The New Politics of Sex

The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government Power

I promised to publish excerpts from my books. The New Politics of Sex was published by Angelico Press in 2017. Nothing is out of date except that I do not treat transgenderism, which was not yet an issue. But I do explain the background in feminism and homosexualism that gave rise to transgenderism (and will no doubt give rise to even more bizarre variations). More importantly, if I do not cover the one aspect of sexual radicalism on which today’s media and conservative political class fixates, you will see that I cover many other features of sexual radicalism that the professional conservatives neglect, some of which are equally or more destructive under the radar screen and bound to become more important in the near future.

Deal Hudson, founder of Crisis magazine and advisor to President Bush, said this book “well may be the most important book of 2017”. And Phil Lawler, editor of Catholic World News, calls it “devastating”: “This is the most frightening book I have read in years."​

Below is the first installment, the “frontmatter”: Table of Contents, a few excerpts from the Introduction, and Bio. I plan to post some longer excerpts soon.

Extended descriptions, reviews, and a button to buy the book are on my web page.

Please comment here or on the Amazon page and recirculate this.

Contents

Introduction vi

I. Politicizing Sex—and Sexualizing Politics 1

II. Liberating Sex: The Politics of the Family 30

1. The Welfare State 45

Day Care

Obesity

2. Divorce 62

Child Support

3. Homosexualism 94

Same-Sex Marriage

Homosexual Parenting

4. The Family and Criminality 109

III. Criminalizing Sex: The New Gender Crimes 115

5. Rape and Sexual Assault 148

6. Sexual Harassment 184

7. Domestic Violence 208

8. Stalking 225

9. Child Abuse 229

10. Bullying 246

11. More Gender Crimes 253

Breastfeeding

Washrooms

And More

12. Religious Belief 256

13. Hate Crimes and Hate Speech 272

V. Globalizing Sex—and Sexual Power 276

14. Sex and the International Regime 281

United States Foreign Policy

The European Union

The United Nations

15. Human Rights: Still More Gender Crimes 307

CEDAW

Convention on the Rights of the Child

Yogyakarta Principles

Domestic Violence (again)

Sex Education

16. Politicizing AIDS 358

17. Poverty and Development (and Sex) 363

18. Yet More Gender Crimes 376

Child Soldiers

Sex Trafficking

19. Islamism as a Sexual Ideology 409

20. Sexualizing War 419

Conclusion 469

Introduction

“Any man of genius is paralyzed immediately by the thought that his efforts will win him punishment rather than rewards.”

— Evariste Huc, Christian missionary

“Frankly, it is irritating that anybody would be distracted by which statistics are accurate.”

— US Senator Claire McCaskill

With astonishing speed the public agenda of the Western world and beyond has come to be dominated by what Newsweek magazine calls “the politics of sex.” Demands to recognize same-sex marriage, liberalize abortion laws, or open military units to women and homosexuals are only the most salient manifestations of a much larger trend, whose full dimensions we do not yet understand. The extraordinary spectacle we have seen over five decades is the emergence of a political agenda and ideology that derives political power from demands to control and change the terms of sexuality.

Few people today need to be told about the sexualization of culture. Images of sex surround us, and they are deplored by many across the spectrum. Less noticed, and very poorly understood, is how the demand for unlimited sexual freedom is being politicized by radical ideologies and exploited by governments, whose operatives are able to greatly increase their power as a result. One can welcome this development or deplore it, but there can be no doubt that it is taking place, even though scholars and journalists across the spectrum seem determined to avert their eyes.

For decades, sophisticated people have chortled as an assortment of moralists, reactionaries, and religious zealots warned that unrestricted sexual indulgence would lead to social turmoil, tyranny, and civilizational decline. The argument of this book is that matters turned out to be not so simple as the sophisticates thought and that the moralists, reactionaries, and religious zealots have turned out to be broadly correct, but that this process is unfolding in ways somewhat different from what they too expected, to the point that these Cassandras have often been strangely blind to the fulfillment of their own prophecies. Indeed, many of those most vocal in warning about the dangers of the Sexual Revolution have not only failed to understand its full dynamic; some of their direst warnings are being fulfilled with little opposition in part because even the Cassandras themselves have sometimes been made unwitting accomplices in advancing the very trend they deplore.

This book is an attempt to step back and gain a perspective on the larger phenomenon of how not only our society but particularly our politics has been pervaded by sexual ideology and the impact of almost unlimited sexual freedom on our political culture, public policy, and government machinery.

…

…the few scholars and journalists who write critically about some manifestations of sexual radicalism are usually unaware of parallels to their findings elsewhere, and so even they do not see that what they have discovered is only one piece of a larger puzzle: the arrival of a new political ideology.

…

Contrary to the accepted wisdom of conservative critics, this is not driven primarily by the soft targets at which those conservatives usually direct their complaint: Marxism, racial militancy, multiculturalism. These are now relatively passé academic fashions, and few risks are incurred by criticizing them. Of all the radical ideologies that seek to control the institutions of learning today, wrote the late Robert Bork, “feminism is by far the strongest and most imperialistic, its influence suffusing the most traditional academic departments and university administrations.” The vanguard of academic bolshevism today – like the vanguard of leftist politics generally – is sexual.

Certainly no shortage of academic attention is lavished on sexual matters; quite the contrary. Like all ideologies, sexual radicalism is spread by cadres of academic ideologues. Novel disciplines like “women’s studies,” “gender studies,” and “queer studies” recast all knowledge as sexual-political grievances, and sexual activists have colonized other disciplines, where they exert a veto power over what others may write and say. This is true foremost in the social sciences and humanities but even extends to the natural sciences.

