Blunck, Eck, Sex

To the annual convention of the United Lutheran Synod of New York in Rochester last week went Dr. August H. C. Blunck, 53, with a chunky, blunt report. Dr. Blunck, pastor of St. John's Lutheran Church in Brooklyn, is chairman of the synod's committee on moral and social welfare, whose seven ministers and two laymen believed it was high time their church concerned itself with "the important matter of marriage and divorce." They proposed that seminaries teach prospective clergymen sexology and psychiatry, that clergymen instruct prospective husbands about sex, that the church's Sunday schools give sex instruction to youngsters, and that the State require psychiatric examinations to prevent marriage of the abnormal and unfit.

The committee's recommendations were printed in the pre-convention bulletin and distributed to the 500 delegates from 431 Lutheran churches in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut and New Jersey. Dr. Blunck waited patiently for a chance to introduce his committee's proposals on the convention floor. The first day the convention passed a resolution outlawing bingo and other gambling methods of raising money for the church, after Albany's Pastor William Eck exclaimed: "I would rather go into the ditch and dig for an honest day's labor than accept salary from such illicit means." The second, third and fourth days the delegates busied themselves with routine business. By the end of the fourth day, when most of the delegates had gone home. Dr. Blunck and his committee discovered that their report had quietly been filibustered off the agenda. The few remaining delegates voted to make it a special order of business for the 1939 convention.

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