Lecture 4: Highlights of the Sexual Revolution II

Draft fourth lecture in the coming series: "The Sexual Revolution and its Consequences"

This is a draft of my fourth lecture in the upcoming series on “The Sexual Revolution and its Consequences”, to be sponsored by the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture. It covers the two connected issues that are generally overlooked even by critics of the Sexual Revolution: welfare and divorce. These issues have a much lower media profile that the legal controversies I addressed in the previous lecture (#3), but in the long run they may be even more consequential.

Here is an updated outline of the series as a whole:

General Outline

Course Title: The Sexual Revolution and Its Consequences

Lecturer: Stephen Baskerville

Scope of Lectures:

1. Introduction to the Sexual Revolution

2. Sexual Ideology

3. Highlights of the Sexual Revolution I:

   Contraception, Abortion, Homosexualiy, Same-Sex Marriage, and Connected Issues

4. Highlights of the Sexual Revolution II:

   Welfare, Divorce, and Connected Issues

5. Exporting the Sexual Revolution: Great Power Foreign Policy, NATO, the European Union

6. Globalizing the Sexual Revolution I: The United Nations and other Intergovernmental Organizations (Procedures, Sex Education, AIDS, Development Assistance)

7. Globalizing the Sexual Revolution II: Human Rights

8. The Churches and the Sexual Revolution

9. Effects of the Sexual Revolution

10. Responding to the Sexual Revolution

---

Lesson 4

Highlights of the Sexual Ideology II: Welfare, Divorce, and Connected Issues

Source Texts:

• Stephen Baskerville, Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (2007).

• Stephen Baskerville, The New Politics of Sex: The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government Power (2017)

• Stephen Baskerville, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went “Communist” and What to Do about It (2024), chapters 2, 6

• Stephen Baskerville, “From Welfare State to Police State,” The Independent Review, vol. 12, no. 3 (Winter 2008).

• Stephen Baskerville, “The Sexual Left, the Welfare State, and the Divorce Revolution,” Chronicles, June 2021, https://chroniclesmagazine.org/view/the-sexual-left-the-welfare-state-and-the-divorce-revolution/

Further Readings:

• Judy Parejko, Stolen Vows: The Illusion of No-Fault Divorce and the Rise of the American Divorce Industry (2002)

• Maggie Gallagher, The Abolition of Marriage: How We Destroy Lasting Love (1996).

• Roland Huntford, The New Totalitarians (1971)

• John Lott and Lawrence Kenny, “Did Women's Suffrage Change the Size and Scope of Government?” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 106, no. 6 (February 1999).

• William Collins, The Empathy Gap (2019)

• Greg Ellis, The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law (2021)

4

Highlights of the Sexual Ideology II: Welfare, Divorce, and Connected Issues

High-profile issues like contraception, abortion, homsexuality, and same-sex marriage form the “commanding heights” (so to speak) of the Sexual Revolution, and capture most of the public and media attention. Yet other changes may actually exert a more profound impact on our society and also on the structure and purpose of government.

Welfare: The State as Provider

The larger context and battleground of the Sexual Revolution – the political contest that I have described as a battle to control the terms of reproduction – this is further illustrated in the most first major achievement of the Sexual Revolution. If we step back a few years, we can see how this battle likewise intensified to the point of crisis during the 1960s, though it began decades earlier. At one time, this issue received enormous attention from both the left and right. For years, it was considered to be among the top political controversies, at least in America (which again, set the trends), one that consistently occupied front-page importance. In fact, it absorbed the attention of some of America’s best minds. Today it is largely ignored and seldom even included as a component of sexual politics. Yet it forms the first major victory of the Sexual Revolution. It was created immediately following the extension of the vote to women, though it reached the crisis point only in the 1960s.

In fact, one could go even further and say that it constituted one of the most radical political innovations of all time: I am speaking of the welfare state.

The welfare system represented a major alteration in the very nature and role of government itself. Before welfare, government authority had been seen for centuries to be limited largely to the “negative” role of protecting its citizens’ persons and property. The welfare state gave government power a new, more “positive” and proactive mandate to provide for its citizens' material needs.

This new role of family provider came with unintended consequences, because it opened new avenues to dramatically increase government power. It gave government officials an entrée to manage and “administer” the nation’s families – in effect, regulating the private lives of its citizens. Starting in the early 20th century, governments throughout the West began to exert a direct and active role in supervising private family life. This new power was asserted especially in the area of child-rearing.

In retrospect, this was the beginning of what in recent years has come to be called “the Deep State”.^[1]

The welfare system was quickly implemented throughout the western democracies. But ironically, the one country where its presence is considered to be the most minimal turns out to be the country where it ended up exerting the most extreme consequences and provoking the most controversy: the United States. This is because, unlike European welfare systems, the American version was limited to the poor. And poor communities are generally less resistant than middle-class ones to encroachments on their privacy and rights by government functionaries.

