Documenti di Didattica
Documenti di Professioni
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1. Introduction 1
5. Conclusion 30
Bibliography
Primary sources 34
Secondary sources 38
That a conflict between science and the religious right lies at the core of American public
life has long been a mainstay of political commentary (Mooney 2005; Alumkal 2017). The
topic resurged with Donald Trumps choice of Mike Pence as vice-president, connecting
the latters popularity among evangelicals with their stances on climate change and
sexuality. It is often traced back to the 1925 Scopes Trial (Hankins 2008: 49),1 when
Clarence Darrow seemed to have lost his battle to turn back the tide that has sought to
force itself upon this modern world, of testing every fact in science by a religious
dictum (quoted in Geisler 2007: 73). Yet it became especially prominent in the 1980s with
the legacy of Jerry Falwells Moral Majority - the mass mobilisation of what he called a
and the call since the Reagan years to call America back to God, back to the Bible, and
back to moral sanity (quoted from Falwell 1987: 111; Smith 2000: 1-5, 18).
At the end of the 20th-century the antagonism between science and religion was nowhere
determined body of fact about sex (Kinsey et al. 1948: 5, 35). Sexology had leapt into the
limelight in the 1940s when bestselling scientist Alfred Kinsey, on the back of thousands of
deducing from this that sexual variance should not be criminalised as it was (Hardy 1998:
270, 270-276). His findings contributed to growing pressure for the legalisation of
homosexual sex, which occurred first in Illinois in 1962, and from 1971 spread rapidly
among the other states (Kirby 2007: 496-507). After Kinseys death in 1956, American
sexologists continued to attract controversy,2 yet for decades the sexual conservatism of
markedly with Kinseys arguments (Irvine 1990: 128-9). Against that backdrop, in June
1981, a paper presented to the 5th World Congress of Sexology by Judith Reisman, a
hitherto little-known scholar, launched the first of several allegations against the then-
deceased Kinsey, charging him with scientific malpractice and child abuse. These became
the basis for a series of socio-political mobilisations against not only the science thought to
have been mounted on his shoulders, but the culture, laws and policies thought to have
Yet political scientists have overlooked the relationship between scientific sexology and
religious conservatism during this period. The political history of science has mostly been
limited to a litany of questions pertaining to industry and ecology, evolution and bioethics
(for example Hunter, 1987; Noll 2001 Alumkal 2017; Fitzgerald 2017). And while political
scientists studying the history of the religious right have engaged with sexuality (especially
as regards sexual rights, education, and public policy surrounding AIDS), they have tended
to treat it as a distinctively ethical problematic, rather than a scientific one (for example
Cantor 1994; Smith 2000; Luker 2006; Hankins 2008). This silence is of concern, not
simply given the centrality of sexuality to processes of power (Foucault 1976), but more
so, as given the particular prestige of scientific discourse in modernity, the rise of sexual
science is a key factor in the construction [] of sexuality - and hence of political struggles
In the absence of such a political history, our understanding of the relation between sexual
science, religion and politics is necessarily limited. On the one hand, the attack on
sexology has been portrayed as simply part of a broader postwar moralism that pushed
against a value-neutral scientific rationality (for example Bancroft 2004; Rich 2004;
3 / 40
Alumkal 2017: 3). On the other hand, the backlash has also been particularised, and
therefore dismissed, as the paranoia of a few political opportunists (for example Bancroft
2004; Blumenthal 2004). Both these positions are misleading, and in neither case does it
transpire that the political discourses and actions that begun to confront sexology in the
1980s implicated arguments concerning the viability of the modern nation-state and its
I argue that a political history of the campaign against Alfred Kinsey, as it occurred both in
politics. For it to do so, three research questions must be answered: How were the
critiques of Kinsey, as they took form after 1981, formulated and legitimised, and by which
political actors? What relationship to science did these critiques imply? What were their
though largely drawn from online databases, have rarely been analysed in conjunction with
In section one, I argue that political analysis must pair an examination of discourse with a
historical understanding of the American sociopolitical moment at the time, especially with
regards to AIDS-related sentiments of national body panic (Knight 2000: 203). I argue that
argument which discursively connected the health of the individual body and the body
In section two, I examine the role of science in this political argument, arguing that the
religious right mobilised against the sexological institutions of the state by drawing on a
4 / 40
cultural repertoire of secular-scientism - not of religious moralism - to challenge its targets
claimed value-neutral status. I will argue that the movements restorative project
In section three, I draw out how this epistemic model functioned as the basis on which the
anti-Kinsey campaign staked its political claims. I will demonstrate how their claim to
contamination of scientific and political truth. I will demonstrate that this promise was
I will conclude by spelling out two implications this has for understanding the politics of the
American religious right more generally. Firstly, the discursive strategies of the post-1981
debates, which had also problematised the relationship between science, religion and
democracy.
Though the 1948 and 1953 Kinsey Reports were by no means the first sexological studies,
by taking advantage of new mass media they garnered unparalleled visibility, publicising
the aggregate findings of over 12,000 interviews - a feat of unprecedented scope in itself
(Irvine 1990: 17, 40-42). The studies purported to demonstrate that Americans had vastly
5 / 40
underestimated how commonly sexual activity deviated from conjugal and reproductive
heterosexuality,3 with the corollary that sex laws criminalising this deviation were in
desperate need of revision (Kinsey et al. 1948: 6, 392). Most controversially, the 1948 text
found that same-sex intercourse was not rare or unnatural: nearly half (46%) of the
their adult lives (Kinsey et al.: 656-660). Reviewers from the American Statistical
Association established almost immediately that the Kinsey Reports contained key errors:
interviewing biases that skewed his results (see for example Wallis 1949; Cochran et al.
