November 10, 2004
Kinsey, or Let's Keep Talking About Religion
``Instead of being lionized, Kinsey's proper place is with Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele or your average Hollywood horror flick mad scientist,'' said Robert Knight, director of Concerned Women of America's Culture & Family Institute. . . . Focus on the Family and its allies blame Kinsey for a host of ills - including clearing a path for candid, comprehensive sex education programs espoused by organizations like the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States.From CNN.
A social scientists' research on the way people behave is blamed for sparking a social change which religious conservatives condemn. What's the meaning of this, then?
As far as I can tell, groups like Focus on the Family think that the best way for their goals to be achieved is to keep information about reality away from the masses. Knowledge of new ways of behaving, in their thought, gives people the freedom to make their own choices about right and wrong, and these spokesmen are operating on the assumption that, in a free marketplace of lifestyles, religion cannot compete with free love.
I agree with conservatives insofar as I think that, by and large, free love and wholesale sexual license aren't viable lifestyles for the vast majority of people - living like that and not wrecking lives requires a great deal of maturity and wisdom not just in an individual, but in a whole community, something that's hard to come by. But is ignorance really the best policy? Obviously, there's been sexual deviance at all levels of society throughout history, and if anything its expression and place in society under repressive Christian regimes has ended up being more systemically damaging than under more accepting moral codes. Why, then, does the contemporary Christian mindset prefer brushing all that is unpleasant under the rug?
This is a way of thinking that goes beyond just moral issues. One obvious connection can be made to one of Bush's comment in the debates, which basically boiled down to him saying that the only mistake he'd made in his administration was hiring Paul O'Neil - that is, the only mistake he was willing to acknowledge was hiring the guy who was impolite enough to point out all of those other, real mistakes. Another similar case is the continuing crusade to undermine the teaching of evolution in secular schools. These are not stances for particular viewpoints, in which arguments are presented and facts or philosophy arrayed on the field of battle. These are stances in opposition to knowledge and debate themselves.
This is by no means a feature inherent to religion (I would point to Jews and, to a lesser degree, Jesuits as having strong traditions of free inquiry), it is an overpoweringly strong feature of the born-again Christian movement. It is not an attitude that will ever ultimately allow people of even the greatest level of faith to be truly coherent selves. Only through genuine reflection and self-criticism can each person reach their own individual peace with existence. When your entire critical perspective is that you will see no evil, there is very little room for open reflection.
Postscript: I just noticed that the director of Concerned Women of America's Culture and Family Institute is a man. Not that that's anything to worry about - if white men can speak so forcefully on behalf of the Negroes, of course they can do the same for women.
Weird. I've never heard of Kinsey before.
I pretty much agree with what you say, though I suppose I've come to have my doubts about a "free marketplace of lifestyles" that pretty much corresponds to my doubts about mass democracy. I think that your "free marketplace" formulation is close to, but not exactly, what the liberal agenda ought to be. Secular public schools, for example, are not exactly an expression of a free marketplace. Nor is a public consensus that science is preferrable to pseudoscience. Or that considered opinion is better than mere belief. In any case, under a "free marketplace", these fundamentalist groups have a right to boycott and say whatever the hell they want to say. They would retain these rights under the sort of elitist hegemony I would prefer, but these groups would be made fun of mercilessly.
Also, I imagine the Christian answer to your arguments is that they don't want an "individual peace with existence". It's a lonely world out there, and some just can't get by without a kind of totalizing validation from the community.
sleepnotwork,
You really should read what the born agains have to say about Kinsey before writing them off as simply being anti-knowledge or debate. Their point is not that Kinsey is bad b/c he did social science research the results of which they don't like. Quite the opposite. They argue that Kinsey's research was shoddy and often ethically questionable. He was an advocate for lowering the age of consent to 10 and he did research on the orgasms of pre-pubescent children. Like Margaret Sanger who was a racist and advocate for eugenics, the left has largely ignored the troubling aspects of Kinsey's past b/c his questionable research helped dismantle all sorts of mores that they oppose.
As for Concerned Women for America it remains an organization founded, run and largely staffed by women. Two men currently hold prominent positions and one of those is resigning to work in the senate.
An aside: I never understood what Bush was supposed to do with the "what mistakes have you made" question. Seemed like lose-lose question. He says "I made no mistakes" and he is condemned for arrogance. He admits to a mistake and the headline the next day is "Bush now admits war/tax/economic/9-11 decision wrong".