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...
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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...
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...
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...
Governor William Weld’s Manly Agenda
Does Massachusetts Governor William Weld want to “Empower America” or “Empower Queer Nation”? Social conservatives who hold out an inkling of hope that “Empower America” might actually pay attention to their issues should take a closer look at Governor Weld’s promotion of the homosexual agenda in public schools. On February 10, 1992, Governor Weld “empowered”...
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...
Recently Discussed
Gays and Judaism were recently discussed in the summer 1993 issue of the Public Interest. Since the author of the article, Dennis Praeger, had been identified a few weeks before in Insight as a political conservative and Jewish traditionalist, one might have expected to find here an attack on sexual perversion based on Leviticus 18....
Pulling the Trigger
At the end of the Episcopal Church, U.S.A.’s General Convention last summer, an academic friend, not an Episcopalian, asked me, “What argument is advanced against blessing polyamorous unions by those Episcopalians who favor the blessing of same-sex sexual unions? Or do they pull the trigger and say that the blessing of same-sex unions is only...
The Wrongs of Women’s Rights
The recent decision to deploy women on submarines has been hailed as a victory in the continuing struggle to liberate women from the oppression of the domineering male sex. Conservatives have generally deplored the move, citing the inevitable sexual tensions and lowering of morale that will result from putting young males and females in such...
SpongeBob and a Transgendered Sock Puppet
Cultural debate over sex roles has reached such a fever pitch that even the sexual preference of the children’s cartoon character SpongeBob Squarepants has become a topic of great concern. Conservative religious broadcaster Dr. James Dobson expressed alarm that a new educational campaign to tout “tolerance” and “diversity” was employing the images of SpongeBob, Big...
Gradgrind in Love
Richard Posner has a complaint against many of his fellow judges. Owing to their lack of up-to-date information and their conservative backgrounds, his colleagues often decide cases that touch on sex in an ignorant and benighted manner. Judge Posner aims to remedy matters with this comprehensive treatise, which offers both a theory of how sexual...
The Wrongs of Women’s Rights
The recent decision to deploy women on submarines has been hailed as a victory in the continuing struggle to liberate women from the oppression of the domineering male sex. Conservatives have generally deplored the move, citing the inevitable sexual tensions and lowering of morale that will result from putting young males and females in...
Weinstein: Who Cares—and Why
Just as America started to recover from Harvey earlier this fall, fate hit the replay button. Harvey the First destroyed property and took lives across Texas and parts of the Southeast. Harvey the Second, the alleged rapist and confessed serial sexual predator moonlighting as a movie mogul, pulled back the curtain on Hollywood’s sordid business...
The Puritanism That Dare Not Speak Its Name
Every society places some kind of restriction on personal conduct, and limitations are usually most visible in the areas of sexual behavior and the use or abuse of particular foods or intoxicants. Restrictions might be formal and legal, perhaps enforced by a specialized morality police or vice squad, or there may be informal social sanctions...
Looking Backwards
Hard cases make bad law, and since 2002 the exposure of some ugly criminal cases has stirred legislators in several states to contemplate dreadful legal innovations. However far removed these crimes may appear from regular mainstream American life, the legal principles involved threaten to wreak havoc in the coming decades. As all the world knows,...
Harvey and Teddy
I was walking up Madison Avenue when I spotted two comely young women having tea at a sidewalk café. It was a couple of days after the scandal, so I stopped and introduced myself as Harvey Weinstein and asked them if they wanted a drink back at my place. Both roared with laughter. This is...
Out of the Closet and Into the Schools
Relying upon federal legislation intended to allow Bible clubs equal access in high schools, a student homosexual group is demanding not only meeting space but official approval at a Salt Lake City high school. The Gay/Straight Alliance of East High School first formed in 1995. Fearing that federal law would preclude a ban targeting only...
The Legacy of Sandra Dee
A first-wave Baby Boomer, I grew up the 1950’s and early 60’s. We teenage girls yearned to look like Sandra Dee (a.k.a. Alexandra Zuck), who passed away on February 20, 2005. If we couldn’t remake ourselves into the image of “Gidget,” then Mouseketeer-turned-beach-babe Annette Funicello, Carol Lynley (Blue Denim), Tuesday Weld (Rally Round the Flag, Boys!),...
Mommy’s Little Monster
Monsters are an ancient phenomenon in human history: There have always been individuals whose characters are marked by brutal, sadistic cruelty, who lack any redeeming instincts of compassion or mercy. Call them what we will—fiends or psychopaths, ghouls or serial killers—this type is by no means new to the later 20th century, however much the...
