My, how time flies, sir. It seems like only yesterday (it was in late November 1991, actually) that you were apologizing after being caught telling a so-called gay-bashing anti-lesbian joke to Jerry Brown. You remember, the one that was inadvertently picked up by a C-Span microphone. I thought that what was wrong with the joke...
1863 search results for: Sexual%252BPolitics
Post
Sexual Politics
The 1980’s witnessed one of the greatest miracles in the history of American politics and the climactic triumph of one of the most effective political leaders ever to emerge in America. That leader was a woman, and however well-known she is today, she has never achieved the honor and celebrity of her many inferiors. The...
Post
The Secret History of the Feminist Movement
The feminist movement, it has just been learned, was actually concocted by men. Specifically, a small group of planners meeting in 1962 set in motion the developments of the next 30 years concerning men and women. These men acted in a selfish spirit of personal aggrandizement. The heretofore secret minutes of their planning group are...
Post
A City on a Hill—With Transgender Toilets?
A little over 30 years ago, I was attending a conference in a faraway place when disaster struck. I became sick, really sick—the sort of illness where one can barely crawl out of bed, let alone attend conference sessions. Lacking care of any sort, I lay in bed for two days, waiting for some semblance...
Post
Crossing the Line
On April 29, 1993, the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs held a confirmation hearing for Roberta Achtenberg, President Clinton’s nominee for the position of Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. Like most nominees, Miss Achtenberg brought along members of her family to lend her support...
Post
Sexual Harassment and the Academy
SCENE; Administrative conference room at a major university. Five grim-faced faculty members sit around a long table and stare at THE ACCUSED, who sits at one end, apart and alone. He is well dressed, young middle-aged, nice looking but not particularly handsome. Each member of the COMMITTEE has in front of him or her a...
Post
Credulous Creatures
“If the world will be gulled, let it be gulled.” —Robert Burton Who now reads Alfred Kinsey? Almost no one. Who now remembers the great media event set off in 1948 by the publication of his “monumental” book of 804 pages on Sexual Behavior in the Human Male? Most Americans over 40 probably do, while...
Post
Frankenstein’s Children
“Monstrum horrendum, informe ingens.” —Vergil, Aeneid In 1974, I first encountered one of the creatures E. Michael Jones writes about in Monsters From the Id. It appeared in the guise of one of my graduate-school classmates. She was a bright, pretty woman who seemed unusually self-possessed and accomplished for a 22-year-old. My impression changed, however,...
Post
The Coming Counter-Coup Against the GOP
The right’s failure in 2020’s election may herald the start of a new conservative ascension. But it cannot happen under the current Republican Party leadership. The problem is greater than the Republican-in-Name-Only politicians ignoring the legitimate charges of election-rigging and jumping Trump’s ship. For years, the established conservative political class has looked away from...
Post
By Blab Befuddled
Words cannot take us everywhere, nor should they. Before the most sublime truths, we grow reverently still. Confronted with bestiality, we shudder at the unspeakable. But in the Age of Blab, everything must be talked about.” Indeed, modem journalists consider it progress to be able to chat endlessly about depravities our wiser ancestors refused even...
Post
From Russia, With Love—and Hate
Russian sexuality and the country’s general mores have become a topic of conversation in the United States, mostly in relation to President Trump’s alleged connections with the Kremlin and his behavior during his trip to Russia some time ago, which is the subject of the infamous “Steele Dossier.” The British press has not ignored the...
Post
Scandals in the Church
The Roman Catholic Church in the United States must regard 2002 as one of the most traumatic years in Her history. Any Catholic who hoped that the media might eventually find a new subject for horror stories would have been further disheartened this past January, when television and print media suggested that a whole new...
Post
When Sex Conquers Love
Much as I hate to admit it, AIDS czarina Kristine Gebbie got it right. The message to youngsters these days does indeed give the impression that sex is ugly, dirty, and a more perverse than pleasurable experience. Ms. Gebbie bungled only when she took on the role of anti-Victorian-morality crusader. In the space of a...
Post
Sexual Habits
In writing of sensual pleasures, Thomas Hobbes observed that “the greatest” is “that by which we are invited to give continuance to our species, and the next by which a man is invited to meat, for the preservation of his individual person.” From more than one perspective, Hobbes had his priorities straight. Parents, on more...
Post
The New Scapular
When I was in Catholic high school, some 15 years ago, even as the last of the marble altars were being pulled out of America’s churches, the ornate wooden confessionals uprooted in favor of plywood-and-plexiglass “reconciliation rooms,” one devotional custom persisted from centuries before, in the undershirts and blouses of the Vinnics, Patricks, and Marias...
Post
Debating the “Gentile Vice”
At its annual “Ministers Week” lectures last year, the theological school of Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas provided a revealing window into the contemporary debate within mainline church circles over homosexuality. Taking a pro-homosexuality approach was Victor Furnish, a professor at SMU’s Perkins School of Theology. Defending the traditional Christian stance was Richard Hays...
