The rest of the US delegation to the Louvain University Colloquium on the Sexuality of Woman consisted of Hagmaier, who was then teaching marriage and the family at Catholic University; Louis Dupré of Georgetown University; Elmer Gelinas of St. Mary’s College in California; Thomas Hayes, a biophysicist at Berkeley; John Noonan of Notre Dame, whose book on contraception and natural law had been published the previous year; Bernard Pisani, an obstetrician at St. Vincent’s Hospital in New York; and Reuben Hill, a well-known sociologist at the University of Minnesota who worked in the areas of marriage and family life and who also served as a program officer in population studies at the Ford Foundation. (As Calderone noted in her postconference report, Hill was also a Mormon and to her knowledge the only other non-Catholic present at the gathering.) At this same event, Calderone was approached by Canon Charles Moeller, undersecretary to the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (the Roman Catholic office responsible for transmitting and defending church doctrine), who spoke with her at length and asked her to send books published in the United States that “would seem to have the most relevance to all of the complicated matters under discussion, particularly as they relate to sex and marriage.” When she remarked that some of this material might prove challenging to the church, he replied, “‘Yes, but it is essential that our theology be based on the most accurate scientific knowledge.’”83 Calderone was deeply impressed that these Catholic leaders wanted to grapple with real science, unbound by the pabulum and wishful thinking that she worried were the tools of local Catholic leaders.
As we saw earlier, Calderone’s work with SIECUS played a significant role in gaining the imprimatur of the US Catholic Conference in the June 1968 “Interfaith Statement on Sex Education,” published jointly with the National Council of Churches and the Synagogue Council of America. A month after the document’s release, however, her hopes for further cooperation with Catholics were dashed. Pope Paul VI issued the papal encyclical Humanae Vitae, which condemned all forms of contraception in no uncertain terms and linked birth control to abortion and to sexuality issues much more broadly.84 As the encyclical stated, these were not new teachings but strong reiterations of points that had been made for some decades in other official (and unofficial) documents. The response of Catholics in the United States was largely tepid, as angry disbelief cooled to indifference. A month after Humanae Vitae was publicly released, a Gallup survey found that only 28 percent of American Catholics who had heard of the encyclical agreed with it; even among the more devout Catholics, fewer than half supported it. As historians have shown, Catholics continued to use contraceptives, their defiance marking a “trend toward nonconformity with Church teaching” that “continued unabated.”85 But more public work, like collaboration with an increasingly controversial organization, had to cease—it was now too fraught for Catholic leaders to participate actively in SIECUS.
Of her many accomplishments, Calderone was particularly proud of her outreach to Catholics. She singled out a speech she gave about “how Planned Parenthood can cooperate with Roman Catholics” as one that “gave me great satisfaction.” As she recalled, her point there had been to work with rather than against Catholics, honoring the rhythm method and teaching Catholic women to use it as scientifically as possible: “Don’t try to subvert her faith to other methods. Instead, make the rhythm method a part of the services offered by Planned Parenthood.”86 Her openness paid off, for “as a result of that speech” to Planned Parenthood about Catholics, the theology department at the University of Notre Dame invited her to deliver a lecture in its annual Marriage Institute—the purpose of which was “to illucidate the meaning of love and sexualogy [sic] in marriage.” That Calderone was the author of “the most comprehensive medical textbook” on contraception was duly noted in the advertising of her lecture, one of four that would together earn attendees a certificate “fulfilling the Church’s required pre-Nuptial instruction.” According to the postlecture write-up in the student newspaper, her talk on “Sex and Sexuality” stressed societal conditioning and the current need to “re-evaluate assigned sexual roles” and was delivered to “an overflow crowd.” Notre Dame theologians had selected Calderone to fill a requirement of the Catholic Church for marriage preparation!87 And yet Catholics were forbidden from partaking of her broader program for individuals to exert control over their sexual reproduction. Calderone had made inroads of politeness, but the breach between worldviews was wider than ever.