1953; Brady 1954), all of which undermined the conclusion that homosexuality was so
prevalent. After 1981, these errors are presented by the religious right as Kinseys bid to
mainstream his own alleged homosexuality, conflated to encompass his pedophilia.4 Yet
while his methodological shortcomings have been clearly acknowledged, by the 21st-
Despite Foucaults quip that even a fictional discourse can induce effects of truth (1977:
193), the search for the truth to the allegations had precluded one for their political effects.
With few exceptions (see Larson 2004), commentators were reduced to a narrow debate
on the extent of Kinseys guilt (see Rich 2004; Bancroft 2004). As a result, the discussion
bore few fruits for understanding American political thought in this period. On one level, the
impasse was catalysed by an agent-centered fixation with decoding the actual intention of
a given writer (Skinner 1969: 49). With titles like Reismans 1998 Kinsey: Crimes &
Consequences and Richs 2004 The Plot Against Sex in America, both Kinseys
3For example in masturbation, the frequenting of sex workers, sexual contact with animals,
premarital and extramarital intercourse (see Kinsey et al. 1948; 1953)
4A long-standing trope among the religious right to equivocate gay activism with moral decline
(Gallagher and Bull 1996: 216-7)
6 / 40
prosecution and defence deduced their adversaries nefarious intentions by demonstrating
the supposed fallaciousness of this or that claim. In doing so, both formulated conspiracy
theories in Poppers sense: the view that an explanation of a social phenomenon consists
in the discovery of the men [sic] or groups who are interested in the occurrence of this
phenomenon (1945: 306). It is implied that one can infer conspiracy simply from false
premises. Thus, E. Michael Jones, editor of the pro-Catholic magazine Culture Wars, joins
former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense Ronald D. Ray, in arguing that Kinseys
statistical errors were motivated by a hidden sexual agenda (1989: 30) that yearned for
sexual anarchy (1998: 31). And, as other critics suggest, religious conservatives distort all
truth in their agenda against the separation of church and state (Cantor 1994: 3).
For political analysis to escape this impasse conspiracy must be considered not as it
pertains to truth but to effect, not through judgement but genealogy. This is what it means
to take the movements own claims - and own efforts at self-definition - seriously (Capps
1990: 6). Conspiracies form part of the discursive repertoire with which political agents
fiction" a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth (Foucault 1977:
identity (Knight 2000: 9-10; see also Barkun 2003: 3). Kinsey himself was a political
activist whose research intended to challenge mores and laws: in Indiana University
lectures given in 1939 and 1940, for example, he insisted that sexual regulation, in
opposing certain biological impulses, society has reached the point of threatening its own
foundations (quoted in Jones 1997: 327-329, 640; Hardy 1998: 9, 186-187); this was
implication of his argument that it is the total 95 per cent of the male population for which
the judge, or board of public safety, or church [] demands apprehension, arrest, and
conviction, when they call for a clean-up of the sex offenders (1948: 392-393). Yet
portrayals of him are conspiratorial to the extent that the intentions of an individual become
7 / 40
the sole cause of national decline writ large. For the history of political thought to engage
with conspiracy, pace Skinner, it cannot begin with intentionality, but rather with the
ones (Carver and Mottier 1998: 2). And, as Skinner did argue, to take the political-
linguistic seriously is to ground it in the historical world of meanings (Ross 1997: 33;
emphasis added). A historical genealogy reveals how the figure of Alfred Kinsey was
relationship depicted in Leviathans frontispiece: between the political body and the Body
Politique.
In the immediate decades after 1948 it was the early Cold War language of high politics
1963 described as one of its clearly delineated villains: intellectuals whose betrayal at
home endangered not just old American virtues but, with them, national security and
independence (24). The psychoanalyst Edmund Bergler, reviewing his work in 1948,
propagandistically used against the United States abroad, stigmatising the nation.
However, memoranda from 1950 indicate that state authorities, such as the FBIs
leadership (including J. Edgar Hoover), were primarily concerned by the threat within (see
FBI 2010b: 14-17).5 That Kinsey, as one 1950 memorandum to FBI Associate Director
Clyde Tolson puts it, was critical of the Bureau in his views on crime, homosexuality, and
other matters even led Hoover to commission an investigation in 1950: in the words of one
1952 note, it was unAmerican [] to seek to disrupt the force (police) of law and
order (see FBI 2010b: 19-20). This sedition was imputed to the moneyed interests that
had funded Kinseys research, principally the Rockefeller Foundation, whose own
connection, in 1954 then-Director of the CIA Allan Dulles even sent a transcript of a 1953
East German broadcast into West Germany that suggests Kinsey was also perceived as a
threat to the latter. The attached transcript argued that Kinseys sponsors (Rockefeller,
Dulles, Morgan and their crew) had deliberately hired this charlatan without scientific
by Dulles 1954: 2). It suggests these groups want Kinseys work to be published in
German for when the youth is obsessed by sex it will be all the easier to pull the steel
helmet over his ears and the wool over his eyes [sic] (quoted by Dulles 1954: 2).
