A program of sex education must be undertaken immediately by Negro churches to check an alarming growth of sex degeneracy among clergymen as well as parishioners, declares Rev. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., this week. In a sensation-packed article in the November Ebony, the noted Harlem minister and congressman boldly lashes out at his fellow-clergymen for tolerating the “tiny minority of degenerate ministers who have eased their way into pulpits today to, cast a pall over all the church.” He added that the sexual degeneracy in Negro congregations has developed to the point where it is now up to clergymen to begin comprehensive sex education programs to ) “stem the growing influence abnormal sex practices in youngsters, to save these youngsters from the horrible no-man’s land of sex.” Citing typical examples of ministers who are guilty of sexual perversion. Rev.

Powell says that one minister, who engaged in an unnatural relationship with an officer of his congregation exercised so much influence “that there a fantastically high percentage worshippers in his church who blatantly and openly flaunt their sex perversion. They do it and they get away with it because they are following the depraved | leadership of a man who has allowed his strange sex learnings to overshadow his duty to God and to his fellow men.” Rev. Powell demands swift action to and check the “boys with swish girls the swagger,” and at the same | insists the church has a responsibility to help “these haunted people who are touched with such degeneracy. A homosexual may well be the way he is because he never received the proper sex education at an early age. A church, which offers a well rounded and understanding sex instruction program, will find it can and does decrease homosexual potentiality in its membership and in its community.” Rev.

Powell, is pastor of the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York–largest Baptist congregation in the nation-“zeroes in” on another target–the leaders of the so-called religious cults, who “deliberately and cold-bloodedly put undue emphasis on sex, weaving into their sermons and services a pattern which is labelled religious ardor but which is anything but.” He makes it clear he does not include Father Devine in this group.