But that guilt trip doesn’t work with Patricia Stewart, a retired nurse who has two grown children, four step-children and ten grandchildren. She has a passionate interest in seeing them avoid sexually transmitted diseases. Some of them are students in the Nauset Regional School District on Cape Cod. 

Massachusetts News Staff 

January 5--Patricia Stewart argued passionately last summer against the distribution of condoms in the Nauset School District on Cape Cod. Did sheknow something state school officials don’t know? 

Apparently so. While both the state Department of Public Health and Department of Education say the sex education curriculum promotes abstinence, it also presents condoms as "safer sex" for teens. 

Perhaps "safer," but far from safe. Stewart didn’t have to do her own study to come to that conclusion. She simply marshaled commonly available government statistics that show condoms to be notoriously unreliable, particularly for preventing sexually transmitted diseases. 

She cited studies that show increasing cervical abnormalities in girls aged 10 to 19 and contended that HPV (the human papilloma virus) is at epidemic levels among young women. 

Indeed, the federal Centers for Disease Control says one in four Americans between ages 15 and 55 has an incurable sexually transmitted disease, after more than a generation of sex education that promotes condom use. 

And she argued that instead of simply assuming kids are going to "do it," schools should take an approach similar to the one they take with drugs and tobacco — refusal skills and zero tolerance. In other words, sex education that focuses on authentic abstinence. 

Committee Voted Against Condoms 

The Nauset Regional School Committee bought at least part of Stewart’s argument. Its members voted 7-1 that night against a proposal to make condoms available to students in the local schools, although Committee Chairman Truman Henson tells Massachusetts News he believes that would have been the vote whether Stewart had spoken or not. 

However, the last vote four years earlier had defeated condoms by the narrow margin of only one vote. 

But for Stewart, the victory represents only a first step in an effort to challenge the current philosophy of sex ed in Massachusetts schools. 

She first appeared before the School Committee in June 1998 to challenge them on several levels. She noted that three authors of the health curriculum for the state’s schools were members of the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts. 

"Since Planned Parenthood is the largest provider of contraceptives and abortion in the country, isn’t it a conflict of interest for them to have such an influence on the curriculum," she questioned, noting that there were no representatives from the other side, such as Massachusetts Citizens for Life. 

The superintendent and school committee gave her permission to study the curriculum, and she spent last winter doing that. 

In general, Stewart says, school children have been "inoculated" against the modesty and moral sensibilities that most people took for granted as recently as a generation ago. 

"They have seven different ways that they teach the kids," she says, "So if they don’t get it one way, then they [the schools] keep reinforcing it another way. 

"They try to create barriers between kids and parents. The kids are sent home to find out what drugs the parents have in the medicine cabinets. Fourth graders are asked to find out what their family values are, which gives the schools an easier time of breaking them down in a variety of ways, with anonymous questions, discussion groups — things like that." 

Arousing Elementary Children 

Perhaps worst of all, Stewart contends that sex education in the primary grades violates what is called the "latency" period, in which children aged 6 to about 12 are essentially asexual. 

"They are educationally ideal and have no sex hormonal drive," she says. "But if they are artificially stimulated, it can do tremendous harm. If you look at all the people arrested for pornography or for abusing kids, I would suspect many of them had problems at this time in their lives." 

She quotes the psychiatrist Melvin Anchell, who says that sex education is "anti-educational." He says that if a young child receives sex education between the ages of 6 and 12, his "curiosity" and his "desire to learn are destroyed." 

The doctor says, "With the artificially induced arousal of his erotogenic zones, the child experiences a decreased capability for academic pursuits and exhibits an emotional retardation in connection with the development of compassionate feelings ..." 

The primary curriculum in Massachusetts schools covers descriptions of sexual organs complete with anatomically correct dolls, discussions of homosexuality and HIV, sexual development during puberty, contraception and sexual intercourse. It also includes "good touch" and "bad touch," which Stewart agrees is useful in an era when child molestation is rampant. 

She also spent a day at the regional high school "reviewing some absolutely horrible sex ed videos," with only one, featuring NBA basketball star A.C. Green, promoting abstinence. 

