The roots of seething paranoia, ground out like sausage by right-wing radio evangelists like Dr. Burpo go deep and run long. I have run a couple of his other broadcasts in recent months, where he interviews some like-minded individual in Congress and today is not an exception.

Representative James B. Utt was a Republican from the Santa Ana area of Southern California. During the time of this broadcast (1969) the big brouhaha was over a program called SIECUS being introduced into the California school system. It was all about sex education and it attempted to shed light on an area that had been woefully inadequate since schools began.

Of course, the Dr. Burpos of the world would have none of it and so he enlisted the support of like-minded individuals in Congress like Utt and several others, to come on the radio and alarm listeners that all this talk about SEICUS was a communist plot and in fact, SEICUS was held by these people to be a communist front.

Yes, it got like that.

James B. Utt: “The whole thrust of SIECUS was to make pornography acceptable in the parlor at home. And the publishers of the SIECUS program are the greatest publishers and purveyors and distributors of pornography that there is in America. And why should we, the tax payers and the moral people of America be supporting the . .these pornographic uh . . mills that are making so much money in California in fact all over the United States. And I became concerned mainly because, time after time I was getting letters from concerned mothers enclosing some of the pornography . . .pornographic literature that they were receiving and that their children were receiving and wondering what they could do about it.”

It was interesting to realize this controversy is still going on, some 41 years later. I've noticed a number of websites claiming SIECUS extols the virtues of homosexuality and godlessness and promotes moral decay.

Hmm - 2011, moral decay, screaming evangelicals. Yeah - makes perfect sense . . . .