Dr. Jocelyn Elders has been elevated to what the New York Times calls the Surgeon General’s “bully pulpit,” and President Clinton has uxoriously compared her to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Yet Elders as the mouthpiece for the healing profession—not to mention the allusion to her in a pulpit—is grossly ironic. Her insensitive, sometimes spiteful public asides reveal her to be more fit for today’s bull pit of warring ideologues than for a bully pulpit. More critically, there is mounting evidence that the public school sex-ed model she pushes is destructive of our children.

Pediatrician (now First Healer) Elders’ nonchalant contempt for fetal life is now a commonplace: her taunting of pro-lifers to cease their “love affair with the fetus” savaged millions of Americans who esteem the unborn as very young human beings. (Consider, by analogy, the likely reaction of black Americans to the following variation of her vicious comment: “African-Americans should cease their love affair with slaves.”) Elders also derides pro-life Christians as having a “Bible-belt mentality”; pro-life Catholics, in particular, are singled out as belonging to “a celibate, male-dominated Church.” She does, however, place special stock in molding little children. “Give me,” she says, “the choice of trying to educate a 3-year-old or . . . an 18-year-old and I’ll take the 3-year-old every time.” And what does she prescribe for those in their formative years? Ever more systematic, explicit, and graphic sex ed, launched in kindergarten.

Since Elders sits on the board of the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research arm of Planned Parenthood, it should not be surprising if she adopts as part of her sex-ed program for coed kindergartens the Planned Parenthood suggestion that children outline a friend’s body and verbally label all the parts, including genitals and buttocks. By the time children reach third grade. Planned Parenthood commends constructing models of reproductive organs out of Ping-Pong balls, paper cups, straw, yarn, and cellophane bags. Given Elders’ endorsement by the Sex Information Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), one might further divine her educational “health” plan by citing the council’s “messages” for five- to eight-year-olds: “Boys and men have a penis, scrotum, and testicles. Girls and women have a vulva, clitoris, vagina, uterus, and ovaries. Both girls and boys have body parts that feel good when touched. . . . Sexual intercourse occurs when a man and a woman place the penis inside the vagina. . . . Some men and women are homosexual, which means they will be attracted to and fall in love with someone of the same gender.”

Granting that teaching the physiology of sex is integral at some point to responsible sex ed, there is staunch opposition—from both parents and medical professionals—to instruction of this kind at such an early age. Some of the opposition centers on violation of the “latency period,” when, according to psychiatrist William McGrath, healthy young children are “not interested in sex” and “premature interest . . . in sex is unnatural and will arrest or distract the development of personality.” Parents charge infringement of their rights and familial privacy by Big Brother (and Big Sister) whose pedagogy contradicts their own. These are powerful social stirrings, with the potential for litigation against public schools on the basis of perceived parental rights and freedom of religious expression (i.e., parental teaching of religiously based sexual morality).

There is, moreover, Elders’ loose tongue on the matter of giving contraceptives to teenagers. When named public health director in Arkansas, she was asked if she would recommend distributing condoms in public schools. “Well,” she responded, “we’re not going to put them on lunch trays, but yes.” She admonished girls to carry condoms in their purses on dates and concluded: “We taught them what to do in the front seat [of a car]. . . . Now it’s time to teach them what to do in the back seat.”

Elders’ flippancy highlights her knee-jerk “value neutrality,” now similarly ingrained in the public school establishment’s treatment of sexuality, hi step with this conventional amorality, she makes no pretense of upholding the moral standard that youngsters should simply not have sexual intercourse, and. by adopting as her chief concern “safe” sex, she implicitly condones it. Also, her reductionist (narrowly contraception-governed) model of sex cd, by discouraging internalized beliefs and values, unnaturally disjoins sex in students’ minds from that which gives it meaning: mystery, passion, love, personality, self-worth, integrity, family, community, and transcendent ends.

The unwillingness of sexual ideologues such as Elders to hold up traditional norms of right and wrong is insidious. Concerned physicians, such as Mildred Jefferson, warn that condom distribution in the public schools is failing to decrease rates of teen pregnancy and sex-related diseases, including AIDS, and appears even to increase them. They point out that, even when teenagers are educated about and have access to condoms, they most often fail to use them or do so ineffectively. In place of contraception-centered sex ed they hold up abstinence-based models whose success they claim can be demonstrated. The failure of condom-based sex ed, notably on Elders’ own turf, is a case in point: during her tenure as Arkansas’ public health director, the state went from having the fourth highest teen birthrate in the country to the second highest; the rate of sexually transmitted diseases among teens rose strikingly. Reprehensibly, when on Elders’ watch a large batch of defective condoms was distributed to schoolchildren, she deliberately kept this danger secret. She has refused to acknowledge wrongdoing and has never sought out those who may have become pregnant or infected. The confirmation of so unfit a Surgeon General is all the more abhorrent in light of Elders’ widely alleged financial improprieties and managerial incompetence.

This controversy is an unambiguous sign of the gaping fault line in American culture. It is emblematic of the seething rift between, on the one hand, largely middle-class traditionalists, who are frustrated in the extreme by the highhanded intrusion into their economic and social affairs of the dominant statist elite, and, on the other hand, that same elite, whose purpose is to substitute its Utopian will for that of the people and to aggrandize itself. This is why Elders’ substance and style matter, for they grate at the heart of historic American beliefs and sensibilities. Her “in your own face” bravado epitomizes the left-liberal, bureaucratic arrogance now stoking the American blood feud; it will play its droll part in the decisive cultural battle to come.