Reaction Was Mixed 

The reaction locally was mixed. At the meeting itself, Stewart says there were a number of people who stood up and defended what she said. 

"I had never met or heard of most of them," she says. "It was as if God had sent them." 

One parent told the committee that distributing condoms to students would be like "handing them a loaded gun," while another pointed to what she said were the "disastrous" results of a condom distribution program in Falmouth. 

One of those present was Teresa Donovan of the Massachusetts Family Institute. She urged the committee to consider that while people believe that knowledge is power, knowledge is not will power. "Students today do not have a knowledge deficit when it comes to sex. Rather, as one writer notes, they have a virtue deficit," she said. 

But not everybody was so supportive. Stewart says she had first been promised that she would be allowed to speak to the combined school committees of the four communities, with 36 people. Instead, she spoke to the regional committee of eight. 

She says she was also promised that she would be first on the agenda, and that there would be no time constraints on her presentation. "But they loaded up the agenda and put all kinds of pressure on me to cut it down." 

She believes Supt. Gradone "primed" Committee Chairman Henson to interrupt her presentation with questions. And she says Gradone told the gathering that the information she was quoting from the curriculum was inaccurate. 

The special education director, Maureen Brenner, was instructed to report back at the next meeting about the inaccuracies, Stewart says. "But she didn’t say anything specific was wrong. She just focused on what they said were ‘other concerns’ that they had." 

Henson tells Massachusetts News the problem wasn’t that Stewart was technically inaccurate. "She was extremely well-prepared, and had obviously spent a tremendous amount of time and energy on her presentation," he says. 

Problem Is With State? 

Henson says much of what Stewart presented is based on state Department of Education educational "frameworks," and is not taught in the Nauset district. "Her issue is really with the state," he says. 

He says the local district emphasizes abstinence in sex education, and adds that much of what could be taught to primary students, according to state curriculums, is not taught locally. He says he "absolutely agrees" that some of what the state would allow at the primary grades would violate the latency period. 

"But what she was relating is not taught here," he says. 

He disagrees with her, however, that the use of condoms should be treated the same way as drugs or tobacco. "I’m not a psychologist," he says, "but I see a clear distinction between the human urgings of sex and illegal activity. We need to keep in mind that a 15-year-old is a 15-year-old." 

Stewart does not agree, saying that while many in the schools are trying to do the right thing, they are only giving "lip service" to abstinence and are accepting the state curriculum because it is the easiest thing to do. 

State Disagrees or Won’t Talk 

At the state level, Dianne Hagan, director of Adolescent and School Health for the state Department of Public Health, told Massachusetts News that the goal of the state’s health curriculum is to "promote and increase the rate of abstinence, recognizing it is the most effective means of preventing disease and pregnancy." 

But she adds a caveat. "We also recognize that it is important for both males and females to have access to reproductive care." And she says the two statements are not at cross purposes. She says the rates of both teen pregnancy and teen sexual activity have declined over the past 10 years. She says the average rate of sexually active teens is 31.2 per 1,000. Even in communities where that rate is much higher, "for the first time, every community is under 100." 

Hagan expressed shock at the contention that primary school children can be seriously damaged by sex education. "I’m glad you can’t see my face," she said, upon hearing the quotation from Dr. Anchell. 

While she is aware of the "latency age," Hagan says it is generally agreed that it ends at about age 9. Sex education needs to start earlier, she says, because kids are sexually aware earlier. "It has taken us a while to realize that there is sex activity at younger ages," she says. "So we’ve moved our prevention efforts there." 

She said she did not want to get into an argument over specifics of sex education. But she did say the department is using federal funds to support abstinence education, and it is not trying to divide children from their parents. 

"We do want to change the social norms and make abstinence to be seen as a positive attribute." 

Stewart challenges the truth of that statement. 

The state Department of Education did not respond to numerous requests for an interview on the subject. 

State Officials In Denial 

Stewart still insists state officials are in denial about what is being taught in public schools, and about the results as well. 