A Methodist Revival
Methodism, America’s third-largest religious denomination, eagerly embraced the Social Gospel nearly a hundred years ago. It supported labor unions, civil rights, and a moderate welfare state. By the 1960’s, the church was supporting Third World revolutions and abortion rights, while opposing school prayer and U.S. military defense efforts. Not surprisingly, Methodist theology became as wacky...
Parietals Then and Now
As a Columbia University undergraduate in 1956, I resided in Hartley Hall, a stately building on the Morningside campus. During my orientation week I was introduced to my floor counselor who said in an unambiguous way that hijinks would not be permitted on his watch. He highlighted one rule which could never be disobeyed: women...
Natural Woman
Women of the younger, liberated generation have been raised to believe that being equal to men means being the same as men. Thus, they try hard to convince themselves that casual sex is harmless “fun” as long as they “play it safe.” In A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue, Wendy Shalit presents the...
Remembering Augusto Del Noce
Augusto Del Noce viewed politics and philosophy as inseparably linked and believed that society had to be understood in reference to the history of its thought. He diagnosed Marxism as the deification of history.
The Streetwalker’s Story
Prostitution may not deserve its reputation as the world’s oldest profession, but it has been around for millennia, appearing in virtually every society. In this revised edition of a book originally published in 1978 (under a slightly different title), Vern Bullough and Bonnie Bullough document the ubiquity and diversity of prostitution, tracing the practice from...
Cui Bono?
You cannot hope to bribe or twist / (thank God!) the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do / unbribed, there’s no occasion to. —Humbert Wolfe The June issue of Chronicles was literally on the press on May 7, when local radio talk-show host Chris Bowman announced that Bishop Thomas Doran of the...
Italy’s Child-Abuse Lobby
Don Fortunato di Noto is a well-known Italian Catholic priest who has served as a leader in the fight against pedophilia for years, so much so that even Newsweek has acknowledged his work in a lengthy article. As founder and president of the helpline Telefono Arcobaleno, he has forcefully decried the abuse of children as...
A Few Bad Men
The results of two extensive studies were released too late for me to consider them in my column (“Truth and Consequences”) last month. Both the “Report on the Implementation of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People,” released by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), and the 2006 Supplementary Report to...
The Gelded Age
“If the Model Boy was in either of these Sunday schools, I did not see him.” —Mark Twain What do men want? In the gloried 1950’s, Sports Afield and Rod and Gun exemplified a male ethos resting on the quest for game by the primeval hunting band. With Playboy, Hugh Hefner moved the American male...
Can’t Get No Satisfaction
Brokeback Mountain Produced and distributed by Focus Features Directed by Ang LeeScreenplay by Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana from a story by Annie Proulx An enlightened colleague recently asked me what I thought of director Ang Lee’s film Brokeback Mountain. When I told him I thought it a dreary, sappy soap opera, he smiled pityingly...
Dispelling the Darkness of Secularism
Bolshevism evolved into religion, some kind of materialistic pagan religion, which worships Lenin and his like as demigods, while considering lies, deceit, violence, the oppression of the poor, the demoralizing of children, humiliation of women, destruction of the family . . . and the reduction of all the nation to extreme poverty as the principles...
“Bully Pulpit”
Dr. Jocelyn Elders has been elevated to what the New York Times calls the Surgeon General’s “bully pulpit,” and President Clinton has uxoriously compared her to Harriet Beecher Stowe. Yet Elders as the mouthpiece for the healing profession—not to mention the allusion to her in a pulpit—is grossly ironic. Her insensitive, sometimes spiteful public asides...
Botox Blasey Ford
Christine Blasey Ford is out with a memoir no one asked for about her experience testifying against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation. Her unconvincing story remains the same, but her face appears to be the beneficiary of her substantial cash windfalls.
Stop the #MeToo Lawsuit Carnival
Statutes of limitations are necessary to ensure defendants get fair trials. Politically motivated suspensions hurt more than just their intended targets and are incompatible with justice.
The Politics of AIDS Research
The epidemic of AIDS highlights a crisis in policy on which the social sciences may shed some light. In the process, it may also move the study of policymaking to some substantial higher ground. Whenever we pose a question in terms of understanding rather than resolving, we run the risk of hearing social research denounced...
Terms of Empowerment
Imagine, if you can, thousands of parents last January insisting that the Fairfax County, Virginia, school board distribute a 169-question sex survey to their 13-, 15-, and 17-year-olds. Envision legions of taxpayers falling all over themselves to divert $60,000 earmarked for educational purposes to ask students about oral sex, number of sexual partners, depression, and...
