from relating to readers that the book included one case that “described how a prostitute used her mouth to cause an ejaculation of a young student.”51 Drake was prone to repeat highly exaggerated statistics and tall tales, as when he claimed that California public school children had been shown “a vagina the size of a blackboard,” or that a teacher in Flint, Michigan, had stripped in front of her students, or that a Phoenix twelve-year-old experimented sexually on his four-year-old sister after receiving sex education at school. In any case, with Calderone and SIECUS refusing to “dignify” Drake by responding to his outlandish charges in a public debate, Drake had little incentive to refrain from such exaggerations.52
The Christian Crusade campaign against SIECUS and Calderone inspired some flamboyant hate mail. Once its campaign against her was in full force and for years after its peak, Calderone received numerous letters like the following:
Dear Mrs. Calderone: There has got to be a special place in hell for a reptile of a woman like—indeed, scrofulous, vile, wicked example of degenerate human being that you are.… Yes You Madam du Farge are at least partially responsible for the moral degradation of much of America’s youth… with your nihilistic, ungodly, theories, which have destroyed countless youths in our country.… They should not callit [sic] Venereal Herpes, but Calderone Herpes in honor of its degrading and reptilian author. You will indeed be JUDGED!53
Outraged postal correspondence had been a routine fact of life for sex reformers for years, of course; the vicious invective directed at Calderone, however, was sharply escalated from the letters directed at earlier figures like Sanger and Kinsey.
Another letter addressed itself to “MARY STINKEN CALDERONE, MISTRESS OF THE DEVIL; MISFIT PROSTITUTE OF HELL”—the titles jabbing derisively at Calderone’s MD and MPH academic degrees. The writer assured Calderone that Hades would be a place “WHERE YOU WILL HAVE MOLTEN STEEL POURED INTO YOU FROM TWO DIRECTIONS… & WHERE YOUR DIET WILL BE PUSS, EXCRETIONS, ROACHES, MAGGOTS & SPIDERS.” Others wrote in less pictographic style but with equivalent loathing. “You people are the kind who would not be mourned in the least should you be found with millstones around your necks and at the bottom of the sea,” blustered another writer. Letters this malevolent, penned by men and women alike, routinely ended up in the “Crank” files.54 Calderone had become a perpetual target not only of the Christian Crusade organization but of its enthusiastic audiences around the country.
As opposition to sex education spread, many groups besides Christian Crusade took up the issue. Organizations ranging from the John Birch Society—which founded the Movement to Restore Decency (MOTOREDE) committee—to the Ku Klux Klan acted alongside the numerous local and national groups formed specifically to fight sex education. Gary Allen, billed as “one of the nation’s top authorities on civil turmoil and the New Left,” published “Sex Study: Problems, Propaganda, and Pornography” in a 1969 issue of American Opinion, the magazine of the John Birch Society. Allen repeated many of Drake’s claims about the dire links between sex education and Communism and added more of his own, lambasting “comrades” Kirkendall, Calderone, Rubin, and Genné for being anti-patriotic haters of America. Excoriating the religious credentials of Genné in particular, Allen wrote, “In addition to his consultation in pornography at Sexology, the files of the House Committee on Un-American Activities record that Genné has affiliated himself with such Communist Fronts as the Stockholm Peace Petition, the World Peace Appeal, the National Committee to Repeal the McCarran Act, the Committee for Peaceful Alternatives to the Atlantic Pact, etc.” Anyone affiliated with SIECUS was, in short, pro-Communist. In Allen’s telling, SIECUS educators urged parents “to simply surrender your children to the indoctrination and ‘skills’ provided in the schools by Comrade Rubin and the Leftist pornographers of SIECUS.”55
After treating John Birchers to more examples of the preposterous attempts by SIECUS to control their children, Allen hammered home his point: “Everywhere one turns with these people the reins lead back to the Far Left. Why? Clearly because it is in the interest of the Communists to promote programs like SIECUS for destroying American sexual morality, and enervating the moral fiber of our nation’s youth.” Communists, he reminded a readership for whom this was already gospel, had always known the strategic value of preaching permissiveness, corrupting youth, and ensuring that young people were more devoted to sex than to religion. “Historically, the destruction of morality has often been used as a technique to ready a country for Communist revolution,” and readers must arm themselves with this knowledge of “What’s Really Happening” with SIECUS in American life today.56
The links between Communism and sex education imagined by right-wing commentators received even more graphic treatment in a pamphlet distributed by the Greenwood, Indiana, chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, It’s Time to Save Our Schools. It blamed Communists and Marxist-inspired liberals for “forced integration, illegal bussing, narcotics, homicides, assaults, violence, suicides, rapes, burglaries, drunkenness, sex education, and interracial dating.” “Under the misrule of these totalitarian Leftists,” the schools had become “jungles, graduating children who have never properly learned to read, write, add or subtract, or even conduct themselves in an orderly manner—but will be thoroughly schooled in sex.” Teachers were frauds and charlatans, “mind benders” who imposed secret psychological tests on students that “parents cannot be allowed to see.” Besides the evils of integration and the rise of interracial dating—too obvious to require lengthy commentary—the pamphlet devoted most of its space to the perversions that sex education was imposing on American children. The document warned parents that teachers were being hired who themselves oozed sexual prowess, and many advocated demonstrating sexual intercourse in class. “Sound fantastic? Remember that today’s liberal sex fantasies are tomorrow’s liberal dictated school rules.” Children and teens were learning obscene words, seeing pornography, caressing and fondling each other as part of the educational process—and in racially mixed classrooms, no less. Parents who objected would be subjected to “‘mental health’ concentration camps.” All of this was at the behest of SIECUS, whose leaders “have known Communist affiliations.”57
