| Anonymous 2004-12-16, 6:22 pm |
| http://www.newyorker.com/printable/...6ta_talk_radosh
November 23, 2004
THE CULTURE WARS
WHY KNOW?
by Daniel Radosh
Issue of 2004-12-06
When Judith Reisman and Eunice Van Winkle Ray lectured together
recently in Nashville, Mrs. Ray was introduced by her husband, Colonel
Ronald Ray, who grabbed the audience's attention by announcing that the
United States "lost the most important war of the twentieth century."
He was referring not to Vietnam, where he served, but to the sexual
revolution. "Many of us are casualties of the sexual revolution," he
said cryptically. Mrs. Ray then took the lectern and presented an
overview, complete with charts, of our current state of sexual
degeneracy: the repeal of laws against abortion, adultery, fornication,
and even sodomy. All of this they trace back to the work of one man:
Alfred Kinsey.
The recent release of "Kinsey," a film about the famous mid-century sex
researcher, has made this a busy time for the anti-Kinsey movement.
Most Americans no longer give much thought to Kinsey as a societal
force, but his detractors believe that his significance can hardly be
overstated. A recent newsletter of the abstinence-education group Why
know? compared the publication of "The Kinsey Report," in 1948, to the
attacks of September 11th, and labelled Kinseyism "fifty years of
cultural terrorism."
Judith Reisman is the founder of the modern anti-Kinsey movement. She
spent a week in Washington, D.C., recently, talking to people on
Capitol Hill about opening a congressional investigation into Kinsey's
work. The new film, she said, is "deceptive and malevolently
misleading, to say the least." A sixty-nine-year-old independent
researcher with a Ph.D. in communications and a former songwriter for
Captain Kangaroo, Reisman is the president of the Institute for Media
Education and the lead author of "Kinsey, Sex and Fraud" and "Kinsey:
Crimes and Consequences." In one article, Reisman describes Kinsey as
"a scientific and moral fraud, a certifiable sexual psychopath as well
as a sadomasochistic pornography addict and a sexually harassing
bully." Though largely unknown outside social-conservative circles,
Reisman has been influential within them. She has served as a
consultant to the Departments of Education and Health and Human
Services and was given seven hundred and thirty-four thousand dollars
by Ronald Reagan's Justice Department to study pornography. More
recently, she has been active in the rise of abstinence-only education;
in June, her colleagues gave her an Abstie Award for lifetime
achievement. Last week, Reisman testified at a congressional hearing
about the dangers of pornography addiction, saying that police should
be required to collect evidence of pornography consumption at any crime
scene.
"Dr. Kinsey's most egregious fraud is that he wasn't a scientist,"
Reisman said the other day. "He was an ideologue who was most
importantly a sex offender at best, and, beyond being a sex offender,
he was certainly a child sexual abuser and/or solicitor and guide in
the perpetration of that abuse." At the root of this accusation is an
interview that Kinsey conducted with a sexual predator who kept
detailed records of his activities with hundreds of women, men, and
children.
But it is not simply Kinsey's neutrality toward such people that upsets
Reisman. She claims that Kinsey actively solicited pedophiles to molest
children and report back to him. In fact, she said, "there is
absolutely no reason to believe that Kinsey himself was not involved in
the sexual abuse of these children." (None of Kinsey's four biographers
have turned up any evidence that he was.) Reisman also believes that
Kinsey died not from heart failure but from what she calls "brutal,
repetitive self-abuse."
To a reader of Reisman's scholarly papers, it sometimes appears that
there is little for which she does not hold Kinsey responsible. In her
research on gays, for instance, she has written that the "recruitment
techniques" of homosexuals rival those of the Marine Corps. The Kinsey
paradigm, she holds, created the moral framework that makes such
recruitment possible. Reisman also endorses a book called "The Pink
Swastika," which challenges the "myths" that gays were victimized in
Nazi Germany. The Nazi Party and the Holocaust itself, she writes, were
largely the creation of "the German homosexual movement." Thanks to
Alfred Kinsey, she warns, the American homosexual movement is poised to
repeat those crimes. "Idealistic 'gay youth' groups are being formed
and staffed in classrooms nationwide by recruiters too similar to those
who formed the original 'Hitler youth.'"
Reisman was not always a counter-revolutionary. Her parents were
members of the American Communist Party, and she belonged to the Labor
Youth League in Los Angeles in the nineteen-forties. But the sexual
revolution caught her off guard, and she became concerned, first, about
the spread of pornography. It was at an academic conference in Wales in
the late nineteen-seventies that Reisman discovered Kinsey. She was
lecturing on evidence of child pornography in Playboy cartoons, when,
as she recalled it, a mysterious man approached her and said, "If
you're really concerned about child sexual abuse you have to look at
'The Kinsey Reports.' I said, 'Why?' and he said, 'I worked with Kinsey
and his aide Wardell Pomeroy. One is a pedophile and the other is
homosexual.' I said, 'Which is which?' and he said, 'Read and
discover,' and he walked away and changed my life."
Reisman won't say exactly whom she met with on Capitol Hill, but she
was "very encouraged" by the response. She is hoping that someone will
revive H.R. 2749, a bill introduced, at Reisman's urging, in 1995 to
determine if "The Kinsey Reports" "are the result of any fraud or
criminal wrongdoing." It has been languishing since its sponsor,
Congressman Steve Stockman, of Texas, lost his bid for reëlection in
1996. "I certainly would like to see a congressional investigation. Let
Congress establish the truth of this matter. Or let it go to a
courtroom." She hopes that the film (along with two forthcoming
television documentaries and a recent novel by T. C. Boyle) will foster
a backlash, or at least persuade some of Kinsey's alleged eight hundred
child victims to finally come forward. She envisions a class-action
lawsuit modelled after the Big Tobacco trials. She said, "Suddenly,
people ask, 'So much cost in celluloid, books, and press for some
obscure sexual deviant in Indiana-who is profiting?' Follow the money."
Ultimately, Reisman and her colleagues hope to discredit not only
Kinsey but the entire field of sexology which he created, and what she
calls "the sexindustrial complex" that has grown out of it. "One
doesn't measure American sexual habits," she said. "That's not a
science."
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