J. Douglas Johnson, executive editor of Touchstone Magazine, critiques Tom Piatak's column in the August issue, and Mr. Piatak replies.
1868 search results for: Sexual%252BPolitics
The Link Line: The Art of Indoctrination
The University of Wisconsin’s main campus in Madison has relished, at least since the anti-war movement of the 1960’s, its image as one of the most radical and leftist colleges in America. In order to cement that status well into the next century, the university is now selling and nationally distributing a package of “Health-Line”...
Sex Matters
Rarely have I read in so few pages a book as thought-provoking and compelling as J. Budziszewski’s On the Meaning of Sex. Budziszewski, a Yale Ph.D. and professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas, has grappled for years with the sad effects of our era’s shallow understanding of sex on the lives...
Storytelling
Constitutional lawyers like to tell the story (probably apocryphal, since it’s too good to be true) that, sometime in the 1960’s, when the Warren Court was engaged in its effort to rewrite the Constitution, one crusty old Harvard Law professor, upon reading the latest product from the Supremes, stormed into his constitutional law class, roared...
The Chastity Amendment
The appearance of an article about American church life on the front page of the Washington Post is a rare occurrence. But the approval by the Presbyterian Church (United States) of a church law requiring celibacy of its non-married clergy gained front-page attention in the Post not just once but twice this year. Treatment of...
Bondage Boy Goes to School
In a state where the rock ‘n’ roll hit “Louie, Louie” was banned from the airwaves after the governor deemed it subversive, Indiana University (IU) is no stranger to controversy. One of its most famous professors was Alfred Kinsey, whose work is continued by such scholars as Leon Pettiway, author of the recent university press...
In Focus
Journey to Nowhere Lesley Blanch: Pierre Loti: The Legendary Romantic; Helen and Kurt Wolff Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; San Diego. In the end, nothing is more boring than adventure. Once the newness has worn off, foreign landscapes, forbidden loves, and bizarre rituals prove less stimulating than familiar settings, ordinary people, and well-worn traditions. This...
The Smutty Professor
Fifty years ago, Indiana University professor Alfred Kinsey launched what was perhaps the first salvo in the Sexual Revolution. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, the work of Kinsey, Wardell Pomero), and Clyde Martin, hit postwar America like a sucker punch. Claiming that 85 percent of American males engaged in premarital sex, 70 percent had...
The Sex Quiz
“Is it possible heterosexuality is a phase you will grow out of? Are you heterosexual because you fear the same sex? If you have never slept with anyone of the same sex, how do you know you wouldn’t prefer it? Is it possible you merely need a good gay experience?” Far from rhetorical questions and...
Missed Manners and Creeping Laws
From the August 2001 issue of Chronicles. All societies regulate personal behavior: That is part of what makes them societies, instead of mere aggregations of isolated individuals. Societies differ enormously, though, in just how they perform this regulation, how much they rely on law and the state, rather than informal or private means. If I...
Psychology Today, Psychology Tomorrow, Psychology Forever
Psyche haunted the Romantic poets and their successors. Coleridge celebrated “the butterfly the ancient Grecians made the soul’s fair emblem and its only name.” Coleridge was a Christian. But the pagan Keats, in his search for a private “system of Salvation,” said his prayers to Psyche, “latest-born and loveliest vision far / Of all Olympus’...
Missed Manners and Creeping Laws
All societies regulate personal behavior: That is part of what makes them societies, instead of mere aggregations of isolated individuals. Societies differ enormously, though, in just how they perform this regulation, how much they rely on law and the state, rather than informal or private means. If I walk into a crowded room wearing a...
Law in Lehi: A Case of Abuse
Lehi, Utah, is somewhat familiar to those who have seen the movie Footloose. The small Mormon community provided Hollywood with the perfect setting for a tale of adolescent rebellion against parental and religious authority. Yet shortly after the movie’s release Lehi’s pious image was ruptured by a child abuse scandal. One morning in the summer...
Plymouth Rocked
Far From Heaven Produced by Clear Blue Sky Productions Written and Directed by Todd Haynes Distributed by Focus Features and USA Films Auto Focus Produced by Propaganda Films Directed by Paul Schrader Screenplay by Michael Gerbosi from Robert Graysmith’s book Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven and Paul Schrader’s Auto Focus...
The Present Climate
When Lorena Bobbitt startled her hubby one evening with a knife through his privates—vigorously severing an intimate part of their relationship—a lot of women apparently admired the, uh, statement Lorena made that night. I own the conversation radio station for Lancaster & York counties in Pennsylvania, and the other morning Lorena Bobbitt talk poured from...
Fueling Culture Wars
“Discrimination” is one of today’s buzzwords, and laws and regulations prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation are fueling some of the sharpest skirmishes within America’s culture wars. A New Jersey Supreme Court ruling against the Boy Scouts’ ban on homosexual Scout leaders has gained the most publicity of late. But a public feud between one...
