THE ROOTS OF A TRANSGRESSION

It would doubtless be hard to win sympathy for Mary Kay LeTourneau. She is
the Washington state teacher -- 35, married and already a mother of four --
who last year bore a baby fathered by a 13-year-old grade-school pupil.

She served a 6-month jail sentence and, upon being freed, violated terms of
an early release by resuming her dalliance with the child. A welfare
department report prepared for the court's guidance discloses that
LeTourneau had again had intimate relations with this boy scarcely
one-third her age.

And so it's been decided she must do another seven and one-half years
behind bars. Judge Linda Lau may have had no choice under the law. If so,
Mary Kay LeTourneau joins the thousands of drug addicts and others who fill
our prisons today because society has not found the answer to their
problem.

Just before his client was led away in handcuffs, defense attorney David
Gehrke uttered a sad truth.

"Society does not need to be protected from Mary LeTourneau," he said. "The
person who needs to be protected from Mary LeTourneau is Mary LeTourneau."

I cannot claim status as even an amateur psychologist. I have no ready
explanation for -- nor solution to -- the strange impulses that appear to
drive this woman.

But I do know something about the sort of background in which she grew up.
I served briefly alongside her father, a California congressman in the
early 1970s. This was at a time when Mary Kay, the fourth of seven Schmitz
children, must have been about 10 years old.

John Schmitz was a well-liked but somewhat curious ex-community college
professor who blurred his ultra-conservatism with a keenly honed sense of
humor. Asked why he had joined the John Birch Society, he offered this
explanation: "I wished to identify with the moderate wing of the Republican
Party in Orange County!" When President Nixon announced an intention to
visit Communist China, Schmitz said he would gladly vote the funds to send
the president there -- but not to bring him back.

An ardent anti-abortionist, Schmitz gained assignment to the House Commerce
subcommittee dealing with public health matters. His intent, he explained,
was "to help stop baby-killing bills."

Although it may have no bearing on his daughter's recent troubles, Schmitz
adamantly opposed sex education in schools.

Because extremists like this seldom influence the shape of legislation, the
congressman's ideology made him essentially irrelevant. Among those who
knew him only casually, moreover, his perceived holier-than-thou attitude
annoyed some colleagues. "Schmitz was more Catholic than the pope," one of
them recalled recently.

Defeated for renomination to Congress in 1972, Schmitz ran that year as the
American Party nominee for president against Nixon. He regained public
office by winning election to the California state Senate. But his
political career crashed suddenly, and for a reason that now seems to have
been eerily foreboding in light of the case against his daughter. It was
revealed in 1983 that Schmitz was keeping a mistress on the side -- a
former student of his by whom the professor-ideologue had sired two
children.

Regrettably, John Schmitz is now said to be terminally ill with cancer. A
news dispatch from Seattle quotes Mary Kay as saying "It is a tragedy that
this came out about me before my father's death."

No one who knew the family can feel anything but sadness -- the more so
because Schmitz seemed personally unpretentious. His posture as
self-anointed conscience of Congress would have been hard to accept in an
Elmer Gantry type, or in the likes of those fallen televangelists, Jimmy
Swaggert and Jim Bakker.

Yet any person proclaiming special virtues, if found unable to live up to
his or her own stated ideals, inevitably invites the label hypocrite.
These last 25 years in the life of John Schmitz might have inspired a
Sinclair Lewis novel.

In real life, however, is it fair to carry the story line into succeeding
generations? One can only speculate what it must have been like to grow up
in a family headed by this strangely driven man. The news photos of Mary
Kay LeTourneau show a nervous, possibly confused woman unable to cope with
the impulses that label her not only a child molester but, technically, a
rapist.

Seven and one-half years behind prison walls? And to what purpose?

She flouted a court order, true. But this tormented woman poses no threat
to public safety. If she must be incarcerated, let it be in a mental
hospital, some institution where doctors can try to understand and,
mercifully, to deal with the demons of her bloodline.

VAN DEERLIN represented a San Diego County district in Congress for 18
years.