Liberty University is thriving. The private, Christian college in Lynchburg, Va., founded by conservative evangelist Jerry Falwell in 1971, boasts an enrollment of 13,500 and 87,000 distant learning students. Falwell’s son is president, and unlike his father, Jerry Junior spurns TV evangelism and political appearances. Asked why, the younger Falwell said he doesn’t think outside activities would further the best interests of the school.

Falwell senior, who died in 2007, founded the Moral Majority in 1979, laying the foundation for Christian conservatives – a potent political movement today. Falwell is remembered for his stand against homosexuality, his pro-family commitment, and statements on a wide range of political issues, all of which received wide publicity. However, no searches mention the stand Falwell and Moral Majority took against sex education textbooks in 1979.

Initially, the fulminations by the Moral Majority to ban texts in public school brought images of Nazis tossing books in bonfires–until parents read one of the controversial books, Boys and Sex, by Wardell Pomeroy, which is still in widespread use in classrooms across the United States. In an early chapter, the book warns entering college male students not to be judgmental when they meet new boys brought up on a farm whose sexual encounters were with barnyard animals. Today, it’s number 18 in Google’s list of banned books.

That does not mean the book is banished from classrooms. But, in my opinion, it should be, and that would not violate the First Amendment. Boys and Sex is not actually a book at all, that is, a book subjected to reviews, legal considerations, and the marketplace. It is instead a “textbook,” the hybrid form of book publishing designed to instruct students by force.

Textbooks should have no protection from boycotts, or even bonfires. Problem is, parents can’t find the book on shelves to buy them up or complain to the publisher or bookstore owner.

They are in the limbo between protected publishing rights for books and the same safe harbor claimed for mostly leftist, propagandistic, thought control textbooks. As Moral Majority learned, radical educationists claim First Amendment rights and label anyone who complains as a book burner for objecting to a textbook, as if he or she has committed a foul anti-American crime.

The Boys and Sex example provides a peek into how progressives have undermined education using slanted textbooks from K-12 to college. If parents and students could be made privy to decisions by local school boards and committees of college teachers, who adopt questionable textbooks, there would be hope for rescuing education from the grip of progressives who make sure sexual deviation is the norm, socialism a desirable alternative to capitalism, atheism a valid religion, and climate change an unquestionable fact.