Lecture 8: Effects of the Sexual Revolution

Draft eighth lecture in the coming series: "The Sexual Revolution and its Consequences": the consequences, intended or otherwise

This is a draft of my eighth lecture in the upcoming series on “The Sexual Revolution and its Consequences”, to be sponsored by the Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture.

Here I pull together some less obvious consequences of the Sexual Revolution to show that sexual radicalism has changed much more than just sex and family life.

Composing this lecture, I came up with some lines with which I am particularly pleased, though my vanity is tempered with the thought that, in all the years I have worked on this topic, I did not think of saying it this way sooner. (Sometimes new insights are just a matter of finding better ways to say what we already know.) I think this point explains why the Left’s seizure of power in the United States from about 2020 rerpresents an act of world historical importance and why they are ramain in a strong position to derail Persident Trump’s reforms. Essentially this explains the argument that I elaborate in my recent book, Who Lost America?

Over the centuries, governments had managed to wrest from churches the decisive authority over the marriage agreement. Having consolidated this power by the 20th century, governments were now in a position to subdue and even eliminate their main rival and check on their power, which is the family. They could effectively abolish the family by refusing to enforce the marriage contract over which they had taken exclusive control – so-called “no-fault” justice. From this point onward, citizens no longer derived any legal status or rights as a result of being married and no longer had any assurance that their marriages and families (and homes) could not be dissolved for reasons beyond their control, because state officials could dissolve a marriage and dismember a family (and abolish a home) over the objection of one or both spouses. Aside from leaving them and their property in a state of extreme insecurity, the most serious consequence was depriving them of any recognized rights to the care, custody, or companionship of their minor children. From this point forward, children became the legal property of the state, and parents who begot them had the right to raise them only at the pleasure of state officials. Officials could take control of any child without any specified burden of proof to justify why, other than simply to declare that they themselves judge their own action to be best for the child.

The manoeuver that the modern state had pulled off was effectively to abolish the greatest threat to, and limitation on, its power: the family.

Today, is the fundamental problem of our politics and civilization.

Comments, suggestions, and questions welcome.

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. Effects of the Sexual Revolution

9. Opposition to the Sexual Revolution

10. Responding to the Sexual Revolution

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Lesson 8

Effects of the Sexual Revolution

Source Texts:

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

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

• Janice Fiamengo, The Fiamengo File (Substack site, https://fiamengofile.substack.com)

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

• Carrie Gress, “The Only Way to Make Abortion Unthinkable Is to Wipe Out the Feminism Fueling It,” The Federalist, 24 January 2025, https://thefederalist.com/2025/01/24/the-only-way-to-make-abortion-unthinkable-is-to-wipe-out-the-feminism-fueling-it/

• Robert Bork, Coercing Virtue: The Worldwide Rule of Judges (AEI, 2003)

• Martin van Creveld, Men, Women, and War (Cassell & Co., 2001)

• Brian Mitchell, Women in the Military: Flirting with Disaster (Regnery, 1998)

Further Readings:

• David Rosen, Armies of the Young: Child Soldiers in War and Terrorism (Rutgers, 2005)

• John Witte, From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition (Westminster John Knox Press, 2012)

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8

Effects of the Sexual Revolution

As indicated at the start, radical political movements often produce results that depart significantly from what they envisioned when they began. Even those who instigate them are often disappointed and sometimes shocked by the outcome. The Sexual Revolution is no exception to this “law of unintended consequences”. I have pointed out examples in past lectures, but I want to summarize the more important (and less obvious) ones here.

Here too, I will confine myself mostly to the effects on our civic life, governments, and public policies.

New Roles for Government Power

The Sexual Revolution has changed the very nature of government itself. In fact, it may have done more than any other ideology to divert government power into new and unprecedented paths. By subjecting the private lives of law-abiding citizens to control by state functionaries, agencies administering “family policy” created the blueprint for what is now called the “Deep State”.

The first major institutional accomplishment of the Sexual Revolution was the welfare state, which developed early in the 20th century and reached its crisis point in the 1960s. Welfare changed the role of government fundamentally. Throughout history, the purpose of civil government had been seen as limited to protecting populations and their property. Now, for the first time, governments began concerning themselves with the material well-being of individual households. This involved more than managing general economic policy (which also began at roughly the same time). It came with strings attached. Government officials began to demand entry into their citizens’ private lives – especially their family lives – where they could “administer” how they live in what is otherwise the privacy of their homes.