AS CALDERONE CONTINUED TO ENDURE attacks on her and on SIECUS by the John Birch Society and fundamentalists like Drake and Hargis, she grew wearier and angrier but no less determined to fight for access to sex education that would be accessible to all people. Once in a while, she responded in a tone that matched that of her opponents, as when she snapped at a reporter that the right-wing groups and “ignorant parents” who opposed SIECUS were “sexual illiterates.”88 More often, she struck a disconsolate note when discussing fundamentalist religion.
In a presentation at the International Congress of Sexology in Montréal, Québec, she reminded her listeners that the chief enemies of sex education had long been church leaders, who remained powerful obstacles in this field. “Historically, the prime contender for control of the sexuality of a person by an outside agency is, and continues to be, religion.” A deep suspicion of pleasure and privacy was at the root of religion’s repressive force, in her view: an “almost paranoid fear that exists, not only of sexual pleasure itself but also of the recognition of one’s body as a valid source of that pleasure.” Rather than noting, as she often had before, the many liberal Protestant and Catholic leaders who were working for change in this regard, she cited several studies to demonstrate that lay people were simply circumventing their leaders on matters ranging from masturbation and birth control to a wide array of sexual practices outside of marriage. Calling for “a coalition of strengths” to bring professionals together in service to a “universal approach to realistic sexual knowledge for all ages and socioeconomic groups” (emphasis in original), Calderone noted that religion “can be especially helpful in such a coalition,” but only if religious leaders were willing to agree with this statement: “That sexuality itself is morally neutral, but that how we learn or are taught to use it throughout life has heavy moral implications.” “Such moral implications,” she insisted, “should—and indeed must—transcend differences in religious dogma.” Working together in this way would turn what were internal sexual battlegrounds into “private peacegrounds.”89
As Calderone knew, however, her words were hardly religiously neutral. The fight over sex education had contributed enormously to the hardening of opposing views toward sex: the very idea that “sexuality itself is morally neutral” was the core notion that so angered her critics. Liberal religious allies could align with Calderone, yes, but their opponents were also coalescing to gird their loins for battle on the other side.
Weary though she was, Calderone was determined to continue her work. Every chance she could, she pointed out to audiences and readers that the Christian Crusade and the John Birch Society were willing to “use totally unchristian methods,” such as outright lying, to achieve “a political end: control of public education.”90 In a journal aimed at Protestant pastors, she wrote that she was “one of the few persons singled out for the most ruthless attempts at character assassination. I do not know those who hate me, but I know their words. I do not hate them, but have only compassion for them because they know hate. They refuse to know my words, yet they hate me and have no charity for me. How can this be?”91 At this point in her life—Calderone was sixty-six—she was more than ready to call it sexism. “The personal attacks focused on me, a woman, have almost all been made by men,” she wrote. She knew she did not embody the Christian Crusade’s idea of appropriate Christian womanhood—the malicious crank letters that flooded her mailbox made that point with venom—and hence they wished to deny her the “personhood” that women in the United States, with the he
lp of liberal religion, had at long last attained.92 Despite persistent opposition, however, the work of SIECUS and Calderone, in particular, moved sex education from the margins to the center of the American educational system, with nearly all public school systems offering some form of sex education to students.93
Billy James Hargis’s own crusade against sex ed and other forms of sexual immorality crashed to a halt when Time magazine published its 1976 account of his sexual improprieties with both male and female students at his American Christian College in Tulsa. Although a friendly local reporter subsequently published a sympathetic piece that gave Hargis’s side of the story, the damage was done, and Hargis became an untouchable in the conservative Christian community. Writing the autobiographical My Great Mistake nine years later, he blamed turncoat employees of Christian Crusade—Noebel, above all—for falsely betraying him (he called the Time story “pure trash”). Though he admitted he had grown extremely arrogant in his ministry, and repeatedly described himself in vague terms as the chief of sinners, Hargis insisted that the sexual charges were untrue, admitting only to having allowed an excessive “familiarity” to grow between himself and the young people at the college and fiercely denying the taint of homosexuality. The sex scandal, in Hargis’s account, had been invented so that his traitorous associates could take over his hard-earned ministry. His bitterness toward all his onetime Christian friends who deserted him in the wake of the scandal remained raw. “I have found that some Christians are the most unforgiving people in the world,” he wrote. “They want to believe the worst of anybody.