Talk dirty.

• Author: Larson, Christina
• Position: Book Review

TALK ABOUT SEX Battles over Sex Education in the United States by Janice M. Irvine University of California Press, $24.95

RALPH REED MUST BE RIDING high. Most political strategists credit the Georgia Republican state chair and former Christian Coalition chairman with engineering Saxby Chambliss's upset of Max Cleland that gave the GOP control of the Senate. In addition to his well-publicized attacks against Cleland for blocking a proposed homeland security agency, Reed's team employed a classic scare tactic to swing the critical bloc of white women voters who were the election's deciding factor: stirring fears about what information and access to contraception their children could obtain at school.

Two weeks before the election, Chambliss's campaign began airing ads attacking Cleland's vote to purportedly allow school nurses to dispense the morning-after "abortion drug? In reality, Cleland had supported legislation to allow states, rather than Washington, to determine how federal aid to schools would be spent. But Reed's ploy worked. By painting Cleland as a liberal, especially on matters related to sex and children, Chambliss won the socially conservative state.

This strategy of campaigning to "recapture the culture" from corrupting modern influences is a time-tested tradition for conservative strategists. Flagship groups like the Moral Majority in the 1980s and the Christian Coalition in the 1990s attacked sex education and family planning initiatives, polished tactics to mobilize their base, and discovered that sex sells.

Janice Irvine, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, contends that campaigning against sex education has been "central in the rise to political power" of the New Right. In her new book, Talk About Sex, she traces the Right's history of exploiting societal fears about sexual promiscuity and moral decline.

In 1964, a Quaker reformer and one time Planned Parenthood medical director named Mary Calderone founded the Sex Education and Information Council of the United States (SEICUS), a private group dedicated to promoting sex education. That same year, Barry Goldwater &dared his candidacy for president and set about channeling grassroots conservative anxiety about the "sexual revolution" and social change into a national movement.

Few issues galvanize conservatives as much as those concerning sex--from feminism, abortion, and gay rights to pornography and sex education. Early opponents of...