The other radical innovation in the role and nature of government relates to the state's connection to marriage. Over the centuries, governments had managed to wrest from churches the decisive authority over the marriage agreement. Having consolidated this power by the 20th century, governments were now in a position to subdue and even eliminate their main rival and check on their power, which is the family. They could effectively abolish the family by refusing to enforce the marriage contract over which they had taken exclusive control – so-called “no-fault” justice. From this point onward, citizens no longer derived any legal status or rights as a result of being married and no longer had any assurance that their marriages and families (and homes) could not be dissolved for reasons beyond their control, because state officials could dissolve a marriage and dismember a family (and abolish a home) over the objection of one or both spouses. Aside from leaving them and their property in a state of extreme insecurity, the most serious consequence was depriving them of any recognized rights to the care, custody, and companionship of their minor children. From this point forward, children became the legal property of the state, and parents who begot them had the right to raise them only at the pleasure of state officials. Officials could take control of any child without any specified burden of proof to justify why, other than simply to declare that they themselves judge their own action to be best for the child.

The manoeuver that the modern state had pulled off was effectively to abolish the greatest threat to, and limitation on, its power: the family.

Proliferation and Entrenchment of Poverty

Government welfare was intended to provide temporary relief for families undergoing economic hardship, when male wage-earners were unemployed or eliminated by war, and to provide general relief for the poor and needy.

Yet as poor relief became bureaucratically administered, poverty became increasingly entrenched and intractable. Functionaries such as social workers and judicial practitioners developed a vested interest in perpetuating the problems they were ostensibly solving. Reinforced by feminist ideology and other liberal sexual precepts, they accomplished this largely by encouraging sex and childbearing outside of marriage, and also by exiling men from their homes. The result was that poverty increased and perpetuated itself. It also bred serious social pathologies associated with family breakdown or non-formation: violent crime, substance abuse, truancy, homelessness, and more. These further increased government power and budgets by demanding solutions from government officials.

Poverty has also been exacerbated by the fall in male wages, driven largely by the flood of new (female) workers into the workforce.

Ideological Realignment

Traditionally, relieving the poor and working class was the concern of the ideological Left. With the displacement of socialism by feminism at the vanguard of the Left, poverty has not only become prolonged and entrenched (as described previously); it has also ceased to figure prominently on the public agenda at all, and today one hear’s little about it. Increasingly, poverty came to be seen as a small price to pay for “gender equality”.

Abuse and Exploitation of Children

Family breakdown and fatherlessness are well understood to leave children vulnerable to various forms of physical and sexual abuse. Child abuse is rare in intact, two-parent families, while it is common in single-parent homes and in institutionalized care. This is why child abuse has increased as marriage has declined and become insecure. It also leaves children and adolescents vulnerable to more organized forms of abuse and exploitation: recruitment into gangs, militias, prostitution, forced labor, and grooming cults. Some suggest that it also leaves children vulnerable to exploitation by politicians and government officials themselves, who politicize children by rationalizing and deflecting criticism of controversial policy innovations as being “for the children.”

Sexualization of Institutions

Almost all institutions in the West have been sexualized. The most serious consequences are seen in the weakening and politicization of the military, police, security services, firefighting, priesthood, and other traditionally male professions. Among the most serious changes has been diminished levels of competence and proliferation of accusations of various kinds of sexual misconduct.

Creation of New “Constitutional” and “Human” Rights

During the Sexual Revolution, certain sexual practices were elevated to the status of new “rights”, though previously they had never been recognized: birth control, abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage. Though not mentioned in the constitutions of most countries or in recognized codes of human rights, courts now claimed that people enjoy these freedoms as constitutional or human rights. The cutting edge was furnished by American judicial decisions that pushed judicial power and the entire state machinery into new realms.

Abrogation of Traditional Civil Liberties and Constitutional Rights

Along with asserting new rights that had never before been legally recognized, the Sexual Revolution resulted in the abrogation of numerous protections and rights that had been recognized for centuries in constitutions and codes of human rights.

In fact, the judiciary itself has violated almost every basic principle of civil liberties, such as those found in traditional codes of law, national constitutions and bills of rights and international human rights codes. These include the following (and I have broken them into several categories):

First, standard civil liberties have been lost:

• freedom of expression: ie, freedom of speech and publication

• religious freedom

• freedom of assembly and association

• the right to criticize and petition the government

• right of privacy, such as rights “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures”

Second, rights to “due process of law”:

• presumption of innocence

• habeas corpus, or the right to know the charges against one

• protection against self-incrimination

• protection against double jeopardy

• right to speedy justice

• right to public trial

• right to an impartial jury

• right to justice in the local jurisdiction

• right to face one’s accuser

• right to cross-examine witnesses

• right to legal counsel

• right to have knowingly false accusations punished

• protections against “cruel and unusual punishment”

• protections against slavery and involuntary servitude

In addition, as I indicated above, no-fault divorce codified and legitimated some of the most radical legal innovations ever seen in the West, including violations of what had been considered accepted judicial principles and procedures:

• Legally innocent and unimpeachable citizens could now be summoned to court and subjected to judicial directives governing their private lives that amount to punishments.