By 1970, when Hargis published his own salvo in thi
s war, Sex Revolution in the United States, the battle against SIECUS and Calderone had become the centerpiece of Hargis’s Christian Crusade. As Hargis wrote (emphasis in original):
I do not feel that the greatest victory that Christian Crusade has achieved in fighting the SIECUS variety of sex education in the public schools has been to expose SIECUS, Dr. Mary Calderone and Dr. Lester Kirkendall; but, instead, it has been the fact that it has united parents across the country in a protest movement against the abdication of parental responsibility and the authority of the home, and has alerted them to the necessity of strengthening their family ties and improving the home, with an emphasis on teaching and moral indoctrination, according to the family philosophy or religious concepts.
Hargis could “point with pride” to the fact that “hundreds of thousands of American parents” had been inspired to fight against the evils of sex education. The victory was that increasing numbers of parents were finally “acting like Christian parents should,” while more and more young people were learning to behave. Hargis thanked God for “the Mary Calderones and Lester Kirkendalls” who, through their “intemperate statements and candid remarks” about lessening the authority of parents and of biblical authority, had helped to “illustrate how far America has gone toward moral anarchy.”58 Sex would remain at the core of the Christian Crusade’s focus thereafter, and the backlash galvanized by Billy James Hargis and his partners would reverberate for years to come, as similar groups fused religion and conservative politics that were centered on a range of issues relating to sex and gender norms.
NOTWITHSTANDING THEIR CONSPIRATORIAL CLAIMS, SIECUS’S critics were right to note that the group helped to forge a remarkable alliance between the forces of science and liberal religion. Calderone’s model for sex education was a medical one, but she was eager to seek allies among any religious groups willing to acknowledge the expertise of physicians who took their cue from scientific findings. Calderone had a number of liberal Protestant collaborators who were dedicated in their labors with SIECUS. The group’s second president was David R. Mace, a former minister, Methodist-turned-Quaker, and sociologist who pioneered marriage counseling in Britain and the United States. Reverend Genné of the National Council of Churches served as secretary of SIECUS; William Graham Cole, a former minister and college chaplain who was then president of the Presbyterian-affiliated Lake Forest College, served on the board of directors. By the fall of 1965, Rabbi Bernard Kligfeld of Temple Emanu-El in Long Beach, New York, had also joined the board. These clerical leaders provided important religious legitimacy for a board that consisted largely of physicians, psychiatrists, educators, counseling experts, and scholarly experts in family relations. If those entrusted with the spiritual guidance of their flocks ever worried that their authority was being supplanted by medical professionals in the realm of sex education, they did so quietly. All seemed delighted and grateful to cultivate these cross-professional collaborations on a matter of such singular social importance.59
The efforts of Calderone and SIECUS to forge alliances with religious leaders bore fruit in an “Interfaith Statement on Sex Education” that was publicly released on June 8, 1968. The document carried the official imprimatur of three significant US religious bodies: the National Council of Churches, the Synagogue Council of America, and—notably—the United States Catholic Conference. However bold its aims, the document struck a conservative tone, insisting on the godly nature of human sexuality and the need for spiritual and moral instruction deriving from “our Judeo-Christian heritage.” Sex education was primarily a task for parents, the statement assured, but “supplementary assistance from church or synagogue” and also from schools was sometimes necessary and desirable. A lengthy set of strict guidelines laid out precisely how school educators should teach this subject: sex education “must respect the cultural, familial and religious backgrounds and beliefs” of all students, “with understanding, tolerance and acceptance of difference”; yet the document assumed an ethical framework of “moral values and beliefs about what is right and wrong that are held in common by the major religions on the one hand and generally accepted legal, social, psychological, medical and other values held in common by service professions and society generally.” Calderone had succeeded in bringing Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders together in a show of unity on a matter of sexual morality. The attacks of Hargis and his allies were just one of many factors ensuring that this public unity would be short-lived, but the interfaith document showed that a unified path forward seemed briefly like a real option.60
