In 1964, Dr. Mary Calderone resigned her position as the medical director for Planned Parenthood of America. Having come to believe the nation needed an organization concerned solely with educating it about sexual issues, she rented a New York office and established the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, or SIECUS. It was an optimistic name for a group that could boast only five members, a secretary, and a single typewriter, but Calderone soon drew together an army of influential allies and set about liberating Americans from their outdated beliefs about sexuality, especially those derived from the Bible and Judeo-Christian morality. Today, SIECUS is the largest clearinghouse of sex-education curricula to America’s public schools.¹

By 1964, the sexual revolution was in full swing, propelled not a little by the notorious bombshell book from Alfred Kinsey entitled Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, or simply “The Kinsey Report.” The revolutionaries hailed Kinsey’s work as a ground-breaking study and hoped to use its claim to scientific objectivity as a platform for re-educating America with a sexual philosophy freed from antiquated notions of religion and morality.

In establishing SIECUS, Mary Calderone teamed up with one of Kinsey’s closest fellow-researchers, Wardell Pomeroy, who served on SIECUS’s original board of directors. The two of them bought into Kinsey’s ideology wholesale, Calderone calling his free-sex philosophy a “new religion.”² She even refused to distance herself from Kinsey’s chilling advocacy of pedophilia: The major effects of pedophilia, she said, “are not caused by the event itself, but by the outraged, angry, fearful and shocked reactions of the adults who learn of it.”³ “It’s not that [pedophilia] is a bad thing or a wicked thing. It just simply should not be a part of life in general, right out on the sidewalk.”⁴ Pomeroy, of course, went even further, enthusiastically endorsing his boss’s conclusions: “[I]ncest between adults and younger children can also prove to be a satisfying and enriching experience. Incestuous relationships can—and do—work out well.”⁵

Calderone believed America’s children needed to be re-educated about sexuality. With sexual liberation sweeping the country, she said, a new stage of evolution was breaking on humankind, and educators must prepare children for the bright new world awaiting them. “To do this,” she declared, “they must pry children away from old views and values, especially from biblical and other traditional forms of sexual morality—for religious laws or rules about sex were made on the basis of ignorance.”⁶

Mary Calderone died in 1998, and SIECUS has since publicly renounced many of her more extreme positions, including incest advocacy.⁷ Nevertheless, the organization’s mission of “freeing” American children from biblical morality continues unabated. SIECUS has been a vocal opponent of abstinence-only sex-education programs and a staunch ally of the homosexual movement. According to its “Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education,” SIECUS recommends that children aged 5 to 8 should learn about masturbation, sexual intercourse, and homosexuality. By age 9 to 12, they should hear from their teachers that “homosexual love relationships can be as fulfilling as heterosexual relationships.” From 12 to 15, they should be told that “sexual orientation cannot be changed,” and by age 15 to 18, they should be given the phone number of the local gay and lesbian center and be taught how to integrate contraception into a sexual relationship in “creative and sensual ways.”⁸ These are the ideas that SIECUS—now a tax-payer funded organization⁹—is even today holding up to public school administrators as the best way to teach children about sex.

There is no doubt the amoral free-love philosophy espoused by Kinsey, Calderone—and SIECUS—has slowly crept into the curricula of America’s public schools. Children whose parents have tried to raise them to honor and obey God’s Word are now being taught that those beliefs are passé, that having sex before marriage is perfectly normal and even healthy (so long as one uses contraception), and that anyone who refuses to celebrate homosexuality is sexually repressed. If SIECUS has its way, the foundations of American morality will be seriously undermined. In the face of such a challenge, the task of Christian parents is to take seriously their scriptural responsibility to be their children’s primary educators, keeping a close watch on their schools and shaping their children’s minds according to biblical teaching.

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