WHO CREATED YOUR CHILD’S SEX ED CURRICULUM? asked the headline in a bulletin from the America First Policy Institute (A.F.P.I.), a nonprofit think tank with close ties to the incoming Trump administration. The answer was: “Texas chapters of Planned Parenthood” helped conceive “a K-12 sex education curriculum for a national organization which said that sex educators should avoid teaching kids not to engage in casual sex and called for the elimination of women from conversations on teen pregnancy.”
In another fact sheet sent to parents ahead of a school-board election in Peoria, Illinois, the A.F.P.I. warned that “too many schools” were “sexualizing” children “by presenting age-inappropriate sexual content.”
Five decades earlier, another well-funded organization was warning the nation about a gray-haired woman with two medical degrees and a “burning mission: To alert and convert the youth of America to a new sexuality.”
Mary Breasted’s deadline was fast approaching. The young Village Voice reporter was writing a book about the wars over sex education then raging across the country. For three months, she kept calling another Mary—Dr. Mary Calderone, the nation’s leading authority on the topic—to schedule an interview. But the answer was always the same: Sorry, not available. Finally, Calderone’s secretary took pity on the writer and scheduled an interview in late October 1969.
Calderone’s office was located on the second floor of a modern building at the corner of Broadway and West 61st Street, just north of Columbus Circle. Breasted placed her tape recorder on a conference table just as Calderone entered the room. She was in her mid-60s, with gray hair tied in a bun, and maintained a polite smile as the reporter struggled to thread tape through her reel-to-reel machine. After a few minutes, Calderone became visibly annoyed. “You should have done that before you came in here,” she sniffed, lifting her chin and glaring with large, deep-set blue eyes.
Breasted flushed with embarrassment. “You’re right,” she sighed.
She took out a pencil, opened her notebook, and said to herself: This isn’t the most tactful thing one would say to a journalist if their goal is to counter a right-wing smear campaign that labeled them a tool of Communism, a committed foe of Christian morality, and an uncompromising threat to the American family.
Sex and the City
In 1921, Mary Rose Steichen, daughter of the fashion photographer Edward Steichen, graduated from the Brearley School, on Park Avenue, and entered Vassar College. Her father’s patron Helen Pratt, a member of the richest family in Brooklyn at the time (their legacy includes the Pratt Institute), covered Mary’s tuition.
She later enrolled in medical school at the University of Rochester and went on to earn a master’s degree in public health at Columbia University and work at the New York City Health Department. There she met another Columbia graduate, Dr. Frank Calderone, the city’s health director for the Lower East Side. They married in November 1941.
While raising two children with her husband and working part-time as a school physician in Great Neck, Mary Calderone gave lectures on sex education to Parent-Teacher Associations throughout Long Island. She quickly realized parents didn’t know how to speak about sex with their children, in part because adults were largely ignorant about the topic. Many parents were “scared, embarrassed, or ashamed,” she told one P.T.A. meeting, so “they do nothing. And this is tragic.”
Calderone put her lectures on hold when she became the first medical director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, in 1953. She later said the organization offered her the job because “no qualified male physician would take it.”
She organized the first national conference of medical professionals to discuss simmering questions about reproductive health, including abortion. She prodded American doctors to speak frankly with their patients about birth control. It was fulfilling work, but her inbox disturbed her. Every week, it seemed, letters flooded in from men and women asking the most basic questions about human sexuality. But Planned Parenthood had no interest in sex education. According to her biographer, Ellen S. More, Calderone’s boss warned that the organization should focus on birth control and “not spread itself too thin.”
At age 60, Calderone decided to make a career change.
In 1964, with a handful of Planned Parenthood colleagues, Calderone established the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (S.I.E.C.U.S.). Its mission was twofold: publish science-based materials to promote “quality” sex education, and establish human sexuality as intrinsic to physical and mental health.
The response was overwhelming. In its first year of operation, S.I.E.C.U.S. fielded nearly 3,000 requests from school districts, P.T.A.’s, local Planned Parenthood chapters, and medical associations. Thousands subscribed to the group’s quarterly journal. Calderone moved operations out of her home and opened a small office in Manhattan. She hired secretaries and recruited volunteers. “We have come very far and very fast,” Calderone told a reporter for Parade magazine in 1967.
That’s when Calderone and her organization caught the attention of an evangelical preacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The Last Crusade
Weighing in at 270 pounds, the Reverend Billy James Hargis presided over one of America’s first evangelical broadcasting empires, the Christian Crusade. At his peak, Hargis delivered sermons combining spiritual and anti-Communist themes via 500 radio stations and 250 TV stations in the U.S. and abroad. The Christian Crusade also published hundreds of books and pamphlets (with titles such as “Distortion by Design: The Story of America’s Liberal Press” and “Communism, Hypnotism, and the Beatles”), printed its own newspaper, and sponsored well-attended speaking tours and public rallies throughout the country.