• Legal procedures have predetermined outcomes, before being adjudicated, and without being subject to argument or appeal, with verdicts against which no defense is possible.

• Judges can legislate personalized criminal codes around individuals, subjecting them to punishment for conduct that does not violate any law.

• Citizens can be punished not for acts they have committed but for acts that other people say they might commit in the future.

• secret legal proceedings

• legal proceedings that leave no record

• incarcerations without trial

• incarcerations that leave no record

• legal proceedings that never terminate

• abrogation of traditional parental rights of legally innocent parents (rights long recognized in codes of legal ethics such as Natural Law, and in specific legal codes such as Roman Law, English Common Law, and the Napoleonic Code)

• non-enforcement of contracts

• acts or bills of attainder

• ex post facto laws

• falsification of court records

• fabrication of evidence

• forced payment of fees for services that are ostensibly voluntary

• forcing people, including children, to testify against family members

Overreach and Corruption of the Judiciary

This huge inversion of the freedoms recognized and enforced by the state – both the discovery of new rights and the loss of old ones (some suggest, this trading of sexual freedom for every other kind of freedom) – this increased the political power of judicial officials even more than others – not only lawyers and judges, but also psychotherapists and other forensic adjuncts, plus bar associations– and it elevated unelected judicial practitioners to a status of policymakers, equal (or even superior) to legislators and elected executives, though with little accountability to electorates.

In fact, the Sexual Revolution contributed decisively to what the late judge Robert Bork called “the worldwide rule of judges”. In explaining this trend, Bork himself identified “such matters as sexual practices, secularism versus religion, rights of speech and expression, and feminism”.

Less well known – and what has escaped even critics of “judicial activism” like Bork – is that the judiciary also augmented its power decisively – and under the media radar screen – through “no-fault” divorce. Though liberalized divorce was enacted legislatively – first by American state governments and then by national and state legislatures elsewhere – divorce is implemented by judicial practitioners (though arguably it is not a judicial procedure at all, because it always results in a predetermined outcome). In fact, legislatures merely codified practices that courts had already been practicing for decades. Few paid attention to this expansion of judicial power because – in contrast to decisions of national courts – it takes place at the lowest level of the judiciary: family courts.

These courts, in fact, augment judicial power to a degree described by one judge as “unlimited”. “The family court is the most powerful branch of the judiciary,” according to an American Superior Court judge. “The power of family court judges is almost unlimited.”

Creation of the “Deep State”

This growing judicial power, caused by the Sexual Revolution, has not been confined to sexual matters alone. It has spilled over into other realms of public life. Because courts base their decisions on legal authority, their principal weapon for changing policies and policymakers they don’t like is their power to accuse and punish: lawfare.

Accusations of sexual misconduct – child abuse, domestic violence, sexual assault, rape, homophobia, and more – are no longer confined to welfare communies, divorce courts, religious parents, homeschoolers, universities, and the military. (And recently, parents who object to the sexualization of their children in the name of “transgender” identity have found their parental rights threatened.)

Sexual accusations are now used to weaken political figures and prevent candidates for elected or judicial office from occupying offices to which they are elected or nominated.

Sexual accusations furnished the model for “lawfare” operations that we have recently seen, whereby judicial officials initiate legal proceedings against private citizens or public figures for political purposes. “Lawfare” has been used in Italy and France (Francois Fillon and Marine Le Pen), and the United States (Donald Trump and executive officials in his administration), and most recently and most dramatically, Romania (Calin Georgescu).

The most disturbing attack on democracy yet was when the Romanian Constitutional Court – on the thinnest of pretects and under pressure from outside governments – annulled the results of a presidential election in December 2024, cancelled the election, and banned the front-running candidate from being elected. Bork could have been writing prophetically about this coup d’etat in Romania when he wrote (20 years previously), that “Constitutional courts provide the necessary means to outflank majorities and nullify their votes.” [70]

The Ascendency of the Left

The collapse of Soviet-backed Communism in 1989-91, left the western Left at perhaps its lowest point ever. Shifting its focus to sexuality gave the Left new life and enabled it to triumph over the traditional Right. This accelerated in early 2020 with the Covid phenomenon and culminated in what some call the “coup d’etat” that enabled the extreme policies of the Biden administration and other western governments.

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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.