Contrary to what is suggested by Bancroft (2004: 17), long before 1981 concerns already
circulated about another element of Kinseys argument: that preadolescents were sexually
active beings. Yet these conclusions were also conceptualised as due to the influence of
security aspects of funds and foundations, a 1959 FBI memorandum argues that
today, possessing a stranglehold on the training ground of youth (FBI 2010c: 8-10); this
was of concern as they had financed Kinseys 1953 publication, in which it was argued that
sexual relations between preadolescent children and adults (rape not being excluded)
development (quoted in FBI 2010c: 9-10). FBI concern also extended to the work of co-
author Paul Gebhard,6 but did not implicate Gebhards own sexuality. A 1965
memorandum sent to Deputy Associate Director Cartha DeLoach makes note that
Gebhard has made light of the danger of sex offenders, DeLoach having highlighted in
the margin that Gebhard states that society makes a serious mistake in adopting laws and
6 Director of the Kinsey Institute for sexological research from 1956 to 1982
9 / 40
attitudes that set teenagers apart from the adult world while, in fact, they are capable of
acting like adults, and believes sex laws [] should be rewritten so that any act between
two mature people voluntarily, would be legal (FBI 2010a: 43). The way in which the
American high politics: in both New England and Europe witches were accused of
uncontrollable illicit sexual behaviour (even involving the devil) (Le Beau 2016: 165-166),
and in the McCarthy era not only were sexual deviants considered by many to be as
What abruptly changes with Judith Reismans 1981 public attack is not the threat posed by
homosexuality. At the core of the earlier discourse was the argument that political interests
posed a sexual threat to the nation-state, but after 1981 homosexual interests now pose a
political threat. Critics focus particularly on Tables 31-35 of the male volume, in which
quality of orgasm (1948: 163-180). Reisman alleges that the measurements were
scientific experiments (1981: 1), in which Kinsey either directed pedophiles to abuse
organisation Mission: America, even contends that Kinseys sexualisation of children is the
by Christian blogger Michael Craven (2004: 9-10), Dr. Linda Jeffrey (2004: 4),7 and John
invited contributions to their data from a Nazi pedophile called Dr. von Balluseck. Relying
on what Jones terms the prestige of scientific authority (1989: 27), Kinsey and his team
influenced the American Law Institutes longstanding project to standardise state common
laws with a Model Penal Code (MPC), becoming the definitive authority for the 1962 final
version of the MPCs Article 213 (on Sexual Offenses). Echoed by Linda Harvey (1998),
Colonel Ray (1998), and John West (2007: 273-290), Reisman concludes that in this
capacity Kinsey pushed for reducing the criminalisation of homosexual, non-marital and
nonconsensual intercourse, as well as lowering the age of consent of, and severity of
conviction for, statutory rape9 (1998: 187-245; see also Reisman and Eichel 1990). To
enforce their homosexual agenda, the sexologists then successfully lobbied state
legislatures to implement the reforms (see Reisman 1998: 187-245). Kinseys influence
1995; Craven 2004; Jeffrey 2040). From kindergarten to higher education, sex experts
and the Kinseyan sex education monopoly are well entrenched (quoted from Jeffrey 2004:
7). Harvey (1998), Craven (2004) and Reisman, writing with Christian conservative lawyer
Mary McAlister (2011) all argue that parents have been replaced as the proper custodians
of sexual knowledge, while children are being indoctrinated with the desirability of sodomy.
Kinseys homosexuality explains what Jones in 1989 refers to as the heterophobia of sex
education: its primary purpose is to break down the childs modesty and then his natural
Despite Kinsey being one of dozens of researchers cited in the appendixes to MPC drafts
(Mattachine Society, 1956: 15-25), peripheral in the thought of MPC architect Herbert
Wechsler (1952: 1097), the narratives invariable ending is that Kinseys perverse sexual
agenda is the sole cause of prospective national extinction (quoted in Reisman 2004;
also Haynes11 2004). And from 1981, also the year that AIDS would claim its first victims in
a country whose venereal disease rates are among the highest in the industrialised
world (Luker 2006: 23), this extinction is epidemiological. Thus, Reisman and McAlister
(2011) wondering how by 1992 more than 7,000 boys and 1,500 girls have died from HIV/
AIDS, answer with two words: Alfred Kinsey. Echoing Reismans earlier arguments
(1995b: 3-6), they argue that the decriminalisation of homosexuals, conflated with minor-
(pre)adolescent boys. Reisman argued that the ensuing high number of child deaths
forced the homosexual lobby to recruit more children, using public sex education and
pornography (1995b: 9-12). A version of this narrative dates back to Edmund Berglers
1948 review: he had worried that Kinseys data on the prevalence of homosexuality would
mean that the scruples of not a few candidates for homosexuality will be torn down by
statistical proofs. Yet after 1981, Kinseys own homosexuality is amalgamated with what
Knight (2000: 203) refers to as the iconographical body panic of a politicised AIDS
epidemic, in which become incorporated the extreme levels of child sexual abuse panic
that emerges in the 1980s (Lee 2009: 30). The body panic of the AIDS crisis becomes a
opportunity (Knight 2000: 203). Ergo, homosexualitys conflation with venereal and
paedophilic motifs litter the discussions of religious right commentators such as Robert H.
nations venereal detriment (in foreword to Reisman and Eichel 1990: vii-viii).
This line of argument informs our understanding of late-20th century American religious
Reisman, the narratives champion, had been invited in 1988 to discuss pedophilia on
Jerry Falwells television broadcast Old Time Gospel Hour, and enjoyed a professorship at
his Christian Liberty University (2017). Her claims concerning Kinsey were echoed and
and Family Research Council, RSVP America, Focus on the Family, American Legislative
Exchange Council, and CWA, and peddled by Christian periodicals like The Southeast
Outlook and Fidelity. Evangelicals had since the 1960s mobilised against public sex
education and gay rights (Martin 1996: 110-115; Durham 2000: 44; Hankins 2008: 141),
yet with the onset of AIDS in the 1980s an alternative discursive repertoire becomes
words of Jewish conservative Don Feder: We homophobes reckon that AIDS is a lifestyle
disease [] you get it from doing certain things that everyone knows are highly hazardous
(1996: 91). Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, key figures of evangelical revivalism, even
entertained the idea of quarantining those who tested HIV-positive (Martin 1996: 243).
