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The former medical director of Planned Parenthood, Calderone had come up with the idea for her organization, the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States, at a 1961 conference of the National Association of Churches. By the 1964–65 school year SIECUS’s “Guidelines for Sexuality Education: Kindergarten through 12th Grade” had been requested by over a thousand school districts. A typical exercise for kindergarten was watching eggs hatch in an incubator. Her supporters saw themselves as the opposite of subversives. “The churches have to take the lead,” Dr. Calderone, herself a Quaker, would say, “home, school, church, and community all working cooperatively.” The American Medical Association, the National Education Association, and the American Association of School Administrators all published resolutions in support of the vision. Her theory was that citizens would be more sexually responsible if they learned the facts of life frankly and in the open, otherwise the vacuum would be filled by the kind of talk that children picked up in the streets. An Illinois school district argued that her program would fight “‘situation ethics’ and an emerging, but not yet widely accepted standard of premarital sex.” Even Billy Graham’s magazine, Christianity Today, gave the movement a cautious seal of approval. They didn’t see it as “liberal.” But it was liberal. The SIECUS curriculum encouraged children to ask questions. In her speeches Calderone said her favorite four-letter word ended with a k: T-A-L-K. She advised ministers to tell congregants who asked them about premarital sex, “Nobody can judge that but yourself, but here are the facts about it.” She taught that people “are being moral when they are being true to themselves,” that “it’s the highest morality to live up to the best in yourself, whether you call it God or whatever.” Which, simply, was a subversive message to those who believed such judgments came from God—or at least from parental authority. The anti-sex-education movement was also intimately related to a crusade against “sensitivity training”: children talking about their feelings, about their home lives, another pollution of prerogatives that properly belonged to family and church. “SOCIALISTS USE SEX WEDGE in Public School to Separate Children from Parental Authority,” one of their pamphlets put it. Maybe not socialists, but at the very least someone was separating children from parental authority. More and more, it looked like the Establishment. And, given that the explosion issued from liberals obliviously blundering into the most explosive questions of where moral authority came from, thinking themselves advancing an unquestionable moral good, it is appropriate that the powder keg came in one of America’s most conservative suburbs: Anaheim, the home of Disneyland, in Orange County, California, where officials had, ironically enough, established a pioneering flagship sex education program four years earlier.
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Rick Perlstein (Nixonland: America's Second Civil War and the Divisive Legacy of Richard Nixon 1965-72)