Sex Education: The Basic Issues

Foreward

By William A. Marra, Ph.D.

Sometime in 1967 I spoke before a small audience at my parish on the topic, Sex and Sex Education. A member of the audience recorded the talk. The tape was sent to a national organization that had just had begun to oppose classroom sex education. Within two months this organization booked me for talks, twenty in the Midwest and then a few more in California. Thus began my other career. Besides teaching philosophy at Fordham University, in New York, I started lecturing to groups, both large and small, across America, in Canada, and also in the British Isles. I estimate that over the past 30 years I have given some two thousand lectures on religion, ethics, politics; and most of all, on different aspects of education.

When I first started talking about classroom sex education, I was naive enough to believe that those promoting the idea were simply misguided people, caught up in a fad, who would soon come to their senses. Above all, I told myself, at least the Catholic schools will have none of this sustained assault on modesty and innocence.

How wrong I was! I was soon to meet with Family Life experts in Catholic education. They accepted, wholesale, the rationale, the curriculum, and even many of the materials of a powerful group calling itself the Sex Information and Educational Council of the United States (SIECUS).

I then worked with my mentor, Dietrich von Hildebrand, in composing the booklet reprinted here as Sex Education: The Basic Issues, Parts I and II. In 1975 and 1977, as the situation in the classrooms worsened, I wrote additional articles reprinted here: The Two Directions of Sex Education and What the Catholic Church Teaches About Sex.

At the present time ‚ late in the year 1998 ‚ when the squalor of the permissive society seems surely to have reached its shameful nadir, too many educators continue to push for still more sex education in the classrooms both Catholic and secular. When you point out the ever more deplorable attitudes and behaviors towards sex – on the part of almost two generations of young people – these educators take this as proof that we need more of the same!

The additional three essays were added to take account of certain new developments in the ongoing fight for the souls of our children. The Veil of Innocence Declaration and the Eucharistic Adoration, following these essays, provide the beginnings of a movement to safeguard our children.

I am deeply convinced that this book has something important to say to educators and to parents. I pray that it may receive an attentive and respectful hearing.

William A. Marra, Ph.D., 1998