The attacks from right-wing religious activists weighed heavily on Calderone, who was adamant in rejecting the notion that SIECUS was imposing sex education on a nation that did not want it. “My personal belief is that a society gets what it wants. If society doesn’t want sex education for children, then no one should impose it on society,” she told a Playboy interviewer in 1970. “That’s why we’ve never adopted an aggressive program of disseminating sex education in the schools.… SIECUS has simply responded and will continue to respond to requests for information.” To her conservative religious and political critics who saw her as destroying the morals of America’s youth, she turned the tables to place the blame on them, noting that “if the attitudes of adults about sex and sexuality were other than they are, the kids wouldn’t be in so much trouble” or have “the hang-ups, the difficulties, the ignorance” caused by a confusing “excess of eroticism on the one hand and an excess of repression on the other.” Those whom she called “reactionaries” were themselves damaged, frustrated people—“frigid wives and husbands grimly suppressing their sexual urges because they’ve been taught that they’re sinful,” then, in turn, repressing others. Those who sought to quash sexual curiosity and knowledge were themselves responsible for both the bewilderment and the ensuing waywardness of America’s youth. Sex education, in contrast, would facilitate social stability and the responsible growth of young people into well-adjusted parents and citizens.61
Even as the right-wing attacks on sex ed and SIECUS were increasing in pitch, Calderone was growing less wedded to the sexual conservatism she had exemplified just a few years earlier. She concurred with the fourfold set of ethical values put forward in a 1970s SIECUS volume as “the core values in a democratic society” that offered a broad framework for sexual decision making: “respect for truth as a definable moral value and faith in the free play of critical intelligence; respect for the basic worth, equality, and dignity of each individual; recognition of the need of cooperative effort for the common good; and recognition of the right of self-determination of each individual.” Together, these values called on each person to be accountable for his or her own sexual behavior and its effects on others while also enthusiastically affirming individual freedom of choice. There were limits to what individuals should do sexually—nothing was permitted that was exploitative, violating, or cruel—but so long as a person’s actions did not violate the webs of “social obligation and welfare,” they were likely acceptable. These values, she and her fellow SIECUS staff members believed, “coincide with some of the major values in the Judeo-Christian tradition: that every person is to be respected regardless of color or race; that life is better than death, love is better than hate, growth is better than deterioration; and that freedom for individual persons is a goal to strive for.” Ultimately, in a nation that had grown “pluralistic” in its sexual values, the sex educator’s role was to “create a genuine open forum” rather than preaching his or her own specific opinions or imposing a false consensus on alternative views.62
She also apparently grew more comfortable with the notion of sex as a spiritual act than she had been in the early 1960s. Despite being a physician and a scientist, in a 1973 lecture to a Quaker audience, Calderone affirmed, “The mystery of sex continues to be greater than our capacity to comprehend it.” Those who claimed to have “the only pipeline to sacred truth” on such matters possessed, to Calderone’s mind, a hubri
s no Friend could abide. At the height of her work with SIECUS, then, Calderone embraced a sort of bridge across the older liberal divide: between, on the one hand, those who sought to demystify sex and treat it as one more physiological process that should be altogether removed from the realm of the emotions and, on the other, those who sought to elevate the mystical and emotional and sheer pleasurable dimensions of sex as a way of celebrating its unique role in human life. In her 1974 introduction to the SIECUS publication Sexuality and Human Values, Calderone made clear she stood for both: “Right here is where I find it easiest to shift my focus from the understanding of eroticism as a scientist to the celebration of it as a religious person. Perhaps this is because of my Quaker persuasion. In any case, I find that I simply cannot convince myself that the erotic aspect of human life is not as truly integral to ‘that of God in every person’ as is, for instance, the intellectual, the cognitive.”63 How could something so natural and also so good, so sacred, and so joyous be a force for evil and division in the world?
Like progressive sex reformers before her, Calderone knew that myriad traditionalist Christians roundly despised what she stood for—broad access to family planning information and treatment; still more, open and knowledgeable discussion of sexuality throughout American society—but she also knew that they were not all unhinged “cranks.” Unlike Sanger or Kinsey, this revolutionary made direct overtures not only to those she expected to be allies but also to many of her professional opponents every chance she could, believing that her powers of persuasion, the evidence of science, and her good-faith acknowledgment of other people’s religious views could melt fear and open enemies’ eyes to acceptance of sexual realism and the need for better sex education. She committed her efforts with especial fervor to American Catholic leaders, believing them to be key to her efforts’ success. She assured a host of priestly leaders of their mutual goal in bolstering, as she typically phrased it, “the stability of the family under the stresses of modern life.”64
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