Truth and Consequences
Next month will mark the fourth anniversary of the adoption, by the U.S. Catholic bishops, of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People. The protocol document was the bishops’ response to allegations of long-standing clerical sexual abuse of minors over the past 50 years. While the media, victims’ advocates, and not a...
Of Priests and Peducators
Over the past decade, I have been involved in public debate over the problem of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, and that experience has taught me a great deal about the way people come to understand—or, rather, misunderstand—social problems. My point is simple enough. While some priests have undoubtedly been abusive, and a few have...
Transgenderism Stems From Feminism’s Failure to Deal With Marilyn Monroe
Had I told Democratic friends around the turn of the 21st century that in 2021 their party would insist that a biological man identifying as a woman should be treated as a woman in sports competitions, they would have laughed me under the table. Yet here’s Joe Biden, their man in the White House, claiming that...
Shame and Science
A sex tour of Italy was the last thing I had on my mind when I decided to take two children along with me on a recent lecture tour, but each trip I take seems to construct itself thematically like an overwritten modern novel in which every scene reeks of symbolic significance. This time the...
Back to the Stone Age III: Natural Men C—Women and Men
I said at the beginning that man is a mammalian species. From this one simple fact flow many important consequences for the human race. As the word “mammal” indicates, our females nurse their young, which requires diversification of the roles played by males and females, but even those words males and females tell us...
Samantha Power’s Ignorance of Islam
On August 24 the United States Mission to the United Nations published remarks by Samantha Power, the UN Ambassador, devoted to the mistreatment of homosexuals by the Islamic State. The key part of her statement reads as follows: “No religious beliefs justify throwing individuals off of buildings or stoning them to death because of who...
Oedipal Angst
American Pie Produced by Universal Pictures Directed by Paul Weitz Screenplay by Adam Herz Released by Universal Pictures Summer of Sam Produced by 40 Acres & a Mule Filmworks and Touchstone Pictures Directed by Spike Lee Screenplay by Victor Colicchio and Michael Imperioli Released by Buena Vista Pictures Eyes Wide Shut Produced by Warner Bros.,...
A Woman’s Dreams
“Most women have no Characters at all,” wrote Alexander Pope: “Good as well as ill, / Woman’s at best a Contradiction still.” The contradiction of womanhood will perhaps never be fully solved, but it has generally been considered manageable within marriage and family. Outside of the home, women are . . . well, we’ve made...
The Death of David Reimer: A Case Study in Psychiatric Politics
David Reimer, the 38-year-old man who was raised as a girl (“Brenda”) following a botched circumcision in infancy, committed suicide on May 4, 2004. As the left rushes to validate sodomy by judicial fiat and “homosexual marriage,” perhaps now is an appropriate time to revisit his case. It reveals more about the public-policy effect of...
The Next Great Scandal: Photoshopped Modesty
There’s a new censorship scandal afoot: it involves school yearbook pictures, a little too much skin, and some lousy Photoshop skills. Blond, smiling ninth-grader Riley O’Keefe was one of the “victims” of some aggressive photoshopping of her yearbook pictures by high school administrators. O’Keefe’s original school picture featured a gray sweater over a low-cut black...
The Crime of Consistency
When future generations write the history of the Roman Catholic Church in North America, the year 2002 will loom large, since the crisis over child abuse by priests and other clergy has had such a devastating effect on the faithful. Yet these same events also deserve to be remembered as marking a remarkable new low...
Appealing to Prurient Interests
In 1857, the House of Lords engaged in a heated debate over a bill sponsored by an organization calling itself by the frank, but nonetheless quaint, name of the “Society for the Suppression of Vice.” The intent of the bill was to control, through legal penalties, the production and sale of “obscene publications,” and despite...
Aids, Condoms, and Liberals
Since I’ve just finished reading a two-page spread in the Wall Street Journal on sexual assault among staff at the United Nations, I hesitate to refer to a U.N. report in support of what I am about to say on sexual incontinence and AIDS. Still, here it is, as quoted by Edward C. Green, a...
Yahoo Justice
The Supreme Court that has recently issued its anti-harassment decision sits in the middle of a city under siege. Justices who have pronounced the nation’s employers liable for “permitting a hostile environment” to exist in the workplace cannot walk within two blocks of the Supreme Court building without being confronted with the most hostile of...
Gay Marriage in the Dock
In the 2012 election, same-sex marriage made gains at the ballot box for the first time—however narrowly—in all four states where “marriage equality” was presented to the voters for decision. Have the American people been successfully fooled? Maybe the more germane question is, Are large numbers of the American people self-deceived about homosexuality? We must...
Child Abuse at Waco
“For the sake of the children” has emerged as one of the most dangerous phrases in American politics. President Clinton has invoked children’s alleged dependence on the federal government not just for his putatively child-oriented programs (such as the misnamed Department of Education), but also for issues that have only a tenuous connection to children,...
The Wonderful World of Porn
So you thought writing hard-core pornography was an easy way to earn a living? You remembered your adolescence and those turgid paperbacks in which the vocabulary was strictly four-letter, the plot rambling and forgotten halfway through the book, and the characters’ names changed periodically as though some of the chapters were lifted bodily from other...
