The customary refusal of the liberals to tolerate any dissent from their rigid orthodoxy has reared its ugly head again in the matter of the membership of the Connecticut State Board of Education. The liberal educationists have refused to allow even one seat out of nine to be held by a woman who holds non-liberal views.
It all started when Connecticut Governor Ella T. Grasso sent her nominations for the nine-member State Board of Education to the Legislature for confirmation. The Governor apparently had decided that the Board, which had been consistently voting 9 to 0 on all issues for some time, needed one member who would bring a fresh approach and different ideas.
As one of the nine, Governor Grasso named Mrs. Eva Hudak, a very popular union woman who was recently elected president of her local, the northwestern judicial district of the Connecticut State Employees Association. She had held previous appointments to other boards from three earlier Connecticut Governors: Chester Bowles, Abraham Ribicoff, and John Dempsey.
But in the eyes of the liberal educationists, Mrs. Hudak had committed one unforgiveable sin. She had opposed sex education in the schools unless it were taught with morality. So the sex educationists and their allies unleashed a savage personal campaign to keep her off the State Board.
They were joined by the militant pro-abortionists who were eager to oppose Mrs. Hudak because she had been president of a chapter of Birthright, Inc. The attack took on anti-Catholic overtones, as Mrs. Hudak was publicly accused of being “too religious” and “a narrow-minded Catholic.”
Mrs. Hudak’s entire life was combed over more meticulously than any gubernatorial appointee in recent memory. She herself was grilled for two and a half hours in the witness box at the Senate hearing.
Mrs. Hudak is a self-educated woman, having had to stop her formal education during the depression to help support her ten brothers and sisters. The legislative prosecutors showed her no mercy. They publicly ridiculed her for not having read “The Scarlet Letter” and “An American Tragedy”, implying that those two novels mark the dividing line between competence and incompetence.
Meanwhile, another of Governor Grasso’s nominations to the State Board of Educa- tion was quickly approved even though she admitted in her testimony that she opposes having the American Flag in the classrooms and opposes students’ reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the Flag.
The notion has prevailed for so long that anyone who questions the value of sex education must be some kind of unenlightened crank, so the entire topic receives hardly any critical scrutiny. Most parents, would find of great interest a perceptive article called “Turning Children Into Sex Experts” by Jacqueline Kasun, published recently in the journal “The Public Interest.”
Ms. Kasun describes her surprise when she discovered that sex education, as it is taught in the schools today, has little to do with biological facts, but is largely focused on attitudes and “values clarification.” But whose attitudes and values? Certainly not traditional moral values or parents’ attitudes. Even romantic love is debunked in most programs; any sex is accceptable so long as one is comfortable about it.
Ms. Kasun’s survey of sex education classes in public elementary and secondary schools shows that they teach an acceptance of extra-marital sex, homosexuality, and masturbation; and that these new attitudes are induced by such devices as classroom role-playing, drawings, discussions, pre-tests, post-tests, and by constantly requiring students to use the most extensive and explicit vocabulary of sex.
Shirley Foster Hartley, in her 1975 study on “Illegitimacy” (Univ. of Cal. Press), shows that in Sweden, the illegitimacy rate had been declining in 1956 when sex education was made compulsory. Then the trend changed. Swedish births out of wedlock now amount to 31 percent of all births, the highest rate in Europe and two and a half times as high as in the U.S.
But the illegitimacy rate in our country is still climbing, and so is sex education. It would seem that school boards would have an obligation to listen to opposing points of view.
(end)