LaHaye, is said to have claimed: AIDS will do more to direct America back to the cost of
violating traditional values, and to make America aware of the danger of certain behaviour
12Once-director of the conservative Culture and Media Institute, and affiliate of Christian-right
group Concerned Women for America (CWA)
13 / 40
than anything weve seen (quoted in Martin 1996: 242). In connecting homosexuality to an
epidemiological threat, the presentation of Kinsey never escaped the democratic high
politics of the 1950s - its securitised discourse of conspiracy and McCarthyist characters.
Those who opposed federal funding of AIDS research in the late-1980s and 1990s often
justified themselves by arguing that the public attention around AIDSs was a product of
what Don Feder called the will of the homosexual lobby (1996: 90-91). The idea that
homosexuality was gaining political influence connected with the accusation that Kinsey
had encouraged Nazi pedophile Fritz von Balluseck to contribute his documented diaries
to the project (as argues Craven 2004: 10-11), and therefore a series of publications (like
The Pink Swastika) in the mid-1990s that argued homosexuals had led the rise of fascism
What remains distinctive about 1981, however, is that it constitutes a critical juncture
wherein religious conservatives mobilise a depiction of Alfred Kinsey to fuse into causal
relation the (sexual) practices of the individual and the vitality of the American at large. For
Falwell, the establishment of homosexuality was one of the moral cancers that are
causing society to rot from within (1987: 144). And for Reisman and Mary McAlister, like a
cancer spreading throughout the body, sexual anarchy has spread throughout the fabric of
underpinning a vision of modern politics: the threat of anarchy born from bodily conduct,
and ensuing claims to sovereign power, seen as necessary (1651). As a result, the
resource. Scientific need for bodily regulation becomes the basis for conservative claims to
government. This is suggested by Reismans decision to use as an epigraph for her 1998
book a passage from Will and Ariel Durants 1968 extended reflection on The Lessons of
History, in which it is argued that sexuality is a river of fire that must be banked and cooled
14 / 40
by a hundred restraints if it is not to consume in chaos both the individual and the group.
definition a will to political power, argues that the Russian, German, and French
revolutions were all preceded by an embrace of sexual anarchy (1998: 31), a point tacitly
echoed by Reismans decision to also use as an epigraph to her 1998 book a passage
from Burkes 1791 Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, in which Burke argued
that society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed
somewhere. Sexual liberalism is amalgamated into both German fascism and leftist
In this process, the construction of Kinseys corpus connects with a broader historical
lineage, from the Salem witch trials to the McCarthyist era, in which body panic (reds
under the bed) forms a reference point for relaying threats between the individual and the
collective. Most striking in this configuration is not the presence of overtly religious
after 1981 can be said to have sourced from veritably political problematics just as much
as figures such as Falwell and Reagan are said to have drawn from religious iconography
for political gain (Blumenthal 1987; Hankins 2008: 142-148). The construction of a
Hobbesian bond between corpus and Civitas, which predicates the claim to disciplining or
vernacular of personal integrity, national security and public health, here pivoting on the
Given that Alfred Kinseys conspiratorial depiction constituted a political argument, the
question then becomes: how did science figure? Much of the literature would suggest that
15 / 40
the critique of sexology was ethical in kind. Thus, Mooney argues in The Republican War
on Science that the religious right is motivated by a moralistic agenda (2005: 5). Luker
suggests their views on sex are whatever the Bible says (2006: 136). Noll claims that
from the defenders of modern scientific procedures comes protests about professional
expertise, qualifications, and decorum and from fundamentalists and evangelicals come
protests about the decline of Western morality (2001: 176). One exception appears to be
Alumkal, who observes that the late 20th-century Christian Right devised what he calls a
paranoid science - the mixture of threats and crises with a science which claims to
outdo mainstream science (that is, real science) in factual analysis (such as in intelligent
design and the ex-gay movement13 ) (2017: 8, 15). Yet his argument amounts to the
an alternative reality where religious beliefs are safe from threat, here presumably also a
thinly-veiled defence for notions of sexual morality and gods intention for gender
complementarity (2017: 13, 5). Sexologists affiliated with the Kinsey Institute argue
similarly. Bancroft suggests the Republican hostility to federal funding of sex research
since Kinsey, and even into the 21st-century, was motivated by the concern that the
homosexuality was wrong, compromising prevailing moral values (2004: 21-26). John
modernity (93).