Beginning in the mid-1960s, however, Hargis and the Christian Crusade were facing increasingly strong headwinds. His broadsides against Communism, the civil-rights movement, and the “godlessness of the United Nations” failed to grow his audience. The Internal Revenue Service determined he was doing too much electioneering and lobbying and revoked the Christian Crusade’s tax-exempt status. And the Federal Communications Commission vigorously enforced the fairness doctrine, which led many local broadcasters to drop his program rather than provide equal time to the various individuals he regularly castigated on the air.
Then Hargis landed on a new issue, one that he believed would save not only the Christian Crusade but the entire country: sex education in America’s schools.
In January 1968, Hargis hired Dr. Gordon V. Drake, a regular contributor to the right-wing John Birch Society magazine and dean of Shelton College, a private Christian school run by another conservative broadcaster, Carl McIntire. Drake began planning the academic program of a new college, to be built next to the Christian Crusade’s headquarters in southeast Tulsa, but first came a 40-page pamphlet titled Is the School House the Proper Place to Teach Raw Sex? Its principal target: America’s leading sex educator, Dr. Mary Calderone.
Calderone and S.I.E.C.U.S., Drake wrote, were flooding American schools with books, charts, and teaching aids, including “unbelievably clever models which even included multi-colored human figures with interchangeable organs—instant transvestitism.” He took aim at a slide show Calderone had designed for young children, How Babies Are Made, which depicted “an animalistic viewpoint of sex, which is shocking and completely inappropriate for children three to eight years of age.” Calderone and her ilk believed any “inhibitions or moral and religious taboos” regarding sexuality “should be eliminated.”
Drake described Calderone in ominous terms: “She pursues children and youth for her cause.” If Calderone succeeded, Drake warned, “our children will become easy targets for Marxism and other amoral, nihilistic philosophies—as well as V.D.!”
Hargis had struck gold. The Christian Crusade sold 250,000 copies of the pamphlet, at 50 cents a copy. With the help of a young direct-mail genius named Richard Viguerie, who would later raise millions for conservative Republican candidates nationwide, contributions flooded into the Christian Crusade headquarters. By the summer of 1969, Hargis had 200,000 individual donors and an operating budget of $2 million a year.
Line of Attack
At his office in Tulsa, Hargis kept a file of newspaper articles about Calderone, carefully underlining statements he thought might be useful in his campaign to smear and discredit her.
In October 1966, for example, Calderone wrote in the P.T.A. monthly magazine that the reproductive process should be taught “beginning around three years of age.” She told audiences that masturbation was normal and healthy, not a leading indicator of depravity. At a high school in Chicago, a 10th-grade boy asked what he should do when a homosexual man hit on him. “You’re going to have to be able to say, ‘Cool it, this is not for me,’” Calderone replied. “But you owe that person your responsibility and understanding, even if you don’t share his conviction.”
“She was the perfect target,” Mary Breasted, the Village Voice reporter, recalled decades later.
Representative John R. Rarick, a conservative Democrat from Louisiana and a supporter of George Wallace’s presidential candidacy, entered opposition research on Calderone into the Congressional Record that linked her approach to sexuality with Communism. “Through the promotion of pornography, drug use and the ‘New Morality,’” Rarick charged, “the will to resist the International Communist Conspiracy is being weakened.”
The American Education Lobby released a broadside charging that S.I.E.C.U.S. “collaborates with the purveyors of some of the worst hard-core pornography published in this country.” (Calderone’s husband owned a chain of movie theaters on Long Island and leased them to various operators, some of which showed “risqué” films.)
Calderone’s public appearances began to draw protesters. At a New Jersey high school, one parent claimed Calderone forced young children to view pictures of penises and “sperm spouting.” At Marquette University, in Milwaukee, a member of the audience accused Calderone of “rape of the mind.” In Kansas City, another parent called Calderone a “gray-haired old lady that destroys morals.”
In 1969, the California legislature banned the use of any materials S.I.E.C.U.S. published or “promoted.” School districts terminated consulting contracts, plunging the organization into a financial crisis. Calderone was forced to lay off nine employees and stopped drawing a salary.
After initially shrugging off these attacks, Calderone decided she’d had enough.
“She was the perfect target.”
With the help of a Democratic-leaning organization that provided opposition research on Republican candidates and conservative activists and organizations, Calderone amassed a file of nearly 2,000 clippings from small-town newspapers where sex education was a hot topic. A pattern emerged: attacks on S.I.E.C.U.S. were consistently phrased, whether uttered by Hargis and the Christian Crusade or by local groups with names like Mothers Organized for Moral Society (MOMS).