Post
Puritan Pervert
Kinsey Produced by American Zoetrope Written and directed by Bill Condon Distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures Pervert. Although the word has been drummed out of polite conversation in recent years, pervert comes inevitably to mind when discussing Alfred C. Kinsey, the sex statistician and subject of Bill Condon’s new film, Kinsey. Pervert perfectly applies to...
Post
One in Ten: A Gay Mythology
Gay issues are likely to remain central to social and political debate in this country for many years to come, whether in the form of gay rights referenda, gay service in the military, school curricula, or the adoption of children by homosexual couples. It should not be too long before one specific issue, the recognition...
Post
Muslim Sex Crimes in Northern England
In Britain there have been 17 recent prosecutions of gangs of Muslim rapists and child molesters involved in the “on-street grooming” for sex of victims as young as 11 in several towns and cities in northern England. In the most recent case, members of a gang of Muslims from Derby were convicted of rape, false...
Post
Hard Cases and Bad Law
During the next four years, the Clinton administration will appoint dozens of federal judges, in addition to (perhaps) two or three Supreme Court Justices. In the confirmation procedures for these individuals, issues of gender politics are likely to predominate. Abortion will obviously be one such question, as may sexual harassment, but we should also hear...
Post
Transgressing the Pieties
As every alert American has noticed, feminist leaders have jumped to the defense of President Clinton ever since he was first accused of sexually abusing a young woman who thought she was invited to see the then-governor for a talk, perhaps about a job. In doing so, they have made a remarkable reversal of the...
Post
Meet the Tiger
“When I was young and stupid,” said George W. Bush, and we have no reason to doubt him on it, “I was young and stupid.” It is a double tautology. He might as well have said, “When I was young,” and left it at that. When I was young, back around 1989, I believed that...
Post
On Misrepresented Monsters
I enjoyed reading George McCartney’s review of Monsters From the Id in the November 2000 issue of Chronicles (“Frankenstein’s Children,” Opinions). However, it contains some misrepresentations of what I had to say on the relationship between sex and horror. To begin with, the Ford Foundation never funded Alfred Kinsey’s sex surveys; it is the Rockefeller...
Post
Priests and Pedophiles
“Catholic priests claim to be celibate, but we know what they’re really up to. Most of them seduce women, the rest like little boys. Priests trap them in the confessional, and when the priests are found out, the bishops let them off with a slap on the wrist. Celibacy, hierarchy, secrecy, the confessional—those are the...
Post
A Look Ahead
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES on writ of certiorari to the court of appeals June 26, 2013 (Justice Kennedy delivered the opinion of the Court.) The jurisprudence of liberty is a bright and shining star. Its twinkling arc across the sky of our constitutional polity signals the nation’s fundamental commitment to the...
Post
Christopher Hitchens and the Days of Rage
On March 23, the Associated Press published a story dealing with sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church to little fanfare. It noted that allegations of sexual abuse involving the Catholic Church in the United States dropped in 2009, and that most of the alleged offenders “are dead, no longer in the priesthood, removed from...
Post
Equality Takes a Beating
Several weeks ago I was watching a program on the BBC called Would You Risk Your Own Life to Save a Complete Stranger? In Britain, few people apparently would. Far more common is the story of a young girl who was beaten severely in a London subway by several “youths.” The attack took place on...
Post
Christopher Hitchens and the Days of Rage
On March 23, the Associated Press published a story dealing with sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church to little fanfare. It noted that allegations of sexual abuse involving the Catholic Church in the United States dropped in 2009, and that most of the alleged offenders “are dead, no longer in the priesthood, removed from...
Post
Homosexuality and the Family
For nearly two decades, homosexuals and their sympathizers have increased their efforts to persuade opinion leaders, educators, clergy, government officials, and the public that their sexual lives, though different, are as normal and natural as the heterosexuals’. Since some heterosexuals also engage in sodomy, the homosexuals have claimed that it is only their same-sex orientation...
Post
Race, Aids, and Sexual Behavior
For the past decade or so, my research has focused on assessing racial differences in brain size and intelligence, sexual habits and fertility, personality and temperament, and speed of maturation and longevity. Startling and alarming to main people is my conclusion that if all people were treated the same, most racial differences would not disappear....
Post
Trivializing Rape
Last spring I picked up our student newspaper to read this sentence in a front-page story: “Statistics show that one out of every four UNC females will be sexually assaulted while in college.” Wow. The University of North Carolina has roughly 15,000 undergraduates (leave the graduate students out of it), something over half of them...
Post
Patriarchy or Degeneracy: Christian Masculinity vs. The Red Pill
Mr. Howting is right to recognize the crisis of masculinity in the Church. But, the problem isn’t that the red-pill influencers are speaking the truth, its that Christians are pussyfooting around Church teaching.
Post
The Shadow of Sodom
Allyn Walker's audacious Long Dark Shadow is a thinly veiled attempt to normalize pedophilia.