… They love to gossip. They will believe gossip before they will believe anything good about a man.” In a mantra he repeated on television interviews and again in print, Hargis lamented, “Christians are the only army in the world that kill their wounded… and leave their leaders on the field to die.”94
The struggle over sex education was a war, all right: a battle over the moral frameworks in which sexual knowledge would be embedded and over who had the right to determine just what those frameworks would be. The religious progressives in this story were beginning to think of morality much more in terms of relationship than purity, and many were starting to imagine that sex in situations outside of heterosexual marriage might be acceptable even within a Christian context. The conservative Christians who opposed them were not contesting the need for factual knowledge of sexuality—a denial of sex that, to their minds, was more the goal of celibacy-favoring Catholics—but, rather, insisting that the facts be embedded in a whole constellation of specific moral values, centered on chastity and their ideal model for domestic relations. Education about sex was critical to the maintenance of this model, but that education needed to be contained, regulated, and sanctioned by Christian wisdom.
This was not simply a conflict over knowledge, then. More directly, it was a battle for the authority to define the boundaries of Christianity and to set the terms for gendered order within marriage, the family, and American society at large. Equating sexual freedom with child endangerment, and confident that only they could prevent the nation’s destruction, Christian Crusade leaders promoted themselves as America’s valiant saviors and encouraged their followers to see themselves as a remnant of virtuous Christian citizens in a hopelessly decadent world. Hargis and Drake’s accusations against SIECUS enabled the Christian Crusade to grow and expand in influence well beyond its early anti-Communist days. Tirades against sex education proved a brilliant political strategy in the nascent forging of a new Christian right, even as they helped to bring together religious and secular progressives in hopeful alliances against it.
Those who fought against sex education, moreover, had great success in displacing this progressive religious alliance from power. If the progressives seemed to be winning at first—triumphing over an older traditionalism as the mid-1960s caused attitudes toward sex to change, and getting moderate sex ed programs accepted all over the country—they were soundly knocked back on their heels by the attack stoked by people like Hargis. The liberal confidence regarding gradual progress toward greater enlightenment that emerged from Green Lake was, by the 1970s, replaced by the world-weary outlook that an embattled Calderone had by then adopted: a perspective that saw a long struggle ahead against people like Hargis. As the new Christian right began taking shape to serve as the righteous guardian of moral issues on all matters relating to sex and gender, their liberal Christian counterparts had to prepare and strengthen themselves for the conflicts yet to come.
CHAPTER 6
THE ABORTION WAR BEFORE AND AFTER ROE V. WADE
IN AUGUST 1972, THE GALLUP Organization reported, “Two out of three Americans think abortion should be a matter for decision solely between a woman and her physician.” A “record high” of 64 percent of Americans supported “full liberalization of abortion laws,” including a majority of ordinary Catholics surveyed (56 percent). Three in ten respondents (32 percent) disagreed, although two-thirds of that group “would make an exception in the case of a woman whose mental health is in danger.” More Republicans (68 percent) and independents (67 percent) than Democrats (59 percent) agreed with the statement that decisions regarding abortion should be made only by a woman and her physician—a statistic that highlighted the prominence in the Democratic Party of Catholics, many of whom remained unenthusiastic about abortion rights.1 But both political parties contained strong support for the expansion of safe and legal abortion services to American women.
