McMillan on Hemet Suit
After reading Susan Carpenter McMillan’s Column Right, “Ultra-Liberals Fight Morality in the Schools” (Nov. 15), we must respond and set the record straight.
The Hemet School Board is being sued for its implementation of Sex Respect, Teen Aid, and Choosing the Best by a group of concerned parents who have children in the school district. Attorneys from Planned Parenthood, People for the American Way, and the law firm McCutchen, Doyle, Brown and Enersen are representing the parents in this suit. We support their efforts not because we are “middle-aged proponents of . . . free-love” as McMillan suggests. We oppose the curricula because they are medically inaccurate, racist and gender-biased.
In our 60 years of service, Planned Parenthood has always supported the teaching of abstinence as the wisest choice for young people. The endless campaign to misrepresent the goals of Planned Parenthood has grown tiresome, and has fooled very few. Each year, thousands of churches, schools and community organizations invite Planned Parenthood to present comprehensive sexuality education because they know they will get the facts from us. Planned Parenthood educators discuss ways teens can say no, reject peer pressure and make responsible decisions about their sexuality.
We cannot expect every teen to delay sexual activity. The fact McMillan conveniently overlooks is that well over half of American teens have already engaged in sexual intercourse by the time they graduate from high school. Should teens face unwanted pregnancy because people like McMillan feel their behavior is immoral? Should young girls who are forced into unwanted sexual activity be led to believe they are at fault because Sex Respect taught them that boys have difficulty controlling their hormones? Should sexually active teens be denied information about HIV/AIDS that could potentially save their lives because of the narrow-mindedness of the Hemet school board majority?
Additionally, Planned Parenthood has always believed that parents should be the primary sexuality educators of their children. Planned Parenthood supports parental involvement and school-based sexuality education. We are not suing school systems that dare to teach abstinence, we are suing school systems that persist in denying lifesaving sexuality information to their students.
BETH CALLETON, JON DUNN, MARK SALO, SUELLEN WOOD, Southern California Executive Directors, Planned Parenthood
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Certainly writer-commentator Susan McMillan ought to know better. The ACLU is her support rather than the “ultra-liberal sidekick” of any pressure group, for the very press freedom which she lives by--no less than the rest of us--is alive and well in this country in large part because the First Amendment has its watchdog the ACLU.
And I wonder whether McMillan has ever lived and worked abroad, for surely she would have found that press freedom is rare indeed elsewhere.
To be sure, teen-age sex is the issue upon which writers are hired to be helpful and are expected not to be carried away by the emotions of the moment. It enlightens nobody to accuse Planned Parenthood of advocating free love.
Also missing from McMillan’s competence is awareness of ACLU’s limitations. It is funded in pennies and does jobs in dollars. Rather than ambulance-chasing as McMillan suggests, ACLU’s intercession in this case is indicative of a critical constitutional issue involved under ACLU criteria.
As a reporter in New York in 1938, I learned to rely on the ACLU and have supported it ever since. It is our ultimate press support, while our free press is our ultimate democracy support.
DAVID ALAN MUNRO, Laguna Beach
