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Sex Ed Based on Lies Is Child Abuse

Despite the fact that the work of Dr. Alfred Kinsey has been debunked and discredited—largely thanks to the efforts of Dr. Judith Reisman—the world hums along seemingly oblivious to the influence his fraudulent research continues to exert.

Dr. Miriam Grossman, in her book, You’re Teaching My Child What? A Physician Exposes the Lies of Sex Education and How They Harm Your Child, makes clear that we are paying a heavy price for our inattention and complacency.

Alfred Kinsey’s academic training was in the classification of insects. But he turned his personal obsession with sex into his field of study. As Judith Reisman and Kinsey’s biographer, James Jones, have concluded, Kinsey was a deeply disturbed man. Speaking as a psychiatrist, Dr. Grossman elaborates: “If Kinsey was alive today, and under my care, he’d be on high doses of medications. I would hospitalize him on a locked psychiatric unit because of the risk to his health from his compulsive sexual masochism.” From an early age, Kinsey was aroused by sexual humiliation and pain. At the end of his life, Grossman writes, “he intentionally inflicted trauma to his genitals, needed to be hospitalized, and required months to recover.”

Among many other things, his “research” included filming sexual encounters with his wife and among his staff. We now know that many of his findings were based on interviews with convicted pedophiles and sex offenders. He conducted his so-called research by “befriending male prostitutes, transvestites, sadists, and masochists,” Grossman writes. He concluded, among other things, that most Americans, including average folks, took part in traditionally forbidden sexual activities, and that heterosexuality is a result of “social pressures.” At the time, the late 1950s and early 1960s, his books were bestsellers, lapped up by a gullible public and the media, which ignored criticism from highly respected sources.

As Grossman explained in an interview, “Kinsey’s fraudulent research was the basis for his conclusion that a majority of Americans were participating in sexual behaviors prohibited by the Judeo-Christian tradition.” He deduced that, because people’s supposed sexual behavior was not in line with their purported beliefs, those beliefs must be repressive and therefore guilt-inducing and harmful. He declared, in effect, that it was time to reject those values and, as Grossman puts it, “acknowledge that we are what he called ‘human animals’ with sexual urges from cradle to grave.” Kinsey’s ideas can be summed up as follows, according to Grossman: “He believed sexuality is not an appetite to be restrained.”

From Kinsey to SIECUS

Why should we care about Kinsey today? “Because,” Grossman explains, “modern sex education derives from the personal philosophy of this man—a man enslaved to the urges of a warped mind, who in all probability did not know even one day of healthy sexuality in all his sixty-two miserable years.”

It was Kinsey’s followers who founded SIECUS, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S., the country’s first modern sex education organization. Mary Calderone, the prime mover behind the establishment of SIECUS, “found fault with the model used in school-based programs because they focused on preventing pregnancy and venereal diseases,” Grossman writes. “Calderone believed that when the negativity of sex educators is added to society’s repressive morality, the result is too many no’s.” So she and her associates set out to change young people’s attitudes about sex. Grossman notes that seed money from Hugh Hefner helped get the organization off the ground. (After all, who stood to profit more from young people growing up with liberated attitudes toward sex?) Despite its official-sounding name, SIECUS is a privately run organization. Along with Planned Parenthood and Advocates for Youth, SIECUS is today the flagship organization promoting comprehensive sex education to schools across the country.

“From its inception,” Grossman told me, “it was about changing society. The goal was to get rid of the constrictions and inhibitions of traditional sexual morality—in other words, the Judeo-Christian tradition of sexuality. That is the root of modern sex education, and that is what it still is today. It’s not about health, it’s about promoting a specific worldview.”

If that sounds alarmist, read what former SIECUS president, Wardell Pomeroy, told a magazine interviewer in 1981:

In father-daughter incest, the daughter’s age makes all the difference in the world. The older she is, the likelier it is that the experience will be a positive one. The best sort of incest of all, surprisingly enough, is that between a son and a mother who is really educating him sexually, and who then encourages him to go out with girls.

Pernicious Guidelines

Or how about some information gleaned directly from Guidelines for Comprehensive Sexuality Education, published by SIECUS in 2004 (the third and most recent edition). It’s available on the SIECUS website, which boasts that the publication is downloaded 1,000 times a month, to say nothing of the 100,000 hard copies that have been distributed.

SIECUS’s worldview is made clear in the Guidelines’ introduction: “In a pluralistic society, people should respect and accept the diversity of values and beliefs about sexuality that exist in a community.” And this: “Young people explore their sexuality as a natural process in achieving sexual maturity.” In other words, when it comes to sexual practices, there should be no judgments made. Anything and everything goes. As for young people, it’s only natural that they act on their sexual urges.

The SIECUS Guidelines provide specific bullet points for sex educators, organized according to students’ ages. Here’s a sampling of what they recommend for discussion with children ages 5 to 8 (i.e., starting in kindergarten):

• Both boys and girls have body parts that feel good when touched.
• Vaginal intercourse—when a penis is placed inside a vagina—is the most common way for a sperm and egg to join.
• Some people are homosexual, which means they can be attracted to and fall in love with someone of the same gender.
• A family consists of two or more people who care for each other in many ways.
• Many people live in lifetime committed relationships, even though they may not be legally married.
• Two people of the same gender can live in loving, lifetime committed relationships.
• Touching and rubbing one’s genitals to feel good is called masturbation

The following are some recommended talking points for children ages 9 to 12:

• Some people are bisexual, which means they can be attracted to and fall in love with people of the same or another gender.
• Children may have a mother and a father, two mothers, two fathers, or any other combination of adults who love and care for them.
• Most boys and girls begin to masturbate for sexual pleasure during puberty.
• A woman faced with an unintended pregnancy can carry the pregnancy to term and raise the baby, place the baby for adoption, or have an abortion to end the pregnancy

