An important book analyzing the Right’s opposition to K-12 comprehensive sex education beginning in the 1970s and the ways in which their battle enhanced their larger political movement. Opposition to sex education was part of an overall resistance to generational change in the postwar period, reflecting a desire to lock in traditional gender roles and preserve a Romantic notion of the innocence of childhood. But in order to make their argument, the Right’s rhetoric relied on more sexually explicit language even than proponents of sexuality education; conservatives put forward detailed accusations of teachers who recruited kids to homosexuality and assorted perversions, and even offered explicit classroom demonstrations. (Irvine shows how conservatives unconscionably lied about what was happening in classrooms, thanks to supposedly biblically endorsed “mental reservations” that were akin to fingers crossed behind one’s back.) This rhetoric advanced a sexualized culture without arming children with the knowledge necessary to make sense of it, and not incidentally resulted in a cottage industry of new political organizations and abstinence-only curricula and other products. The Right had successfully quashed sex talk in the classroom by the early 2000s, but Irvine suggests that curiosity and the thirst for necessary knowledge cannot be permanently denied.