COLUMN ONE : Backlash to Teaching Chastity : Course in public schools that proclaims safe-sex-is-no-sex draws fire. Backers praise push to stress morality over biology, but angry parents see dangers in a program they call inaccurate and unrealistic.

“Be confident! Be a virgin!”

“Do the right thing! Wait for the ring!”

“Not on weak days! Only on wed days!”

“Don’t be a louse! Wait for your spouse!”

“Pet your dog! Not your date!”

It’s Tuesday morning and the students in Bonnie Park’s classroom at Acacia Middle School are chanting up a storm.

But while the classroom of 12- and 13-year-olds sings the praises of abstinence, a chorus of critics of the Sex Respect sex education course is beginning to raise its voice across the country.

Sex Respect argues that by remaining celibate, you won’t need contraception. And with chastity, God is always on your side. The program, used in more than 1,500 school districts nationwide, was created in 1986 as a conservative alternative to sex education. It has become a target of Planned Parenthood and the American Civil Liberties Union, which call it a tool of the Christian right. And a growing number of parents in many districts have begun to agitate for a more pragmatic approach to teens and sex.

Potentially as volatile as debates over creationism and abortion, the conflict is fueling lawsuits and school board warfare from Louisiana to Riverside County.

Proponents say past educational initiatives have failed to get teens to use contraceptives and have even encouraged sex. They contend that adopting a safe-sex-is-no-sex approach replaces fear with self-control and self-esteem.

The 12-week course is based on a textbook written by an Illinois woman who is an anti-abortion activist and former Catholic school educator. It focuses almost entirely on morality, warning of the dangers of promiscuity and premarital sex while extolling the virtues of sex--but only within marriage. Discussion of the reproductive system is limited to two pages at the end of the book.

Responsibility is better than abortion and sexually transmitted disease, its proponents argue. Sex education based on maturity and not permissiveness is long overdue, they say.

Critics counter that Sex Respect tests the bounds of law and science by favoring moral pleas over clinical information and spurning even the mention of contraception.

“The idea that teen-agers, especially young ones, be told that it’s better not to engage in intercourse makes a great deal of sense,” said Debra Haffner, executive director of the U.S. Sex Information and Education Council. “But the problem is that Sex Respect contains many inaccuracies. It is based on a premise that young people should not make their own decisions, and it is extremely negative about sexuality. It goes beyond teaching them how to resist peer pressure and presents them with a single moral message.”

In Hemet, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood teamed with an outraged parent to wage battle against Park, who doubles as a teacher and school trustee.

In 1989, Park introduced the program to Acacia Middle School, where about 900 seventh-graders each year complete the course that is taught by seven teachers.

A born-again Christian, Park said Planned Parenthood and the ACLU are “on a mission to get rid of Sex Respect because it isn’t politically correct. It doesn’t promote the safe-sex agenda . . . the homosexual agenda.”

She calls two of her grandchildren “condom babies,” proving that the “darn things don’t even work half the time. How can they be counted on to stop the spread of HIV?”

Maureen Bryan, the parent who filed the complaint, calls Sex Respect “a fear-based, abstinence-only curriculum that I see as utterly inappropriate because of its religious bias, its overt counseling against abortion and its perpetuation of stereotypes that don’t belong in a public environment.”

In 1992, Bryan took her adolescent son out of the program, which she said “taught him he was an animal who would most likely do anything he pleased--his biology made him that way--and that it was up to the female to control his behavior.”

Indeed, on Page 6 of the Sex Respect book, the text says that “boys tend to use love to get sex. Girls tend to use sex to get love.”

The 1986 version of Sex Respect--which underwent minor revisions in 1990--also noted that “nature is making some kind of a comment on sexual behavior through the AIDS and herpes epidemics.” That alone led to Sex Respect being banned in Louisiana, where a district judge called the course medically inaccurate and fraught with moral judgments.

With the prevalence of AIDS and the rise in teen pregnancies, school boards ponder not whether to teach sex education, but how. Since 1987, 22 states have passed laws requiring some type of sex education. Sex Respect has given conservatives a vehicle to control the boundaries of the debate. But increasingly, it is being met with challenges in the courts and at the ballot box.

The attorney for the Hemet Unified School District, Karen Gilyard, recommended that Sex Respect be dropped after Bryan filed a stinging complaint. Citing a common criticism, the attorney said Sex Respect comes dangerously close to blurring the line between church and state.

In her opinion, Gilyard said the course violates the state education code.

The Hemet school board, dominated by a conservative Christian majority, rejected the complaint, then hinted at getting a new lawyer. But in recent weeks, the mood has mellowed. Some board members now favor dropping the program or having the state attorney general review it.

Such volatility is becoming more common:

* In north San Diego County, the Vista Unified School District is enmeshed in a rough-and-tumble recall campaign that may result in its controversial board--also dominated by a Christian right majority--adopting the program over the objections of some parents and teachers.

Should the board order the implementation of Sex Respect--which would cost the district $30 per student more than its current, state-sanctioned program--a parents group has threatened to sue.

* The program’s stiffest challenge came last year in Caddo Parish, La., where a state district judge found that portions of the course material violated Louisiana law because they contained religious beliefs, counseled students about abortion, provided inaccurate medical information and illegally quizzed students about religious and sexual beliefs. Sex Respect later was yanked from classrooms, a ruling the school district is appealing, while legal fees climb past $50,000.