Receiving “Moral” Support
Bishop Spong’s agitation for the ordination of practicing homosexuals received “moral” support last February from the Special Task Force on Human Sexuality of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). The Presbyterian commission recommended the ordination of homosexuals as well as the provision of medical and pension benefits to same-sex couples, and their recommendations will be submitted to...
No Message Could’ve Been Any Clearer
Michael Jackson is the mirror of the children of liberal America, even though he is dead. Obsessed with their appearance, they keep hacking away at their features until they are unrecognizable as humans. Sexualized as pre-adolescents through pop culture, they fetishize their own children by exposing them to pop culture in equal or greater measure....
Sex, Drugs, and a Republican Party
An all-night homosexual “circuit” party called Cherry Jubilee’s “Main Event” took place in Washington, D.C., on April 13, 1996. The dance party featured public nudity, illicit sexual activity, and illegal drug use. Among the sponsors of the gay festivities were a GOP congressman and a host of corporations. A federal building, the Andrew W. Mellon...
A Room With a View
Once, before giving a speech in Cincinnati, I met the chairman of the history department at Xavier University. I told him that I was going to talk about the sexual revolution and how it had been used to destroy Catholic political power in the period following World War II (the thesis of Part III of...
Causing Divisions
AIDS, like abortion, seems to have divided the religious community along conservative and liberal lines. One might suppose, in a reasonably rational society, that the increasing availability of contraceptives would reduce the incidence of abortion. However, in the United States at least, abortion has risen dramatically with the availability of contraceptives. Similarly, one might have...
The E.U. Charter of Fundamental Rights: A New Totalitarianism
The E.U. Charter of Fundamental Rights, approved in Nice on December 8, 2000, sets forth the principles upon which the future European constitution should be based. Drafted by a commission of experts from various countries, the document consists of a preamble and 54 articles. It was presented to the E.U. Council as “unamendable”: The charter...
A Cold and Distant Mirror
A review of The White Ribbon (produced by Canal+ and Wega Film; written and directed by Michael Haneke; distributed by Sony Pictures Classics). German director Michael Haneke loves to sneer at his middle-class patrons. In Funny Games (1997, remade in the United States in 2007) and Caché (2005), his affluent characters are shown to be...
Naomi’s Secret
Naomi Wolf is nice. She is attractive, she has a daughter, she is even married. To a man. A far cry from the rabid man-haters associated with modern-day feminism. Her voice has been hailed as one of moderation; she celebrates “power feminism,” professing that women are not helpless. She goes out of her way to...
The Long Retreat Through the Institutions
Twenty-sixteen was the year when American liberals confidently expected to consolidate the quiet political and cultural revolution they had been conducting for decades in the coming national elections. When the Republican Party nominated Donald J. Trump as its presidential candidate, the apparent miracle was enough (nearly) to cause the Democracy to reconsider the possibility of...
Omnigendered Christianity
By some measures, the influence of feminist theology peaked in the 1990’s. It is still around, however, acting as a supporting pillar for liberal religion’s latest preoccupation: the elimination of “gender.” Feminist theologians and clergy convened in March 2004 for an annual “Women and the Word” conference at Boston University’s School of Theology, challenging masculine...
The Sexual Left, the Welfare State, and the Divorce Revolution
“All politics is on one level sexual politics.” —George Gilder Extremists break out of the margins and take power when they fool opponents into advancing their agenda. By politicizing the family and sexuality, the left duped conservatives, and all of us, into becoming their accomplices. Since last fall’s electoral coup, the United States has been...
A Cold and Distant Mirror
The White Ribbon Produced by Canal+ and Wega Film Written and directed by Michael Haneke Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics German director Michael Haneke loves to sneer at his middle-class patrons. In Funny Games (1997, remade in the United States in 2007) and Caché (2005), his affluent characters are shown to be at once...
Trans Lunacy: The Feminine Touch
The mothering instinct causes women to ensure everyone feels equally valued rather than “left out." This can have serious policy consequences when women occupy public office. Mothering does well in the home, but disastrously in government.
Uncommon Properties
Pick up any newspaper at random, and you will come upon story after story of children being murdered, beaten, and molested. I begin this chapter on Monday, October 19, 1992, and looking over the Chicago Tribune I discover: a frontpage story on Chicago schoolchildren venting their grief over the murder of their friends, a headline...
Groomers by Any Other Name
In the wake of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signing the Parental Rights in Education bill into law, the internet has been ablaze with debate as to whether those who advocate for LGBT curricula and policies in public schools should be described as “groomers.” The left is predictably up in arms over this controversy. And although...
Unisex Multiplex
How could I possibly know as much as I do about popular entertainment? I mean, I almost never go to the movies anymore. The big multiplexes annoy me with the stink of their sprays, their even more vexing segmentation of the audience, and their usurious popcorn prices. At home, I have no time for television,...
Gratuitous Grotesqueness in ‘Poor Things’
Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things is now celebrated in Hollywood but, in truth, it is just another feminist revenge story to which creativity comes to die.