These arguments fall into the methodological pitfalls earlier described: the derivation of
intentionality (what is really meant) from alleged falsity, with the corollary that an
characterise the totality of its politics is a result of the disproportionate skew towards male
exclusively centered around men such as Falwell, Robertson and Reagan have eclipsed a
sustained analysis of discourses that differ from super-church sermons. This skew
precludes understanding the movement that confronted Kinseys legacy after 1981, which
was spearheaded by Judith Reisman, and championed by women like Leslee Unruh,16
Linda Jeffrey, Linda Harvey and the CWA. One 1998 RSVP America campaign
memorandum pledges to use 80,000 CWA members and other mothers to discredit,
debunk and defund the fraudulent sex research of Alfred Kinsey (1-2). This movement
spoke the language of secular critique: as Harvey put it, his research were flawed as
research, since Kinsey used questionable methodology, arguing by way of example that
1,400 of his 5,300 male subjects were imprisoned sex offenders (1998: 14). Female
activists mobilised religious conservatisms discourse of family values, and the traditional
valorisation of women who, as mothers, signify natural custodians of the nations moral
with the 19th-century evangelical revivalist women who, also drawing from their position as
compulsion: temperance and the betterment of vulnerable women, especially sex workers
(see Hardesty 1999: x-xi, 90-95). As one 1996 RSVP America memorandum argues,
mothers need to act to protect their children in school from this bogus view of sexuality,
uprooting the source of authority for todays skyrocketing sexual dysfunctions for the
15Histories which make only fleeting mention of female religious conservative leaders include:
Hunter, 1987; Neuhaus 1987; Capps 1990; Gallagher 2003; Hanks 2008
16
Founder of Abstinence Clearinghouse, an organisation which promotes abstinence-until-
marriage heterosexuality
17 / 40
protection of their own children (1). It is thus proper that the anti-Kinsey campaigner, in
Reismans words, act as both a scholar and as a mother (2011). Understanding how the
discourse on its own terms, in defence of child, family, and state, is the predicate of any
discursive examination.
Against the spoilt backdrop of the techno-utopian promises of public health (Knight 2000:
181), the AIDS epidemic forms a juncture at which the truthfulness of the sexological
liberals take part in stinging critique. Masters and Johnson come under fire in the 1980s for
methodological shortcomings tied to an allegedly hidden moral and political basis, which
Behavior in the Age of AIDS (1988),17 co-authored with Robert Kolodny, is denounced for
feminists such as Byron (1988) and Irvine (1990: 128-129) (see also Mehren 1988; Maier
2009: 323-327). Helen Singer Kaplan is similarly attacked for The Real Truth About
Women and AIDS (1987),18 which critics such as Grover (1988: 3), Pearl (1990), and Wolf
Irvine 1990: 126-129). Disparate groups affront sexological publications by raising the
common cry for politics to be taken out of science. And in this regard, religious
17In which they focus on heterosexuality susceptibility to AIDS, advising both a government
crackdown on prostitution, and that particular segments of the population should be subjected to
mandatory testing
18In which Kaplan advises heterosexual women to only have sex if their partners are tested,
dismissing preventative measures that might otherwise be taken to make sexual activity safer
18 / 40
Yet the major difference between them is that the science religious conservatives were
seeking to redeem had burrowed itself into the political establishment - with profound
implications. Their critiques are crystallised on Surgeon General Everett Koop, himself a
prominent evangelical, and his commission by Reagan in 1986 to write a report on AIDS,
in which he comes to recommend sex education for public elementary schools, as well as
the use of condoms for those not heterosexually monogamous. In response, religious
activists and politicians, most notably Gary Bauer, attribute his position on these issues as
due to his being beholden to political-sexual interests: for example, Richard Viguerie,
echoing the views of conservative leaders like Phyllis Schlafly, labelled him the Surgeon
General of the far left, of the homosexual lobby, disobedient to his boss, Ronald
Reagan (quoted in Martin 1996: 250-251; also Durham 2000: 45; Lindsay 2007: 63-64). In
similar vein, Feder argues that public sex educations deviation from heteronormativity is
mere indoctrination: if objectivity and candour were the goals, it would be taught that the
only way to prevent the transmission of AIDS is premarital abstinence combined with
fidelity in marriage (1996: 54). Thus, he hopes that anything else will be considered as
scientific and useful as astrology, phrenology, and tea-leaf reading (1996: 59). Far from
opposing scientific sexology per se, religious conservatives, like other groups, framed
It is only against this backdrop that we can explain why Kinsey has been so often
Bancroft argues Judith Reismans first direct political impact was prompting the opposition
to, and eventual withdrawal of funding from, a series of NICHD19 research surveys in the
late 1980s designed to tackle the AIDS crisis (2004: 10-12). Republicans Jesse Helms and
press secretary having been informed by Reisman that Kinsey had fabricated his data
about homosexuality (2004: 10-12). It is therefore no surprise that Mike Pence, once-
majority of Hoosiers to think that in difficult budgetary times we're spending money on the
study of sexual arousal (quoted in Bancroft 2004: 28).20 As Dannemeyer argued: Imagine
the political landscape if any one demographic grouping were to increase their rank from
10% of the population to 15% or 20% AIDS had nothing to do with this except as a thinly
veiled excuse (quoted in 2004: 10). This opposition is derived not from moralism, but the
need to separate politics from science. After all, Reismans 1981 paper had been
sought to separate what she later termed science (based on observation and
1981, she had spoken of shared scientific principles, arguing that the influence of
between scientific objectivity and truth on the one hand and the mis-information of the
growing child-sex-abuse lobby on the other hand, testament to the continued influence of
particular interest groups beyond the tax-exempt organisations of the 1950s (1). She
In the main, the anti-Kinsey movement decries his research because the science was
bad, and because he was a moral revolutionary in scientists clothing (quoted from
Jeffrey 2004: 2; see also Craven 2004: 6; West 2007: 279-286). The religious conservative
20In a 2004 article by Stephen Adams, published in Focus on the Familys magazine Citizen,
Pence is listed as one of the Indiana Congressman willing to challenge the Kinsey Institute's
refusal to make public its records of child sexual abuse (23).