* In East Troy, Wis., the state Department of Public Instruction concluded that the material perpetuated sex stereotypes but said the department lacked the authority to have the text removed. Late last year, however, East Troy school trustees voted to drop Sex Respect in favor of more comprehensive sex education. (A school district in Sheboygan, Wis., one of the first to use the course, dropped it in 1989 after deciding that it was biased and lacked credibility.)

* In Wilmington, N.C., trustees voted in 1992 to adopt a comprehensive sex education program that preaches abstinence but concedes the necessity of contraceptives. Trustees acted only after parents groups lobbied heavily for Sex Respect.

* In Beaufort County, S.C., a third of parents pulled their children from Sex Respect in 1990 and 2,500 parents, educators and students signed a petition condemning it.

* In Enfield, Conn., the school district started a Sex Respect pilot program, which it rejected in 1990 after a parents group complained that it taught fear, guilt and shame.

* Last August, school trustees in Modesto narrowly voted to drop Sex Respect after a five-year run. Their stand placed them at odds with the program’s local proponents, who fell short in a recall campaign.

* In California, the program is under review by the state Department of Education, which is trying to determine if Sex Respect falls short of meeting AIDS education requirements in a new state law.

The state mandates the teaching of such subjects as math and science. It does not mandate the teaching of sex education, per se. Local districts are given broad latitude in how such a subject is taught or whether it is taught.

Religious bias and a lack of scientific data are among the chief criticisms leveled at Sex Respect and the author of its text, Coleen Kelly Mast. She developed the text with the help of a $300,000 grant given to the Committee on the Status of Women by the Ronald Reagan Administration in 1986.

The committee lost federal funding a year later after settlement of a lawsuit that accused the government of using tax dollars to support programs that were more religious than educational.

Mast failed to return phone calls to her headquarters in Bradley, Ill. In a videotaped speech to Catholic educators, she said: “This is not me up here. I’m weak, a pile of dust. Really, it’s the Holy Spirit that reaches these kids. . . . We’re fighting a war against sin, a war against offenses to God.”

She and her husband operate Respect, Inc., a for-profit corporation that carries a line of “Stop at the Lips” T-shirts, “I’M WORTH WAITING FOR” buttons and a Chastity Challenge home video. Her supporters include the Rev. Pat Robertson and Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum.

Opponents complain that the program is inaccurate. Bryan, the Hemet parent, said a reference in one chapter of the Sex Respect book attributes AIDS-related data to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta “unless otherwise noted.” “But in the chapter,” Bryan said, “there’s only one reference from CDC. The others are from some other unreliable source. My biggest beef, though, is Mrs. Park telling students in her class that French kissing can give you AIDS.”

In fact, the text devotes four chapters to arguing that AIDS can be spread by French kissing and says that “anyone can be carrying your death warrant.” A section called “Sex Tips for a Safe Date” commands teens to “keep all of your clothes all the way on all of the time. Don’t let any part of anyone else’s body get anywhere between you and your clothes. AVOID AROUSAL.”

Lloyd Kolbe, director of the division of adolescent and school health for the Centers for Disease Control, said many of the messages of Sex Respect--such as AIDS being spread through French kissing--”are the last things young people in school need to worry about.”

However, there exists “a remote possibility that the virus can be infected that way. But what we need to focus on is helping young people develop the skills they’re going to need to delay intercourse--and if they do have sex--how to correctly and consistently use condoms.”

Forty percent of U.S. ninth-graders have had intercourse, Kolbe said, with the figures increasing dramatically through high school; 70% of all seniors have had sex. One of eight ninth-graders has had four or more partners, while among seniors the figure leaps to one of four.

“It’s ideal if kids are abstinent, but that message hasn’t worked for the past 10,000 years,” said Dr. Sheldon Zablow, a San Diego psychiatrist who specializes in children and adolescents.

“By teaching contraception, we’re not going to say it’s OK to have sex, but rather, ‘You need to know what’s going to happen if. . . .’ ”

Zablow dismisses as “sheer propaganda” the program’s message that boys are more easily aroused than girls. “Society allows girls to talk more freely about sexual and emotional feelings, therefore, boys are more apt to act out,” he said. “Repeated studies show that if you try to repress sexual feelings, they may come out later in far more dangerous ways--sexual abuse, rape. . . .”

But Park says that in many cases the critics of Sex Respect have overreacted. She says the course “centers around the idea that humans being really can control their behavior, including sexual behavior.”

“It teaches kids how to date, and that they don’t have to be sexually active,” she said.

The students in Park’s class appear to support her wholeheartedly. Some even see themselves as the victims of sex before marriage. Had her parents saved themselves until their wedding night, a 12-year-old said quietly, maybe they would have stayed married.

One boy said: “I don’t want to throw my life away, not like the 15-year-old girl I know who got pregnant and had to drop out. I can’t imagine anything more horrible.”

Proponents say Sex Respect is needed because, in Park’s words, so many messages encourage premarital sex. To “force-feed students talk of contraception” is to whet their appetites for sex, she said.

But Jennifer Cusworth, 16, a junior at Hemet High School and one of Park’s former students, disagreed, saying a 10th-grade social psychology course that dealt heavily with contraception taught her “100% more than Sex Respect ever did.”

Cusworth said she likes Park and considers her a “good person.” But she dismisses Sex Respect as “nothing more than a church sermon.”

“She told us you could get AIDS from French kissing, and when I heard that wasn’t exactly true, I just didn’t think much of the rest of it,” Cusworth said. “In the end, I didn’t know what to believe.”