SPRING, Texas — Outside the Spring Church of Christ, a large roadside sign says a lot about the prevailing sensibility in this cordial town. It reads: "Support New Testament Morality."
This is the home and powerbase of Terri Leo, a state Board of Education member representing 2.5 million people in East Texas.
At the urging of Leo and several other members -- who describe themselves as Christian conservatives -- the board this month approved new health textbooks for high school and middle school students after publishers said they would tweak references to marriage and sexuality.
One agreed to define marriage as a "lifelong union between a husband and a wife." Another deleted words that were attacked by conservatives as "stealth" references to gay relationships; "partners," for example, was changed to "husbands and wives." A passage explaining that adolescence brings the onset of "attraction to others" became "attraction to the opposite sex."
Leo said she pushed for the changes to combat the influence of "liberal New York publishers" who by "censoring" the definition of marriage were legitimizing same-sex unions.
Some education advocates have criticized the board's decision.
"This was never about defining marriage," said Samantha Smoot, president of the Texas Freedom Network, an Austin-based nonprofit that opposes what it calls religious "extremism." "It was an effort to get anti-gay propaganda in the books."
Gilbert Sewall, director of the New York-based American Textbook Council -- an independent organization that reviews textbooks -- also criticized the Texas-approved books' promotion of abstinence-only sex education.
Such programs are "naive and confused," said Sewall, who described himself as an "educational conservative."
Research, much of it conducted by the federal government, has raised a host of questions about the effectiveness of abstinence programs in preventing disease and pregnancy. Teenage girls who are taught in the programs do wait longer before having sex, many experts believe, but are less likely to use protection when they do -- causing them to contract sexually transmitted diseases at the same rates as those who have sex earlier.
"I have very little use for this religion-driven curriculum," Sewall said. "This confuses sex and moral education."
Texas is the second-largest buyer of textbooks in the nation, after California. Books purchased here wind up in classrooms across the nation, because publishers are loath to create new editions for smaller states.