20 / 40
discourse takes this form precisely because, as Irvine argues, Kinsey was committed to
whose success scientific rigor, and perhaps more important, on his ability to convince the
public of the stringency and objectivity of his approach (1990: 22-3). His publications
which strictly avoids social or moral interpretations - for they are not part of the scientific
method (1948: 4-5). Kinseys work is rebuked for having failed what Reisman calls acid
test for the validity of scientific findings: for her, the possibility of independent researchers
to replicate the results (1981: 2), and, for Jones (1989: 35) basic verifiability (on which
Further, the critique of Kinsey becomes synecdochic for sexology at large. Not only does
Reisman claim the entire field rests on him (1998: xxiii), but in her 1981 paper claimed
attendance here, explaining why allegedly the notion that intergenerational sex could be a
positive experience has become dogma among prominent academic sexologists - for
example, not only in the work of the IASHS21 but that of Masters and Johnson (quoted
from 1-8; see also Reisman 1995b: 15-16; Harvey 1998: 14-15). Following Jones, Kinsey,
like Freud before him, was capable of projecting the image of a scientist interested in
discovering the fact of the matter by concealing his own sexual motivations (1989: 30, 33).
But it is Kinseys own repressed homosexuality that gave him the consuming desire to
subvert sexual norms, and it his objectivity which those outside the Kinsey Institutes
charmed circle are expected to believe on the blindest of blind faith (quoted from Jones
1989: 33). The point is even extended to the social sciences at large: Margaret Mead, for
clever rationalisation of her own adultery (for example Jones 1993: 16; Wattenberg 1996).
Ben Wattenberg22 thus quotes James Wilson as suggesting that, in this sense, social
science has thus maintained the reformist normativity it has had since the 1890s (1996).
The person of Alfred Kinsey becomes the case par excellence of one path in the
intellectual life - the one which, allegedly like Freud and Martin Luther, is said to conform
truth to desire, rather than, like St. Aquinas and Augustine, conform desire to
truth (Jones 1993: 11). Intellectual products are a function of the moral life of the thinker,
and without a moral life they can only be the projection of inner need (Jone 1993: 16).
The force of sexual addiction means one of the key modern temptations enters the
deviance the norm (Jones 1989: 27). Given that modernity is rationalized lust, the best
explication of the theories of modernity comes from the biographic details of its
scientific interest (Jones 1989: 33). This line of argument presents itself as a revision of
Judge Palmieris 1957 ruling, in favor of the Kinsey Institute, when its possession of erotic
material led the government to charge it of obscenity: that due to his scientific inquiry, the
appeal of the material to the scientist is not to his prurient interest and [] therefore, the
material is not obscene (quoted in a 1957 photostat from FBI 2010a: 19-20).
knowledge is at the same time the will to power over the bodies of others. Homosexuality
operates as a total composition, being at the root of all an individuals actions because it
22Wattenberg served in various capacities under Republican presidents from Reagan onwards,
and was a senior fellow at conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute
22 / 40
was their insidious and indefinitely active principle - the truths produced by an individual
necessarily dictated by the truth of an individual (Foucault 1976: 43). Yet the anti-Kinseyan
campaign diverges from Foucault in a significant manner. Foucault, like Horkheimer and
Adorno before him, had implored his readers to abandon a whole tradition that allows us
to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended (1975:
27). Instead, the campaign follows Josef Pieper, who had argued in his 1957 The Silence
of St. Thomas that the acquisition of truth requires not merely the brain, but a condition
of purity: for only he who wants nothing for himself [sic], who is not subjectively
interested, can know the truth (quoted in Jones 1993: 16-17). Far from theistic modes of
secularization, which is what historian of science Andrew Jewett suggests (2011: 367-368)
Reisman discloses to her readers, in a 2011 article entitled A Personal Odyssey to the
Truth, that her own campaign against Kinsey was prompted after only a local boy molested
her daughter. Thus, as Jones argued, with reference to Kinsey: Sex is an appetite of
As Jewett argues in the case of the radical left of the 1960s (2012: 365-368), the religious
right sought to argue that scientific pretences of neutral expertise were only a cover for
clearly normative purposes - meeting the instrumental needs of the governing complex,
here conceived of as sexual. Yet there is a crucial difference between critics of scientific
rationality like Foucault and the religious conservatives. The latter agree with Horkheimer
23 / 40
and Adorno that science has no substantial goals, and is thus at the service of every
natural interest (1944: 68-69), but in the final count they do believe that Science can be
redeemed from power, and indeed can redeem power itself. They side with Immanuel
Kant, against the likes of Horkheimer and Adorno, in arguing that science can have an
awareness of itself - perhaps with effective democratic supervision (1944: 66). In doing
so, they suggest, like Jewett (2012: 372), that the meaning of science is fluid, contingent,
and contested, and that it is the institutional details of the instantiation of scientific inquiry
- the funding structures, the choice of problems, the manner of decision-making [] - that
make the difference. And, unlike Foucault, this flexibility gives them the conceptual space
for what Canovan terms a redemptive politics (1999: 8): a salvific democratic vision,
By the 1990s, the anti-Kinsey movement amounts to the claims that homosexuality has
distorted the establishment of science, and, with it, undermined Americas democratic
institutions. The American Law Institutes revision of sexual penal codes in the 1950s and
cause, is said to have been a covert and undemocratic method for elites (quoted from
Jeffrey 2004: 9). And the continued influence of a corrupt scientific establishment has been