Horror in Europe
On New Year’s Eve 121 German women were subjected to sexual attacks, robbery and violence by “concentric rings” of a thousand Middle Eastern and African migrants in and around the central railway station in Cologne. Women and girls were surrounded, poked and jeered at as “whores” and even worse insults; their blouses were ripped and...
On Modesty
I was disappointed by Karina Rollins’ simplistic portrayal of sexual mores in her review of Wendy Shalit’s book, A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue (“Natural Woman,” May). Shalit’s book should not have been embraced so uncritically. In fact, I doubt that anyone with mature sensibilities could get through it without shuddering at its...
Turn Out the Lights
It must have been Sigmund Freud who observed that whenever a new technology appears it is applied almost immediately to some sexual purpose. The dirty old man of Vienna was thinking of such inventions as the photograph and the moving picture, which gave a new impetus to the production and consumption of pornography, but he...
How Many Priests?
For over a decade, the Roman Catholic Church has been in deep crisis over the issue of sexual abuse by Her clergy. That some priests had molested or raped children was indisputable, but just how many had offended? The numbers are more than a simple matter of statistical curiosity. While everyone agrees that “one case...
Friends of the Family
Everyone wants to save the American family. Not a day goes by, it seems, without some politician or professor issuing a call to arms or an invitation to a congressional hearing. For a long time the family had been a conservative/ Republican issue, but last fall both Mr. Mondale and Ms. Ferraro made a great...
Fiction for a Flat Earth
Françoise Sagan The Painted Lady; E.P. Dutton; New York. St. Cyril of Jerusalem is reported to have told his catechumens that “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.”...
G.I. Jane
DESFIREX, the Desert Firing Exercise, is a semi-annual celebration of cordite, steel, white phosphorous, and sand held at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twenty Nine Palms, California. During the weeks before, the howitzers and trucks are prepared for the field; They are rushed through a maintenance pipeline that at all other times...
Onan Agonistes
I’ve been trying to figure out what somebody could do with the thirty bucks (plus tax) that they’re asking for Harold Brodkey’s word-processing product. My copy was no bargain for free. You could buy two pizzas and two sixpacks and have quite a party for that sum. You could wire your sweetie pie a nice...
Nazi Russians and “Basic Morality”
A burbling controversy of Olympic proportions has found its way to Moscow via Lausanne. On one side the forces of evil are arrayed behind the stallion-riding Vladimir Putin and his “anti-gay” law (which sailed through the Duma in June). On the other are the forces of absolute equality, led by the bribe-swilling International Olympic...
The Story of Love
Octavio Paz, who was 82 when he wrote this book, asks in his preface, “Wasn’t it a little ridiculous, at the end of my days, to write a book about love?” The answer is a resounding “no.” The text is densely rich with ideas, elegant in style, and the ruminations are very wise. Paz ends...
Human, Not-Quite Human
The doping scandals that plague professional and “amateur” sports have done little to shake the enthusiasm of fans and sportswriters for their heroes. Fans still flock to the stadiums and spend their weekends watching NBA basketball games, NASCAR races, and even (if ABC is to be believed) AFL football exhibitions. As a child, I once...
Mutiny In Paradise
In December 1787 His Majesty’s armed transport Bounty crept out of Portsmouth harbor on a clandestine mission, heading for the vast and largely uncharted South Pacific. Tahiti, a tiny pinpoint of land in the Polynesian Islands, was the goal. In October 1788, the Bounty dropped anchor in Tahiti’s spectacular Matavai Bay. In April 1789, she...
Bad Eggs
The rich ye shall always have with you is a truth our Savior in his mercy never declared to us. That the poor should be a permanent fact of human society is discouraging enough, especially for modern Americans convinced there is no problem that cannot be fixed, no sin that is without a cure. Even...
Pink Elephants on Parade
More than ever before, homosexual characters and situations are being featured on television. Needless to say, the lay of TV Land is overwhelmingly favorable: cheery, cuddly, cute, and camp. The first of such programming originated in the formerly Great Britain, either imported directly (East Enders, Absolutely Fabulous) or adapted to the American small screen (All...
Final Solution
Public education exacerbates today’s toxic youth subculture. The combined forces of advertisers, television, teen magazines, and internet spammers have lured our nation’s youth into lives of promiscuity. Government schools add incompetence and dependency to the mix—all wrapped in a façade of “learning” and “testing” packages. Government education, unfortunately, never quite met the promised ideal. Even...