During the 1960s, the John Birch Society, an ultraconservative organization, pushed schools to eliminate sex education programs in classrooms, charging that the classes were "smut," "immoral," and "a filthy communist plot" to poison the minds of American children. By the end of the 1970s, only the District of Columbia and three states—Kentucky, Maryland, and New Jersey—required that sex education be taught in public schools. The decline in sex education programs in the 1970s was accompanied by a steady increase in the teen sex rate and out-of-wedlock births. When the AIDS epidemic began to expand its reach into America's schools in the 1980s, parents and educators decided that they needed to teach their children about the realities of sex and disease. By December 1997, nineteen states and the District of Columbia required schools to teach sexuality education, and thirty-four states and the District of Columbia required...