confirm that the accused had the capacity to both appreciate the criminality of their
conduct and to conform their conduct to the requirements of law (ALI 1962: 61). In both
ruling and remedy, juridical authority has been placed in unelected and complicit
psychiatric experts, substituting the judge and the power of the uniquely American jury of
ones peers system (quoted from Jeffrey 2004: 10-11). Scientific technocracy is framed as
science turn out to be wrong: here Kinseys nefarious sexual agenda is lumped together
with the eugenics movement, theories of racial hierarchy, and even corporate propaganda
Contrary to what has been suggested by Stephen Thomas in 1995, in the context of the
AIDS crisis after 1981, religious conservatives did not thus merely impute responsibility for
the disease to its culpable victims. By placing homosexuality at the core of the sexological-
structures antithetical to democracy. This facilitates the argument that rescuing of nation-
state from its body panic requires a politics that will redeem both science and
government itself. But on a broader level, what is such a politics said to look like? The
the promise of a better world through action by the sovereign people, a yearning that the
state is our state, not something altogether alien to us (1999: 11-13); in Falwells words, it
is a responsive government which is truly of the people, by the people, for the people,
instead of in spite of the people (1987: 118). The allegations against Kinsey become the
cornerstone of a campaign whose strategies range from publicity and parent activism on
public school textbook boards to lobbying and protesting outside state and federal
legislatures (as indicated by campaign overviews issued by RSVP America in 1996 and
1997). It is soon after the annual death toll from HIV peaks for all age groups, including
(pre)adolescents, in the early-mid 1990s (CDC 1995: 14; CDC 2001; CDC 2014: 4-5), that
bills against Kinsey are introduced to the Indiana and federal legislatures. In keeping with
navigates are profoundly Republican (Blumenthal 1987: 272-284; Noll 2001: 118; Luker
2006: 18). The campaign seeks to revise what Jeffrey calls bad policy based on bad
25 / 40
science: to amend state penal statutes on criminal responsibility and sexual offense, and
On Capitol Hill, the Child Protection and Ethics I Education Act of 1995 is introduced to the
determine whether the Kinsey Reports were the result of any fraud or criminal
wrongdoing, particularly the systematic sexual abuse of children (US Congress 1995). If
affirmative, the bill entailed the total rescinding of public funds to agencies, universities, or
elementary and secondary schools that, without indicating the unethical and tainted
nature of the Kinsey reports, distribute research which directly or indirectly relies on
Kinseys work (US Congress 1995). The bill is not enacted, however, and shelved at the
end of congress (Haase 1997). In contrast, in Indiana, the state of the Kinsey Institute,
public funds be prohibited from reaching institutions that further the claims made by Alfred
Kinseys research (quoted in Tsang 2013: ix). The bill calls for the disclosure of the sex
crimes against children Kinsey committed in the name of science while promoting the
ideology [] that all sexual contacts are legitimate (quoted in Reisman 2010). Similar bills
are introduced into the turn of the millennium, but fail to obtain legislative force.
The legislative initiatives proposed from 1995 onwards are underpinned by a reasoning
that purports to defend both ethical and scientific practice. Far from a religious-moralistic
antagonism to science, they assume a secular belief in a scientific ethic. Ergo, Reisman
argues that Americans bestow authority - and billions of tax dollars - upon science in the
26 / 40
belief that scientists will make important contributions to society (1995a: 1); in 2004 she
refers to the international' scientific imperative, as it was affirmed by the Nuremberg trials,
to refrain from harmful experimentation on humans - even one wants to write an original
paper on blood coagulation. But for science to benefit society, there has to be political
regulation. In her 1995 background briefer to the Stockman bill, Reisman proposes The
Scientific Research Integrity Act of 1996 (15). She calls for the prohibition of experiments
conducted without the informed consent of the human subjects, particularly children, as
well as the dissemination of data derived therefrom (1995a: 1). Her argument can only be
and federal government to draft codes of ethics and regulation concerning human
experimentation (Cole 1983: 109-116). Her draft proposes to address not only Kinseys
Agencys proposed use of data from Nazi experiments on the health effects of fertilisers,
CIA-sponsored LSD experiments which spanned the two decades after the 1950s, and the
infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiments which lasted four decades after 1932 (1995a: 2).
And it is in this vein that Reisman demands an apology from President Bush for the Kinsey
Reports - citing the strong precedent in respective apologies made by Ford and Clinton
for the CIA and Tuskegee (2004a). Against that backdrop, her critique of Kinsey is part of a
broader secular campaign for ethical experimentation. Indeed, her watershed 1981 paper
was intended not only as a discourse, but as an advocacy instrument, calling for
added).
The aims of the anti-Kinsey campaign are best understood as a response to post-
of the affinity between Reason and power (here conceived of as sexual) (1944: 67). Yet
the campaign does so by mobilising precisely that Enlightenment reasoning the likes of
Horkheimer and Adorno had so famously decried. As Bray has argued (2011: 136), they
had seen in the Marquis de Sades cold-blooded protagonist Juliette what happens when
the credo is science: a strict regulation of emotion that facilitates cruel self-mastery,
conscience (quoted in 1944: 75-57). Yet, Juliettes reasoning is strikingly similar to that of
the religious right: Unless reason takes the reins of government into its hands, emotions
and inclinations will be in control (quoted in Bray 2011: 152); political reasons control of
the carnal passions is equated with the redemption of science, politics and ethics.