For children ages 12 to 15, here are a few of the suggested topics:

• Many scientific theories have concluded that sexual orientation cannot be changed by therapy or medicine.
• All societies and cultures have transgender individuals.
• Values should be freely chosen after the alternatives and their consequences are evaluated.
• No one has the right to impose their values on others.
• Masturbation, either alone or with a partner, is one way people can enjoy and express their sexuality without risking pregnancy or an STD/HIV.
• Some sexual behaviors shared by partners include kissing; touching; caressing; massaging; and oral, vaginal or anal intercourse.
• Young people can buy nonprescription contraceptives in a pharmacy, grocery store, market, or convenience store.
• Some methods of contraception, such as condoms, can also prevent the transmission of STDs/HIV.
• Individuals need to critically evaluate messages received from different sources and establish guidelines for their own behavior.
• All people, regardless of biological sex, gender, age, ability and culture are sexual beings.

And for high-school students, ages 15 to 18, here’s what SIECUS recommends discussing:

• As society builds a better awareness and understanding of gender identity, transgender individuals may be more accepted and face less harassment and violence.
• Most women need some clitoral stimulation to reach orgasm.
• Some people use erotic photographs, movies, art, literature, or the Internet to enhance their sexual fantasies when alone or with a partner.
• Some people continue to respect their religious teaching and traditions but believe that some specific views are not personally relevant.

And then there are the websites, such as Advocates for Youth and Go Ask Alice, that are recommended and linked to by the SIECUS website. Here’s a sampling of topics listed under “Sexuality” on the Go Ask Alice homepage: “Phone sex: Getting started”; “Erotic videos with women in mind”; “Menage a Trois?”; and “S/M roleplaying.”

Viewers can also find the answer to a bisexual female’s dilemma over wanting both a husband and a wife: “The predominant culture in the U.S. enforces a norm of monogamous heterosexuality. . . . Those in polyamorous relationships . . . believe that the human capacity for love can expand beyond one partner.” Links are provided to help the viewer meet others interested in polyamory.

Upsurge in STDs

In 2008, the Centers for Disease Control announced that one in four adolescent girls in the U.S. has a sexually transmitted infection. Grossman lays the blame squarely at the feet of SIECUS and what she called its “main cohorts,” Planned Parenthood and Advocates for Youth. “This pandemic,” she writes, “is a direct consequence of their vision and ideals.” Directly or indirectly, via the sex education curricula they provide or the websites they recommend, young people are given an exaggerated view of the place of sexuality. They’re expected to “explore.” “Diverse” sexual behaviors are normalized. Familial values and religious beliefs shouldn’t be “imposed” and may not be “relevant.”

Grossman points out that in the early 1960s there were only two major sexually transmitted diseases (called venereal diseases then)—syphilis and gonorrhea.

With the advent of antibiotics, these infections were easily cured. So people were convinced that this was a non-issue, that we no longer had to be concerned with infections related to sexual behavior. In addition, in 1960, the birth control pill became available. . . . Infections and unwanted pregnancy were thought to be things of the past.

Today’s science tells us otherwise. Dozens of sexually transmitted infections currently exist, some of which cannot be cured, not to mention HIV and AIDS. And we now know that there is no artificial method of birth control that is one-hundred-percent effective.

Furthermore, there is new research indicating that the prefrontal cortex of the human brain matures quite late. Science now confirms what parents have long suspected: Teenagers have immature brains. This is critical information because it means that teenagers are at high risk for relying on the “feeling” part of their brains, and not the part that considers consequences.

Course Correction

Grossman draws an analogy between teaching comprehensive sex ed and teaching about eating: An expert tells students that people eat different kinds of diets. Some people eat diets low in calories and saturated fats, with plenty of vitamins and minerals. Other people choose to consume foods high in calories and fat, including lots of junk food. It’s up to you—children and teens—to decide which diet you’re going to pick. Comprehensive sex ed teaches students that they have many options when it comes to their sexual behavior, and it’s up to them to choose what’s best for them.

Grossman writes that if the priority of those in the sex ed industry is children’s health, then it’s time for a major course correction.

They must grow up, shed their 1960s mentality, and enter the twenty-first century. They must respond to this catastrophe by declaring war on teen sexual behavior. Yes, war—just as we’ve declared war on smoking, drinking, and transfats. Stop foisting the ill-conceived notion that sexual openness and exploration is healthy. That was never true, and it’s surely not true now, with genital bacteria and viruses infecting another young person every 3.5 seconds.

Instead of telling children that only they can decide when to have sex, we should be doing everything possible to encourage kids to delay sexual behavior. That’s the message health professionals are obliged to be giving, Grossman believes, if they claim to base their teaching on modern science.

Because like it or not, Dr. Kinsey, current scientific research supports traditional values. •

Grossman on Reisman

I would like to acknowledge, with deep respect and gratitude, the scholarly work of Judith Reisman, Ph.D. Dr. Reisman was the first to expose Kinsey’s crimes and fraudulent research, and she remains the expert on these, and other related topics.

On a personal level, I am grateful to Dr. Reisman for all the insights and encouragement she provided as I wrote my book, You’re Teaching My Child What? A Physician Exposes the Lies of Sex Education and How They Harm Your Child. Particularly helpful were the original documents she shared with me. It was because of a last-minute editing error that full acknowledgment of Dr. Reisman’s help was removed from the manuscript.
—Miriam Grossman

From Salvo 12 (Spring 2010)
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