On January 22, 1973, the Supreme Court handed down its 7–2 ruling in Roe v. Wade, declaring that women had a constitutional right to abortion throughout the first two trimesters of pregnancy prior to fetal viability. Responses to the ruling from religious and secular citizens came swiftly and quickly arrayed themselves into a moral pattern. Two camps emerged that were particularly visible. One was made up predominantly of Catholics who were joined by conservative Protestants in associations such as Billy James Hargis’s new organization, Americans Against Abortion. This camp called itself “pro-life” and emphasized the sacredness of the fetus within the womb, and it insisted that legislative efforts must be made to overturn Roe and end what they condemned as abortion on demand. The Catholic Church itself, in fact, spent $4 million in 1973 alone to lobby members of Congress for restrictions on abortion.2 To pro-life advocates, the Supreme Court’s decision had sanctioned the murder of innocents. The other side was essentially secular in orientation but included a broad swath of Protestants and Jews as well as many liberal Catholic lay people. This camp called itself “pro-choice,” a name that aimed to signify the preeminence of women’s autonomy and personal moral decision making when it came to terminating an unwanted or medically adverse pregnancy. To pro-choice advocates, the court’s decision guaranteed women the basic right to determine when and whether to bear children.
Evangelical Christians were not major players in the pro-life movement at this time, and many supported abortion’s legalization. A symposium sponsored by Christianity Today a few years earlier had shown most to agree that “family welfare” issues could justify abortion. Southern Baptist leaders, who held very conservative positions on sexuality and who would eventually become staunch opponents of abortion, initially seemed to be squarely in the pro-choice camp: the Southern Baptist Convention had recently passed a resolution calling on members to work for abortion’s legalization under such capacious conditions as “rape, incest, clear evidence of fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” Ninety percent of Texas Baptists surveyed in 1969 had felt their state’s abortion law should be loosened. After the Roe ruling was announced, one of the denomination’s most prominent leaders, W. A. Criswell, praised the court’s decision and publicly stated his belief that abortion was not murder and that “what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”3 Many Southern Baptist and other evangelical leaders would change their minds in a few years, but the main activis
ts on the pro-life side at the time of Roe were Catholics.4
Media coverage of pro-life and pro-choice activist groups often framed both sides as angry and righteous, and certainly many fit the mold, employing fiery rhetoric that demonized their opponents and presented them as dangerous, hypocritical, and, above all, immoral if not downright evil. Many pro-lifers referred to the pro-choice camp as “pro-abortion,” a term pro-choicers insisted was deliberately misleading; pro-choice advocates countered with the dismissive term “anti-choice,” maintaining that abortion foes were keen to prevent women from making moral choices about reproduction. Regular attempts were made by well-meaning peacemakers to bring representatives of the two sides together, in hopes of finding ground and fostering collaboration on ways to reduce rates of unwanted pregnancies and abortions alike, but these usually foundered when the parties got tripped up by divergent moral attitudes toward matters such as contraceptive access. Before long, it was growing apparent that the politics surrounding abortion had become a zero-sum game and that both sides saw near apocalyptic consequences to going down in defeat.
Instead of rapidly accelerating the trend toward support of abortion that had been visible in the 1972 Gallup poll, the Supreme Court’s Roe decision prompted a ferocious conflict between the 64 percent who had been for “full liberalization” and the 32 percent who had opposed it. The familiar narrative of what came after Roe describes how evangelical leaders seized on the abortion issue to mobilize conservative Protestants as voters, new alliances emerged between evangelicals and conservative Catholics, and abortion became a wedge issue dividing conservative religious Republican voters from secular feminists and liberal Democrats. That story is true, as far as it goes, but it neglects the fact that religious people were divided on abortion, and that many of the pro-choice feminists were part of Christian communities and still committed to them to greater or lesser degrees. Both before and after Roe, prominent Christian voices, from men and from women, made a moral case for abortion rights. By making their own pro-choice case on explicitly religious grounds, they prevented the pro-life camp from commanding the only Christian stance on this profoundly fraught issue. As each side built up its case, they worked to shred the arguments of the other—deepening the divide over abortion within American Christianity far more acutely than most would have dreamed before Roe.
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