Welfare replaced private charity with bureaucratic administration and authority. Traditional charity had been operated largely by unpaid Christian women organized by churches and financed by their husbands. The material assistance they distributed to the poor – food, clothing, shelter – was invariably accompanied by firm strictures on Christian sexual morality that refused to tolerate extra-marital sex and single motherhood. Today, this moral imperative is often dismissed and ridiculed, but it had the merit of mitigating poverty at its source. By insisting on respect for traditional sexual morality, Christian dispensers of charity could devote themselves to actually solving the problem by largely eradicating poverty.

Bureaucratic welfare, by contrast, replaced volunteer women with professional social workers. In contrast to the volunteers, the social workers had two interconnected incentives to encourage extramarital sex, family breakdown, and single motherhood as much as possible:

• First, like all bureaucratic officials, they had a self-interest in proliferating and exacerbating the problems that demanded their services. The easiest way to accomplish this was to remove the breadwinners – the fathers – from the household. This ensured that families and communities remained poor and that their poverty became intractable.

• Second, the social workers were increasingly trained in feminism and other radical ideologies by those who had professionalized poor relief. This made them ideologically hostile to fathers and determined to marginalize and separate them from the women and children.

The result was an explosion of out-of-wedlock births and single motherhood among the poor. This meant more poverty – and more entrenched poverty that continues generation after generation. It also resulted in connected social problems in low-income communities: violent crime, substance abuse, truancy, and more unwed births in the succeeding generations.

These ills first took hold among low-income populations, especially in less educated sectors of society. Especially hard hit were African-American communities in the inner cities, though native Americans and white people in poor regions like Appalachia and the South were also affected. The effects remain to this day, resulting in chronic poverty, drug and alcohol abuse, and crime.

Incidentally, these effects appeared more slowly in Europe, because European welfare systems operated more as social insurance schemes that included affluent people, who could benefit without the acute negative effects. Yet in the long run, similar consequences began emerging in Europe as well.

Divorce: Welfarizing the Middle Class

But it did not stop there. Similar problems soon started spreading to middle-class communities.

This happened because of another radical political innovation that can likewise be described as one of the most truly revolutionary of our times – if not of all time.

Here too, the decisive innovation came from the feminists, who engineered the most staggering coup of all: the most subversive legal innovation ever instituted in the western democracies – a measure so diabolical that, at a stroke, it decimated the integrity of both the family and the judiciary. It not only tore apart families by the millions but it also overthrew the entire Common Law system that had safeguarded freedom and private life for centuries.

This was the oxymoron of “no-fault” justice, which they borrowed from car insurance to legally abolish civilization’s most fundamental institution: marriage. Legislators effectively abolished marriage itself as a legally enforceable contract: so-called “no-fault” divorce.^[2]

So subtle was the sleight-of-hand that few even noticed what happened. The country was preoccupied with civil rights and Vietnam, which seems more pressing at the time. But the Sexual Revolution was already acculturating people to radical sexual liberation and experimentation. No debate was held at the time or since. Propaganda promising divorce “by mutual consent” fooled almost everyone into acquiescing in what was really unilateral and involuntary divorce. This allowed one spouse to abrogate a marriage agreement unilaterally, without any agreement or any transgression by the other and without incurring any responsibility for the consequences to the other spouse or children.

The National Association of Women Lawyers had devised this legislative subterfuge back in the 1940s, and they were waiting for an opportunity to unleash it.^[3] California Governor Ronald Reagan signed the first law in 1969 without understanding of implications and later regretted it. A measure so extreme that its only precedents were during the French and Russian revolutions (both of which were forced to repeal it because of the social chaos it caused)^[4] swept through the US and the western democracies with almost no opposition or even discussion. Today, feminists continue pushing it aggressively in the global South.

The full impact took decades to work through to its logical conclusion. But in the end, the middle class had joined the underclass, similarly pervaded by embittered single mothers, rebellious and self-destructive children, and ejected, emasculated fathers teetering on the edge of criminalization and homelessness – their lives and relationships likewise controlled and administered by the functionaries of the welfare state.

“No-fault” divorce was breathtaking in its nihilism. “No-fault” justice is a contradiction in terms and a guaranteed formula for systematic injustice. Such a concept is not possible in any just legal system or free society. Applied anywhere in the judiciary, it would result in legal chaos, which is precisely what ensued. Yet celebrated legal minds have failed or refused to understand this for more than a half-century. They stood by in silence as it was applied to society’s most important contract – the marriage contract.

Yet even its harshest critics – who focus understandably on the torn-apart families and ruined lives that resulted – have mostly missed the larger consequences and a whole other dimension: the virtually unlimited power over individuals and private life it confers on the state. No-fault justice grants courts the explicit statutory power to punish innocent people. For the first time under Common Law, courts could summon legally unimpeachable citizens – citizens sitting in their own homes minding their own business, not even suspected of any legal infraction – assume control over the most intimate details of their private lives, and inflict on them measures – in effect, punishments – for conduct that is perfectly legal. No-fault justice permits courts to:

• dissolve their marriages without their consent or grounds;

• evict them from their homes

• seize control of their children and abrogate their parental rights;

• prevent them from seeing their children;

• restrict their movements;

• empty their bank accounts;

• confiscate their homes;

• attach their wages;

• forcibly extract fees for people they never hired for “services” they never requested;

• summarily confine them to psychiatric facilities;^[5]

• seize their passports, driving permits, and professional licenses;

• jail them indefinitely without trial or record.^[6]

The result became the most authoritarian and repressive government machinery ever created in the United States. Bit-by-bit, officials took full advantage of their new powers, including mass incarcerations without trial or due process of law, summary confiscations of children and goods, open violations of the most basic civil liberties and constitutional rights by the very courts whose responsibility it is to safeguard them – all against citizens suspected of no legal transgression.^[7]

The New Leftist Gendarmerie

Yet more was still to come. The welfare matriarchy had become “empowering” in new ways, if not for the single mothers who received it, then certainly for the feminist functionaries who dispensed it.

