In “The Return of Character Education” and “Where Sex Education Went Wrong” (Educational Leadership, November 1993), Thomas Lickona merely parrots slogans and fake “history” contrived by the Religious Right. Let me call attention to some of his especially egregious antics.
In “The Return of Character Education,” Lickona says: “Darwinism introduced a new metaphor—evolution—that led people to see all things, including morality, as being in flux.” Poor Darwin! There seems to be nothing that the Bible-thumpers won't try to pin on him. Does Lickona really believe that the world had to wait until 1859 for the idea that morality is variable? If so, Lickona certainly needs to read some history, including the history of Christianity.
In “Where Sex Education Went Wrong,” Lickona brazenly repeats one of the notorious, false claims made by Teen-Aid, a political outfit in Spokane, Washington. Teen-Aid sells various ideological publications, including some that denounce abortion and contraception while promoting the Religious Right's view that women are meant to be used for reproduction. Among these publications are two anti-abortion tracts (Sexuality, Commitment & Family and Me, My World, My Future ) that masquerade as schoolbooks; both rely on gross distortions and on pseudoscience.
In trying to get its tracts into public schools, Teen-Aid has used fictitious claims about endorsements, along with fake “statistics,” which purportedly attest that the use of Teen-Aid materials in the San Marcos (California) Unified School District produced a dramatic decline in the incidence of pregnancy among students. But the San Marcos story is a fabrication, as Peggy Brick and Deborah M. Roffman make clear in their rebuttal to Lickona, in the same issue of Educational Leadership. During my own investigation of the San Marcos tale and other claims in Teen-Aid's advertising, I found no supporting evidence whatsoever; and Teen-Aid refused my written requests for documentation.
This is the organization that Thomas Lickona is trying to promote!
Later, Lickona endorses Teen-Aid's anti-abortion Window to the Womb—a video, he says, that will “show students the power of their sexuality to create human life.” Only in the propaganda of the Religious Right do we find the claim that reproduction is the creation of life. Anyone who has any awareness of biology knows that the claim is absurd, since a new individual arises from an ovum and a spermatozoon that already are alive. No new life is created, and no new life is involved. Lickona and his fellow propagandists scorn indisputable facts while they try to endow a zygote with a mystical aura of “creation.”
In one of his endnotes, Lickona gives an address for Teen-Aid, then adds his endorsement of a “program” sold by Sex Respect, in Illinois. Sex Respect, another arm of the Religious Right, specializes in using pseudoscience, fake sociological “information,” and fake medical “facts” to discourage the use of contraception. This organization's bogus schoolbooks—Sex Respect and Facing Reality—include some ignorant raving that is truly breath-taking. In one notable item, the writers of Sex Respect— disguising old Jehovah as “nature”—say that “nature is making some kind of a comment on sexual behavior through the AIDS and herpes epidemics.” (Let us extend that revelation. Legionnaire's disease must be Jehovah's comment on the merits of the American Legion. Lyme disease must be his way of telling us not to go for walks in the woods. And so forth.)
In March 1993, the First Judicial District Court of Louisiana, ruling in Bettye Coleman et al. v. Caddo Parish School Board et al. barred the use of Sex Respect's books in the Caddo Parish schools. The court's detailed opinion, analyzing many of the falsehoods and absurdities in Sex Respect's materials, seems to have retarded the Religious Right's efforts to push those materials into other school systems.
Both Sex Respect and Teen-Aid have received federal grants under the Adolescent Family Life Act, often called Title XX. Enacted in 1981, Title XX served partly as a device for funneling public funds to right-wing religious groups; during the Reagan and Bush Administrations, grants were delivered to several such outfits through a program run by the Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs, an arm of the Department of Health and Human Services. Since then, a lawsuit (Kendrick et al. v. Sullivan et al. ) has resulted in the Department's promising to operate the program in a religiously neutral way.
For a report on the Religious Right's bogus “sex education” books, with emphasis on the ones distributed by Teen-Aid, see the January-February (1994) issue of The Textbook Letter, the bulletin of the California Textbook League.
