Michael S. Heath is the executive director of the Christian Civic League of Maine.
Two years ago, the League joined with parents in Orono to oppose the introduction of the book "Girl Interrupted" into the high school curriculum.
Last summer, we joined with concerned parents in Westbrook to oppose a sex education curriculum that teaches young children that homosexuality is normal and healthy.
Now we are vigorously opposing the efforts of the Portland School Committee to allow King Middle School to provide contraceptives to its students.
Mainers are confronted with a stark reality. All these acts -- using an obscenity-laden novel as a schoolbook, normalizing homosexuality in the minds of kindergarteners, providing contraceptives to middle-school students -- would have been illegal in an earlier age.
FAILURES ARE MANY
Our schools have not failed merely in their duty to teach young people the knowledge needed for physical and moral health. By teaching dangerously flawed views about sex, and by facilitating harmful and illegal acts, our public schools now actively participate in the corruption of our youth.
Many attribute the current chaos in sexual morality to the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s. They would be correct, at least to a degree.
The groundwork for overthrowing America's traditional views about marriage and the family was laid by the father of the sexual revolution, Wilhelm Reich, who spent his last years in Rangeley before a fraud-related contempt-of-court conviction sent him to federal prison, where he died on Nov. 3, 1957.
The unrelenting campaign to loosen sexual morals derives its name from a book written by Reich in 1929, which was entitled, appropriately enough, "The Sexual Revolution." The original title was "Sexuality in the Culture War.
In the book, Wilhelm Reich -- a disciple of Sigmund Freud - set forth his program for radicalizing society by undermining sexual morality.
Central to the thinking of Reich was the idea that conservative political views have their origin in the repression of sexuality in the child by an authoritarian father.
With time, the conservative ideology becomes incorporated in the character of the child. Character, for Reich, was a bad thing.
To change an individual's political viewpoint from conservatism to liberalism, the character of the individual must be altered or destroyed through sexual liberation.
According to Reich, the path to a better world lies through the loosening of sexual morality -- in others words, a sexual revolution.
Admittedly, all this sounds too mystifyingly evil to be true. But Reich went further. He claimed that sexual energy is the force which governs and sustains the world, and is worthy of honor for creating all that exists. For Reich, sex is God.
In the practical realm, Reich advocated lowering the age of consent to 12, in order to remove the harmful effects of the authoritarian family. Even more shocking is his claim that "The legalization of abortion implicitly contains an affirmation of sexual pleasure."
Apart from the evidence of Reich's own life, there can be no mistaking that the ideas of the Freudian Left have been a dismal failure.
A RISING TOTAL
Every revolution claims its innocent victims. Among the victims of the sexual revolution we can count the victims of child sexual abuse, sexual violence against women, and the 45 million victims of abortion.
I am told that in investigating a crime in a corporate or public setting, investigators look not so much for physical evidence, but for evidence as to what is missing -- information which has been hidden from view.
On the 50th anniversary of the death of the father of the sexual revolution, we need to find out what we are not being told.
Only then can we begin to understand the social wreckage about us; only then can we begin the crucial task of restoring the Christian view of marriage and the family to its rightful place.
-- Special to the Press Herald
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