She convened a group of about two dozen health organizations and briefed them on the organized campaign to discredit sex education in schools, which had now spread to 23 states. The efforts of “super-patriotic” conservative groups, she said, were making headway among the “large middle portion of the population.” (Gallup would soon report a seven-point decline in public support for sex education in just two years.)
Calderone also launched a national speaking tour to stop the bleeding. In May 1969, she told a women’s group at Franklin & Marshall College, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, that no one at S.I.E.C.U.S. had any connection to Communism; the only S.I.E.C.U.S. “conspiracy,” she said, was “to help society achieve saner, more responsible attitudes about a part of us that is universal—our sexuality.”
She traveled to Hargis’s backyard and gave two speeches at the University of Tulsa. She gave a lengthy interview to Playboy magazine, rebutting in detail the charges Hargis and his allies were making. But the most important step she took to defend her own name, as well as the work of the organization she headed, was to testify before a presidential commission that was studying pornography and would eventually recommend the expansion of age-appropriate sexual education in American schools.
A Randy Reverend
In 1971, the Reverend Billy James Hargis opened the American Christian College, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and welcomed its inaugural class of students. When a reporter asked Hargis what was to be taught, he replied, “anti-communism, anti-socialism, anti-welfare state, anti-Russia, anti-China, a literal interpretation of the Bible and states’ rights.”
On a Sunday in late October 1974, Hargis told worshippers at the Church of the Christian Crusade that he was stepping away from his ministry, as well as from the presidency of the American Christian College, “on the advice of his personal physician.” Associates said Hargis would also cut back his weekly TV broadcast to three or four “prime-time specials” a year and would spend more time at his farm, in Arkansas.
Two years later, the real story behind his resignation emerged.
In early 1974, Hargis had officiated at the wedding ceremony of two American Christian College students. On their honeymoon, the woman revealed a secret: she and Reverend Hargis had had a sexual relationship. Her new husband then revealed that he’d had sex with Hargis, too.
The couple disclosed this to the college’s vice president, and three more male students then came forward and said they had sex with Hargis over a period of three years. Time magazine would later report that the trysts took place in Hargis’s office, on his farm, and even on the road, when Hargis was accompanied by the college choir, known as the All-American Kids. The male students said Hargis explained away these sexual encounters as a modern-day version of the Old Testament friendship of Jonathan and David. He also allegedly threatened to blacklist them for life if they ever spoke about it.
The American Christian College trustees promptly launched an investigation. After Hargis confessed, they fired him.
The scandal remained buried until July 1976, when Time magazine broke the story. Hargis denounced the report as the product of a “Godless, left-wing pagan press.” But school trustees, in a letter to 70,000 supporters of the college, confirmed it was true.
Hargis later told a reporter, “I was guilty of sin, but not the sin I was accused of.”
“Sex education was the perfect issue to get people at the edge of their seats—and off their seats.”
With Hargis’s crusade against her largely over, Dr. Mary Calderone continued her speaking engagements throughout the 1970s and inspired other organizations to take up much of the work S.I.E.C.U.S. had pioneered. The American Association of Sex Educators and Counselors developed certification standards for its members. Planned Parenthood launched an education division.
In 1978, Calderone stepped down as executive director of S.I.E.C.U.S. That year, a Gallup poll showed that 77 percent of Americans approved of sex education in public schools, up from 65 percent in 1970.
Calderone died in 1998, following a decade-long battle with Alzheimer’s disease. She was 94. “Dr. Calderone did more than any other individual to convince both the medical profession and the public that human sexuality goes far beyond the sex act,” The New York Times wrote in its obituary, which called her “the grande dame of sex education.”
Today, S.I.E.C.U.S. continues to operate from an office in Washington, D.C. It promotes “shame-free, science-based, and inclusive sex education” and tracks policy at the federal and state levels. The organization considers sex education “a vehicle for social change” and works toward “a world where all people can access and enjoy sexual and reproductive freedom as they define it for themselves.”
The America First Policy Institute unveiled the “America First Agenda,” in July 2022, with 10 “pillars” for a second Trump administration, from “Make America Energy Independent” to “Fight Government Corruption by Draining the Swamp.” Among its recommendations for giving parents “more control over the education of their children” are proposals for “increased curriculum transparency and accountability” and “efficient processes by which parents can challenge materials that are age-inappropriate or otherwise unsuitable for public school classrooms.” President-elect Donald Trump has nominated A.F.P.I. chair Linda McMahon to be the next U.S. secretary of education.
After stepping down from the Christian Crusade, Hargis continued to publish books, including My Great Mistake, a revisionist history of his downfall. He died on November 27, 2004, in a Tulsa nursing home, at 79. “The sinning televangelist has become such a staple of American life,” The Economist wrote in its obituary, “that it is hard to credit that, at one time, the role was new.”
Joseph Rodota is a California-based writer and producer and the author of The Watergate: Inside America’s Most Infamous Address