To implement these draconian powers – and while no one was paying attention – a new plainclothes police force was created, a kind of sexual-family gendarmerie. As the chaos and anomie of single-mother homes exploded – and the larger communities dominated by such homes became ungovernable, social workers began acquiring new police powers – powers that made welfare far more “empowering” than just distributing money and largesse to the poor.

These powers were likewise expanded to police middle-class families. In fact, they spread from there to the politics of the larger society, where they began to exert a profound impact on our larger national and international politics.

These powers began with child protection, domestic violence programs, and child support enforcement. These programs not only further entrenched single motherhood; they also elevated social workers to the status of police. Social workers also thereby further displaced the fathers by usurping their roles of protectors, as well as providers, for the women and children. In fact, fathers became the principal targets of the new police powers and were demoted in status from merely being superfluous to villains. They were transformed from protectors of women and children into “batterers” and “pedophiles” who abused them, and from being their providers into “deadbeats” who abandoned them. Though these accusations were mostly fallacious, the social work matriarchy was now “empowered” to remove the fathers by force and incarcerate them without trial.^[8]

Welfare was no longer merely a government dole. It now became a leftist gendarmerie, with the gendarmes unconstrained by the constitutional restraints we place on uniformed policemen.^[9] The “oppressed” class in need of “liberation” shifted from the “poor” and “working class” to “abused children,” “battered women,” and “heroic single mothers,” and the villains changed from capitalist plutocrats, bloodthirsty militarists, and racists to working-class fathers: “pedophiles,” “batterers,” “deadbeat dads”.

In short, feminism and the politics of sexuality had overtaken and displaced socialism and the politics of class as the reigning ideology of the Left.

Nationalizing the Gendarmerie

This new political technique of using accusations of sexual crimes to eliminate unwanted men originated in welfare and spread to the middle class through divorce. But it did not confine itself to these contexts for long. Through organizations like #MeToo, it was soon expanded into a weapon for use against political opponents. In fact, it became the Left’s favorite political weapon and was used to influence politics and change government policies. Among those targeted were celebrities like entertainer Bill Cosby and the Prince of York, and mainstream political figures, such as dissenting judges, candidates for political office, and even heads of state and government like Donald Trump.

But we will discuss this broader impact in a future lecture, and that is a good place to end…

---

[1] See Lesson 8.

[2] Maggie Gallagher, The Abolition of Marriage: How We Destroy Lasting Love (Regnery, 1996).

[3] Selma Moidel Smith, “A Century of Achievement: The Centennial of the National Association of Women Lawyers,” Women Lawyers Journal, Summer 1999. Few at the time and fewer since seem to have suspected the feminists of being the engineers. That is, few perceived it to be driven by radical ideology. Judy Parejko uncovered this fact and recognized its importance. See her Stolen Vows: The Illusion of No-Fault Divorce and the Rise of the American Divorce Industry (2002).

[4] Louis de Bonald understood the implications in his classic On Divorce (1801); see also “The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage,” by “a woman resident in Russia,” Atlantic Monthly, 1 July 1926 (http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1926/07/the-russian-effort-to-abolish-marriage/306295/). The American Revolution may have had a similar effect. Mark Smith, “Religion, Divorce, and the Missing Culture War in America,” Political Science Quarterly, vol. 125, no. 1 (Spring 2010).

[5] The harrowing ordeal of actor Greg Ellis in psychiatric incarceration, described in The Respondent: Exposing the Cartel of Family Law, (Koehler, 2021), should be compared to that of Soviet-era dissidents like Victor Fainberg, “My Five Years in Mental Hospitals,” Index on Censorship, vol. 4, issue 2 (1975).

[6] For further violations of more general civil liberties, see Lecture #8.

[7] All this is thoroughly described and documented in Baskerville, Taken Into Custody, and none has been refuted.

[8] Not a shred of evidence supports any of these hysterias. See Baskerville, Taken Into Custody, chs. 3-4.

[9] Stephen Baskerville, “From Welfare State to Police State,” The Independent Review, vol. 12, no. 3 (Winter 2008).

---

If you want to read more analysis that will push you to think “outside the box,” you will find it in my new book, Who Lost America? Why the United States Went "Communist” — and What to Do about It — available from Amazon.

Stephen Baskerville is Professor of Politics at the Collegium Intermarium in Warsaw. His books and recent articles are available at www.StephenBaskerville.com.