Battle of the sexes

KRISTIN LUKER is the Rodney King of sociology. Finding herself in the midst of a riot, where history’s hatreds are written on the combatants as indelibly as gang tattoos, she stands up, blinks and asks: Why can’t we all just get along?

Luker picks the streets where the glass is shattering and the cars are burning: abortion, teen pregnancy and, in “When Sex Goes to School,” public school sex education. She interviews people on both sides -- in this case, proponents of comprehensive sex ed (the option of abstinence, plus contraception and sexual decision-making) and those of abstinence-only -- then uses the fracas to illuminate their radically opposed values about sexuality, gender, power and human nature.

As Luker describes them, “sexual liberals” -- people like Melanie Stevens, a former social worker and Planned Parenthood volunteer and an architect of her daughter’s school sex-ed curriculum -- find today’s dissolving boundaries and hierarchies of gender, age and ethnicity liberating. They have faith in reason and in their children’s ability to employ it wisely. Since they expect their kids to move gradually over the border to adult sexuality, sexual information is not just enriching, it’s protective.

“Sexual conservatives” are alarmed by the weakening of hierarchical structures, which represent security and order. “Mrs. Boland” (pseudonyms are used throughout the book) feels modern sex education has unloosed a cataclysm of unruly Eros -- the immorality that allowed her ex-husband to molest their daughter. Jenny Letterman believes that the sex-ed curriculum she encounters is “too much, too soon.” Like most of her allies, she sees sex as God’s purview, best left a mystery. Illicit knowledge led to the Fall, so age boundaries shield childhood innocence. Hierarchies compel obedience to adult dictates about “right and wrong,” preventing children from straying outside the lines to, say, homosexuality.

Between analyses, Luker claims frequently to be puzzled by her conservative informants’ views. Chatting with Mrs. Boland, she feels her “world tip subtly off-balance.” She is “flummoxed” to learn that the minister of an “old-line” church believes comprehensive sex education contains dangerous New Age philosophies. This naive stance is irritating not just because Luker is a professor of sociology and law at UC Berkeley. It also seems designed to telegraph unprejudiced sympathy. In order not to take sides, Luker must find a source of conflict where everyone is blameless: the heart. “When Sex Goes to School” posits that temperament and biography -- not organized religion or politics -- drive the sex-ed wars. For a sociologist, that is a curious thesis. It also distorts history, which names villains and victims, victors and vanquished.

It’s not that Luker discounts history altogether. She writes that the sexual revolution is “one of the great, unacknowledged forces shaping much of contemporary social and political life” (not having noticed its acknowledgment by every talk show host, psychotherapist and street-corner pundit in America). If that era changed everything, however, it didn’t change everyone -- or, really, anyone. Nonconformists chafing at the strictures of the ‘50s were “liberals waiting to happen.” Conservatives may have dabbled in debauchery but came to regret it. Sandy Ames was 25, a career woman, “going to join NOW, blah blah blah” when she got married and pregnant and was abandoned. An epiphany -- “I’m not grounded” -- led her to Jesus.

When did this all happen to Sandy? It’s hard to know, because the interviews are undated and lack historical markers. Somewhere in there, she got the idea to crush comprehensive sex education. Similarly, Jenny Letterman “intuited” one day at the supermarket that the school was up to no good. Jenny popped by her pastor’s office and “found herself connected” to the Christian Coalition.

The Christian Coalition and other conservative organizations tend to appear like that in this book: briefly, sending a brochure and a friendly go-to-it. The liberals have similar helpers, in Planned Parenthood or the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, or SIECUS. The sides, it would seem, are symmetrical in size and strategic acumen. If anything, Luker implies, the liberals are better armed, with history and school administrations in their corner.

But Luker has this wrong. Almost since the first federally funded “chastity” curricula in the early 1980s, which advised students to take Jesus on their dates, “grass roots” sex-ed battles have been a well-organized front in a fatly financed national movement whose aim, according to Concerned Women for America’s website, is “to bring Biblical principles” -- including the abolition of abortion and the denial of homosexuals’ rights -- into “all levels of public policy.”

By the 1990s, no conservative parent with a gripe against a school could go a week without infusions of support from one of more than two dozen national organizations; indeed, these groups’ local chapters were often generating the gripes. Comprehensive sex ed has two organizations devoted to its advocacy, SIECUS and Advocates for Youth. Financially, the sides are not remotely equal. In 1999, Focus on the Family reported an annual budget of $110 million, not all of it, of course, spent on sex ed. SIECUS spent less than $2 million, and Advocates far less.

Most important, the conservative groups have fought dirtier. Luker says she attended many public meetings, but “When Sex Goes to School” reports on none. Instead, she takes tea in the living room with her informants. The problem is that people behave differently in public and in groups than they do at home alone. And these polite Christians can behave badly, accusing the schools of teaching pornography or sodomy and circulating salacious rumors about sex-ed instructors in order to stigmatize them and their allies. Among other unflattering acts Luker neglects to mention: In the mid-1990s, Concerned Women generated 30,000 missives to Congress accusing SIECUS of promoting pedophilia and baby-killing. “You will burn in the lake of fire,” was one of thousands of messages sent directly to SIECUS’ president. It isn’t hard to understand why most multi-issue liberal groups, not to mention parents, have been reluctant to stand up publicly for sex ed.

Halfway through “When Sex Goes to School,” Luker notes that between the extremes lies a vast “sexual middle.” She recommends that schools poll these people to guide sex-ed policy. In fact, such polls exist. They consistently show solid parental support for teaching a wide range of sex-related subjects, including contraception. Many fewer parents endorse abstinence-only education. In a typical national survey conducted in 2004 by the Kaiser Family Foundation, National Public Radio and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, only 15% of Americans did. What the numbers reveal is that Luker’s liberals are not extremists -- they represent the middle. The radicals are the Jenny Lettermans. Yet the federal government continues to invest millions annually in programs that prohibit all messages except abstinence until marriage.

“How did sex education, which has ... enjoyed very high levels of public support ... come to be so controversial?” Luker asks. The real question is, how did a radical minority come to run sex-ed policy as if its were the only view? Luker is right that the story is one of personal values and emotions. But values and emotions are not just personal. Every social-political movement, from fascism to feminism, not only responds to emotions, but also creates, manipulates and deploys them. And America’s evangelicals are among history’s most skillful emotional politicians -- so skillful that their worldview has insinuated itself into Luker’s “neutral” analysis.

“I am prepared to be openminded” about the value of abstinence programs, Luker says. Less open is she to research suggesting that they are of little value, or even harmful -- for instance, that their students may postpone intercourse some months longer than peers in comprehensive programs but are also less likely to use condoms when they do have sex. Nor does she mention that 11 of 13 federally financed abstinence-only curricula in use have been found by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles) to contain serious inaccuracies, from exaggerations of condom failure to claims that teen sex leads to suicide.

Luker concludes that even “sexual liberals now reluctantly concede that abstinence is the best choice for teenagers.” In fact, most of the world concedes nothing of the sort. Teen sex is considered normal; it’s shown on television and dealt with at the clinic -- and yet, especially in Europe, rates of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases are far lower than ours.

Luker tries to play it safe by not taking sides. But in any street fight, to fail to challenge the bullies is to let them, even help them, win. In the end, “When Sex Goes to School” wears the victors’ colors.