The "safer sex" message, she says, has led to "incurable disease, unwanted pregnancies, abortions, out-of-wedlock births, school dropouts, lowered self-esteem, infertility, depression, increased risk of breast cancer, etc. 

And she quotes Barbara Whitehead writing in the Atlantic Monthly, who says, "The unifying core of comprehensive sex education is not intellectual, but ideological. There is little, if any, empirical support for comprehensive sex education." 

The problem, according to Whitehead, is that adults assume "that adolescents will choose rationally and that schools can teach adolescents the true meaning of love, and that they will engage in responsible love making." 

Stewart says that if school officials care about the health and lives of kids, they will offer them a genuine abstinence-based program, not condoms. 

A New Crusader 

Even though Stewart is a relatively new crusader for sex ed reform, the seeds of that public advocacy were planted nearly three decades earlier, when she was living in Bellevue, Washington, and her daughter was in middle school. 

"There was a hearing on whether to add sex education to the curriculum," she says, "and the vote at that time was to go ahead. There’s been a lot of pressure from Planned Parenthood and SIECUS [Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S.] for the past 40 years in that direction." 

She spoke in opposition at the hearing, and after the meeting, a teacher came up to her. 

"I can still remember what she said like it was yesterday," Stewart says. "She said, ‘We’re going to take your child, remove your values and replace them with whatever values we choose.’ 

"I said, ‘Go ahead and try,’ but I smiled when I said it. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction of thinking she had gotten to me." 

Stewart says she would have pulled her children out of public school right then, but she couldn’t afford to send them to private school. 

"So I simply made a point of asking questions when the kids came home," she says. "Whatever they were taught, we discussed. And it wasn’t just sex education. There were other issues as well, like the environment. 

Things have gotten to the point of hysteria in the schools, to where the kids are almost taught to worship the earth, rather than that God created all things for man." 

The growth of that activist spirit continued during her nursing career, when Stewart says she became convinced of a simple, but rather radical concept, regarding health care. 

For most of her career, she was in the operating room. "But for the last eight years," she says, "I did outpatient surgery. I developed the very strong feeling that if people had healthier habits, they would need less health care." 

That led her to do things like counseling women with osteoporosis about their diets, to make sure they ate foods high in calcium. 

She also took note that "people with strong faith, heal better." During that time, she was also on the editorial board of Today’s Operating Nurse magazine, for which she wrote some editorials. "I always wrote on ethical issues," she says, "because I could see the direction this country was heading." 

In her view, the "slide into sexual promiscuity and lewd behavior" really began with the Kinsey reports of 1948 and 1953 on sexual behavior. 

"That unleashed the floodgates," she says, "and we’re paying a high price today in disease. It led to a total change in the definition of family, to a disregard for protection of children from molestation, and basically the endorsement of any consensual behavior." 

Kinsey’s research, she says, was "exposed" in the 1980s as fraudulent, because he had conducted some of his research on prisoners and then applied those findings to the general population. But the damage had been done, she says. 

Even the American Psychological Association, she notes, recently published a study which would change our basic beliefs about child molestation, using phrases like "level of intimacy" rather than "molestation." The APA backpedaled on that, after an enormous pubic outcry, "but [Kinsey and others] have affected every aspect of our culture and civilization," she says. 

Even after she retired and returned to Massachusetts, she kept a low public profile, spending most of her time caring for her elderly mother and aunt. But after her mother died in 1993, and then her aunt in 1997, she joined Massachusetts Citizens for Life and met someone involved in Freedom to Learn, "the brainchild of an educator from Florida named John Beasley." 

That organization had been founded, she says, after the Supreme Court decision on Casey v. Planned Parenthood, in which, "The court said that although a woman has a right to an abortion, she and anyone else who might benefit from it also had the right to be informed as to the ramifications." 

Beasley encouraged volunteers to use that decision to counter the prevailing wisdom on sex ed in the schools. "The kids were being bombarded with information from Planned Parenthood and SIECUS," she says. "So he encouraged people throughout the country to undertake what I did — to examine the curriculum of the local schools, see if it reflected the Planned Parenthood philosophy, and then show the other side, to give kids the information they need to protect themselves." 
 

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