from TomPaine.com:
SOCIALISTS USE SEX WEDGESubmitted by Rick Perlstein on July 21, 2007 - 2:03pm.
Wingnut obsessions never die. I can't believe we're still dealing with this. "Is masturbation and homosexuality appropriate for kindergarteners?" sneers Mitt Romney's flack Barbara Comstock, the woman responsible for smearing Al Gore's reputation on behalf of George Bush in 2000. "That's what SIECUS is, the group that Obama is, the group the Obama campaign has recommended as their guide."
So what the hell is SIECUS? Where is this bizarre rage against teaching kindergarteners about how not to be molested by grownups coming from?
Herewith, a special treat for Big Con readers: an excerpt from my forthcoming book Nixonland, on the backlash against liberalism in the 1960s. Read it to understand where this latest campaign tempest in a teapot is all coming from. Return with us, dear readers, to the summer of Woodstock...
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Two weeks after Woodstock a conference opened at the infamous Hilton in Chicago, where across the street a rally was commemorating the victims of the 1968 Democratic Convention. It opened with a prayer for the Lord's blessing in the struggle against "the humanistic godless effort to destroy the sanctity of the home and the well-being of America." That was followed by the Pledge of Allegiance and National Anthem. Then the chairwoman, a Mrs. Albert Flemming, asked the cameramen in the back to turn down the TV lights. The cameramen didn't respond. At which someone shouted out, "Who the hell wants the news media anyway?" The National Convention on the Crisis in Education had come to order.
There were delegates from 22 states, groups with names like Mothers for Moral Stability (MOMS) and Parents Opposed to Sex and Sensitivity Education (POSSE). The hallways burbled with talk of the recent "so-called protest music festival," Woodstock, the "unshaven faces and their tumbling blankets," of the gym class in which students supposedly went into a closet in pairs to explore what made boys different from girls; of the boy and girl who said they were performing a "scientific experiment" based on what they'd learned in class when found coupling in a toolshed; kindergartens where copulation was taught; the alleged move to coed bathrooms without partitions separating the toilets. The teacher in Minneapolis--or Wichita, Texas, or wicked New York City, or in Flint or Lansing, Michigan--who had screwed in front of the class in the interests of pedagogy. The seventeen boys who raped a sex education teacher after being aroused by her lecture. The classes that taught about copulation between people and livestock. The moral dissolution society was falling to as surely as snow to spring. And the villain responsible for it all: a woman named Mary Calderone.
The complete piece is at:
http://commonsense.ourfuture.org/socialists_use_sex_wedge?tx=3