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...
2788 search results for: Sexual%2BPolitics
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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A Letter to Senator John Kerry
entations”? Well, I didn’t know eitherrnbefore I read these books. Fetishism is arnpreference for achieving sexual excitementrnby using things like articles ofrnclothing (such as women’s underwear,rnshoes, and boots) and, more rarely, partsrnof the human body (such as hair orrnnails). Transvestism is recurrent andrnpersistent cross-dressing in women’srnclothes by males for sexual excitement—rninterference with which, we are...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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....
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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...
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Sexual Politics
12 / CHRONICLESntively recognize that preservation of the sexual constitutionnmay be even more important to the social order thannpreservation of the legal conshtution. They recognize thatnno laws can prevail against the dissolution of the socialnconnections and personal motivations that sustain a civilizednpolity. They acknowledge, with Carl Jung, that whilenthe society can resist epidemics of physical...
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Editor’s Comment
millennia to walk a tightrope between sexual morality and sexualnmores, in America went head over heels into a direct confrontation—andnthe end result is our current chaos in whichnsome American churches opt for modish permissive progressivismnjust to keep their flock in the pews, while others use obsoletendialectics to combat a permissiveness which they cannotncomprehend. Actually, what...
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The Shadow of Sodom
Allyn Walker's audacious Long Dark Shadow is a thinly veiled attempt to normalize pedophilia.
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Editor’s Comment
Sexual Revolution is a pathetic misnomer. The most popularnfeature of revolutions is their reversal of roles: aristocrats go tonthe scaffold, judged by the wretched of the earth. The needynare told that all their needs will be fulfilled. The greedy have allntheir luxuries withdrawn—at least temporarily. In light of thisnsimple recipe, nothing short of a mass...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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Religion
current culture. The fact is, we live inrntimes that are so relentlessly and obsessivelyrn”modern” that the most modernrnthing a president could possibly do is tornput together a government that feels “notrnthe least bit modern.” In a society thatrnhas proudly assaulted as “judgmental”rneverytliing from federal law to everyday etiquette,rnit is positively futuristic—it’s downrightrnradical, for God’s sake—to...
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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...
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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...
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Principalities & Powers
the reasons for regarding it as relevant tornpublic office-holding are really not difficult.rnAny society must regulate and disciplinernsexual impulses and must do sornin terms of what is morally permissible asrnwell as what is socially tolerable. In thernabsence of social and moral norms governingrnsuch sexual relationships as thosernof husband and wife, parent and child,rnelder and youth,...
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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...
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Journalism
A Plague on Both Your Houses Women have always been our censors. Mrs. Grundy was a household word for inflexible propriety a good 30 years before Dr. Bowdler produced his expurgated version of Shakespeare. Times and manners change, and the American Mrs. Grundys took up, in succession, Abolition, Women’s Suffrage, and Temper ance,butitremainedtruethat: Many are...
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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...
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A Hatchery at The Nation
more beautifial and morenexalting than the experience ofnlove between man and woman.nWhen a young man andnwoman are attracted to eachnother, their love arouses thendeepest emotions, the highestnexpectations, they have evernknown. For them, nothingnseems to matter but their love.nNothing seems impossible tontheir love. For each of them, thenother is “the only you there is.”nWhat sort of...