Post
The Rape of the Afghan Boys
Ainuddin Khudairaham held down the trigger of his Kalashnikov and kept firing on unarmed U.S. Marines until the rifle’s magazine was empty, murdering three and wounding one. The Americans had been working out at a gym on Forward Operating Base Delhi in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province when the teenaged boy attacked on Aug. 10, 2012. “I...
Post
AIDing Society: Private Vice Versus Public Health
“So the plague defied all medicines; no cure, no help could be possible nothing could follow but death. . . . The strange temper of the people . . . contributed extremely to their own destruction.” —Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1721) Until recently, the United States has enjoyed unquestioned success in public...
Post
Hell-Bent: Why Gay Marriage Was Inevitable
Like it or not, gay marriage is here to stay. The Supreme Court ruling matters little. That was the case well before oral arguments were heard, and not for legal reasons. Yes, the fact that some states had already recognized it played a part, but the real reason gay marriage is now a permanent part...
Post
The Politics of Rape
When an acquitted William Kennedy Smith emerged from the Florida courtroom last December declaring his faith in the system, a viewer could only query, “Why?” There stood a young man who was indicted for rape and forced to spend over one million dollars defending himself on the basis of the word of one person, the...
Post
The Sensual and the Savage
Yes, God, Yes Directed and written by Karen Maine ◆ Produced by Maiden Voyage and RT Features ◆ Distributed by Vertical Entertainment Waiting for the Barbarians Directed by Ciro Guerra ◆ Screenplay and novel by J. M. Coetzee ◆ Produced by Iervolino Entertainment and Ithaca Pictures ◆ Distributed by Samuel Goldwyn Films Zulu (1964) Directed...
Post
A Book That Needs to Be Read
There are many reasons why one might conclude that the United States is in a spiral of self-destruction and is in fact no longer a Christian country. One of the most obvious—apart from 40-plus years of legalized abortion—is the current effort to redefine marriage to include homosexual couples. But this is just the latest in...
Post
Prurient Puritans
These apparently very different books—a cultural history and research on American sexual mores—actually address the same issue: the attempt to reconcile morality and the sexual impulse. A typically puritanical endeavor, because the puritan, with his eternal bad conscience about things that may not please God, that is sin, goes through mental, moral, and behavioral contortion...
Post
Hamas Advocacy Exposes Phony Sloganeering of the Left
The left’s hashtag activism about sexual violence is just pure politics meant to manipulate female voters into believing that Democratic policies protect women.
Post
The Job of Sex
The lares and penates of post-Christian (actually postpagan) America are Money, Sex, and Power, not necessarily in that order but rather according to individual taste and proclivity. Our household gods are grinning and chuckling malevolently from the hearth as they behold the carnival of sexual scandal and hypocrisy that has been unfolding across the land...
Post
The Puritan and the Profligate
John Lofton Interviews Allen Ginsberg Lofton: In the first section of your poem “Howl” you wrote: “I saw the best young minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Did this also apply to you? Ginsberg: That’s not an accurate quotation. I said the “best minds,” not “the best young minds.” This is what is called...
Post
Conservatives and the Gay Agenda
“The average American watches over seven hours of television daily. Those hours open up a gateway into the private world of straights, through which a Trojan Horse might be passed.” —Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, “The Overhauling of Straight America” (1987) If one had not already been convinced that the gay-rights...
Post
New Wine in Old Bottles
Suppose a wife is dying or has been lying for years in a coma: Who has ultimate authority to decide what medical treatments will be used to prolong or not to prolong her life? Suppose a child of divorced parents is taken out of the country by his mother, who then dies, leaving the child...
Post
The Myths of the Social Sciences
Several years ago one of my former roommates at Harvard, now an economist with the United Nations, dropped by for a visit. We drifted into an informal review of the social science courses we had taken at Harvard in the late 1950’s. The one overriding memory that we both had of those courses was that...
Post
Cutting Our Teeth On Twilight
To date, Stephenie Meyer’s young-adult novels about a teenage girl (Bella Swan) and her vampire boyfriend (Edward Cullen) have sold well over 100 million copies worldwide, and the movie versions are still coming. When a phenomenon is of this scale it doesn’t matter what a book is, artistically; you have to take such a cultural...
Post
Two Faces of Modern Catholicism
Much has been written about the modernization of the Catholic Church—especially the crucial years from 1870 to 1970. These histories have been written from a number of perspectives, each with different definitions of modernity. James Chappel, assistant professor of history at Duke University, gives us a new interpretation which succeeds in revising some of these...
Post
Do Homosexuals Exist? Or, Where Do We Go From Here?
In March of this year over a million Frenchmen demonstrated on the streets of Paris against the legal institutionalization of gay marriage. As far as the media were concerned, this event was practically confidential. It is hard to imagine a similar scene taking place in the United States, but if it did, it would be...
Post
Polemics & Exchanges: October 2023
J. Douglas Johnson, executive editor of Touchstone Magazine, critiques Tom Piatak's column in the August issue, and Mr. Piatak replies.