The U.S.’ “recent experience with abstinence-only sex education is merely the latest chapter in our long, sometimes ridiculous … history of efforts to control humankind’s most basic drive,” Johannah Cornblatt writes in a Newsweek article examining the history of sex education. Organized sex education first gained attention during the urbanization movement of the late 1800s and early 1900s, accordiong to Cornblatt. Later, “rampant” cases of sexually transmitted infections during World War I prompted the federal government to begin educating soldiers about syphilis and gonorrhea, she writes.

Over the next 30 years, sex education “exploded,” and the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States was founded in 1964 “in part to challenge the hegemony of the American Social Hygiene Association (now called the American Social Health Association), which had dominated sex education curriculum development,” according to Cornblatt. She reports that “some of the greatest resistance to sex ed arose during the sexual revolution of the late ’60s and early ’70s,” when the issue became politicized “as religious conservatives built a movement based, in part, on their opposition to sex instruction in the public schools.” The Christian Crusade, the John Birch Society and similar groups began attacking “SIECUS and sex education overall for promoting promiscuity and moral depravity.” Janice Irvine, author of “Talk About Sex: The Battles Over Sex Education in the United States,” said that religious conservatives in the late 1960s “began using sex ed to their political advantage” through the use of “really scary rhetoric” on what students were being taught in classrooms. Cornblatt writes, “In school districts across the country, groups of parents started protesting sex ed programs.”

Advocates of comprehensive sex education “found their position strengthened” when the HIV/AIDS pandemic began in the 1980s. Every state had passed mandates for HIV/AIDS education, “sometimes tied to general sex ed and sometimes not,” by the mid-1990s, Cornblatt writes. Conservatives responded by “launch[ing] a movement to rebrand sex education as ‘abstinence education,’” and religious conservatives played a role in adding abstinence-education provisions to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, meaning that for the first time, the federal government “directed tens of millions of dollars to abstinence-education programs,” she says (Cornblatt, Newsweek, 10/28).

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