…

Despite this massive academic enterprise claiming to subject all knowledge to the scrutiny of “gender analysis,” glaring is the determination with which this vast scholarly industry avoids precisely the questions raised in this book. “Gender analysis is not a scientific study of the relative influence of biology and culture in the creation of the differences between men and women,” observes Dale O’Leary. “Indeed, gender feminists vigorously oppose serious research into biological differences between men and women.” The scholars are advocates and activists, and no attempt to approach their subject matter from a detached or critical viewpoint is tolerated.

…

…we are being asked to believe that there is 100% unanimity in academia that feminist and homosexualist political agendas are simply matters of factual knowledge, equivalent to medieval history or organic chemistry.

…

The exceptions starkly demonstrate the rule, because the few scholars or journalists bold enough to challenge or even analyze any single item on the sexual agenda feel they must first register their party affiliation and ideologically correct opinions on all the others, so toxic is it for any career to become visible on the wrong side.

“I am a feminist,” states one dissenter, who obviously would not have been published even in a conservative newspaper without declaring this essential credential. “I have marched at the barricades, subscribed to Ms. magazine, and knocked on many a door in support of progressive candidates committed to women’s rights.” She then narrates how her son was declared guilty of trumped-up rape accusations by a feminist university tribunal.

“The author fully supports gender equality in all aspects of life,” announces a scholar in introducing his critique of the sexual assault industry in an ostensibly dispassionate academic journal, imploring that his findings “not be confused with a lack of concern for the feminist ideals.” He pleads: “Those who might be inclined to dismiss the author’s viewpoint or the remedy he advocates as insensitive to the needs of rape survivors or somehow anti-feminist should keep an open mind as they read.”

…

In no other field of inquiry must scholars proclaim, at the outset of supposedly detached and apolitical works of scientific research, that they hold certain political opinions or subscribe to a particular political ideology in order to publish their professional research. “For the record, I am a lifelong, outspoken liberal-progressive leftist,” writes [Edward] Green in his critique of gay- and feminist-dominated AIDS policy. “I have always supported reproductive rights and sexual freedom, and I spent many years working in contraception, family planning, and condom marketing. I am not an active adherent of any sect, denomination, or religion.” Green is appropriately ashamed for this verbal self-flagellation and admits that “I shouldn’t have to say these things, but such is the level of argument that some people judge one’s findings by one’s politics and vice versa.” And as he goes on to show, “some people” are the people that control academic funding and hiring and publications and thus whose findings and whose careers are permitted to survive.

In short, sexual ideology has already largely curtailed academic freedom in Western universities. When Patai and Noretta Koertge interviewed academics scholars for their critique of women’s studies programs, “Nearly every woman…requested that her name, affiliation, and other identifying features be disguised.”

Fields like “women’s studies,” “gender studies,” and “queer studies” are not disinterested scholarship or pedagogy. They are government-funded political advocacy, and their aim is to advance a political agenda that rationalizes government measures of intervention into the private lives of non-criminal people who have no comparable platform to defend themselves from the measures being advocated against them by government-funded scholars, institutions, and publications. These government-bankrolled scholars are (and readily describe themselves as being) players in a competitive game of power. In fact, these fields make little pretense at detached scholarship. “The explicit objective of Women’s Studies is political,” according to one practitioner. “The ideology is to be propagated as widely as possible, with the ultimate goal of achieving social change.” While frequently criticized for overt bias against men and masculinity, equally serious is how they have commandeered scholarship in the service of ideology and use the classroom for advocacy and activism. According to its website, “The National Women's Studies Association leads the field of Women’s Studies in educational and social transformation.” There is no pretense that it is other than political advocacy: “Women’s studies…is equipping women to transform the world to one that will be free of all oppression…a force which furthers the realization of feminist aims.” Subjects addressed at its conferences include “Feminist Activism from the Inside Out: Connecting Campus to Community,” “‘You Say You Want a Revolution?’: Paving New Paths in Feminist Mentorship,” and “Drive a Mind Wild: How Feminist Pedagogy can Teach Resistance.”

…

The real-world consequences are seen in the peculiar logic of politically influential academics like Catherine MacKinnon: "Intimate violation of women by men is sufficiently pervasive in American society as to be nearly invisible.” Aside from constituting an open admission that no evidence exists for what (as we shall see) is the most determined juggernaut in the sexual machinery – measures against supposedly widespread “violence against women” – such pretense at scholarship would not (yet) be tolerated in any other academic field.

Like the new gender crimes which (as we shall see) are created in the feminist academies and adjudicated in the feminist courtrooms, the academic thought crime of “sexism” is one which permits no defense, because it is vague beyond any possible definition. Cases like that of the tenured full professor who was dismissed not because he himself committed any ethical transgression but because he refused to submit to anti-“sexist” indoctrination sessions demonstrate that heresy and heterodoxy are the ultimate gender crimes. “To believe in the reality of sexual differences is to be a ‘sexist,’ and ‘sexism comes next to racism in the litany of crimes,” writes Roger Scruton. “There is no defense, since the charge is too vague and too all-encompassing to permit one. As a result, few people will take the risk, in an American university, of questioning the fundamental tenets of feminism, even if these tenets are…transparently false.”

…

In sum, no book like this one now exists because it is not safe for any academically employed scholar to write one. Its existence is the exception that proves the rule of its argument, and I can raise these questions because I am employed in a college that does not depend on government funding. Otherwise, I would quickly be dismissed from my employment as I was from a government-funded university when I began to write about these issues almost two decades ago. This book attempts to ask these unasked questions and begin a broader and more open discussion about the impact of unrestrained sexuality on our public life. It is my hope that it will help other scholars to summon the resolve to undertake further investigations and supply more definitive answers where I can mostly pose questions and suggest hypotheses.