scientific malpractice presume a guilty verdict in the emotions inherent to Kinseys alleged
completes the jigsaw puzzle (1989: 34). This is why Reismans briefer to the Stockman bill
(1995: 14), much like Joness writings (1989: 35), plea for access to the Kinsey Institutes
archives, on the basis that the institutes funding from the government necessitates public
accountability. The latter here is euphemistic: a distinctly modern logic imputes to Kinseys
sexuality a power which constitutes it as a matter of public interest. As Jones argues, the
Kinsey Institute refuse to let anyone see the basis of their data: if there were free access
to Kinseys sex history the whole edifice of sex research and sex education would come
tumbling down (1989:33). If the Kinsey Institute is alleged to have withheld information
confirming Kinseys homosexuality from being confirmed, then, as Foucault has it: One
confesses - or is forced to confess (1976: 59). Like the Salem witch trials (see Wilson
1997: 21), the process of an official investigation becomes a political end in itself: it
28 / 40
functions as a ritual in which one recovers and thus purifies the lineage of events, here in
demonstrating that what has occurred is a pollution of the public (the rational, scientific and
scientifico-juridical apparatus (1975; 1976). Yet here the religious conservatives demanded
that the scientific-state establishment itself confesses its Kinseyan homosexual truth. That
this homosexuality might be revealed and disciplined is the basis of their restorative
politics: rehabilitating the public institutions of science and democracy by separating the
will to (sexual) power from the will to (scientific and political) knowledge. In doing so, the
renders it a revelation of the self (Sennett 1977: 4-6). Because of this, a modern society
must become a sexual story telling society, one in which the world of intimate feeling
loses any boundaries (Sennett 1977: 5-6; Plummer 1995: 4-6). Homosexualitys
conceptualisation as already, inherently, the lust for subversion and power, becomes the
horrors where nasty little secrets of desire, greed, or envy are kept locked up (Sennett:
1977: 5-6), an omnipresent phantom (Foucault 1978: 280), the impulse antithetical to
quintessentially modern scientific and political strategy (as argues Foucault 1975; 1976).
Kinsey himself had based his scientific methodology on interview which required the
scientist to become a master of every scientific device and of all the arts by which any
man has persuaded any other man into exposing his activities and his innermost
thoughts (1948: 35). The religious right explicitly appropriated this strategy: as Jones
argues, Kinsey spent his life snooping into the private lives of thousands of people [] yet
no one knows what this mans own sexual orientation was (1993: 106).
29 / 40
rewritten, as has argued Plummer (1995: 144-146). For Plummer, this is a function of the
modern homo narrans: humankind the narrators (1995: 5). He argues with reference to
feminist and gay movements that sexual story-telling is part of what Anthony Giddens
which has progressively weakened the political claims of earlier periods and cultures
embroiled in tradition (1995: 146). Sexual story-telling heralds a new liberalism, a politics
of difference, a radical and plural democracy, which appreciates that there has been the
eclipse of the essence of any one conception of the good life, because the modern world
is now to complex, too pluralistic - and, crucially, neither abstract philosophical thought,
nor notions of pure rational debate, nor science can save us, or, indeed, serve as the
foundation for this politics (for, as he argues, much that has passed in the name of
science over the past two hundred years has been a form of technical control, even
repression) (1995: 146-147). For him, this suggests the Enlightenment is delivering on its
promise that individuals can live with a greater sense of personal control - and, we are
told, those for whom this marks the collapse of civilisation, and who call for a return to
Yet this dissertation has suggested that sexual story-telling in the late 20th-century has
another political significance, one closer to Foucaults view that power operates through
discourse, and his quip that Western man has become a confessing animal (1976: 59). In
tradition does conceive of sexuality through the prism of a conception of science (the very
one which Plummer recognises as repressive) and in doing so also seeks to make good
homosexual desire antithetical to scientific rationality and the democratic good. In Freudian
control an impulsive id that has overpowered a rationalistic ego. Sexual story-telling thus
Conclusion
The religious rights rise in the second half of the 20th-century is often presented as due to
the end of an era of faith in science, allegedly the 1960s, as science and progressive
democratic ideas failed to provide a coherent and compelling source of ethical meaning
(Marsden 2006: 255-256; Jewett 2012: 16, 365-367). By implication, we are thought to be
living in the aftermath of this era: science is said to have lost its cultural authority, even
attested (Marsden 2006: 256). For Marsden, divisions of the establishment over Vietnam,
and the stridency of counterculture, shattered the pragmatist ethics of the New Deal
(2006: 256). For Jewett, the Deweyan belief that democracy could be informed by
scientific endeavour was shaken in the 1960s by the convergence of the politics of
obsessed with military superiority and consumption-driven economic growth (2012: 365).
The rise of religious conservatism since the 1980s is contradistinguished to both scientific
neutrality and the latters democratic critics: its continued influence treated as the
core concerns for proclaiming the Gospel, [] personal piety, and its militant opposition
[] to secularising culture remain largely the same as in the 1920s (Marsden 2006: 231).
31 / 40
Religious conservatism is said to thrive in opposition to modernizing trends (Marsden
2006: 244-245), a way 'beleaguered believers attempt to preserve their distinctive identity
[] in the face of modernity and secularization (Ruthven 2004: 8). Politically, it is treated
as antithetical to the American democratic tradition, a crusade against pluralism and the
separation of church and state (Cantor 1994: 1; Ruthven 2004: 8). It allegedly equates
American politics with Judeo-Christian principles which oppose a secularist and alien
faith that is corrosive to the well-being of families (quoted from Gushee 2004: 41; also
Noll 2001: 190). Thus, religious fundamentalisms motivational energy involves instincts
and impulses that run contrary [] to the spirit of democracy, as its attempt to synthesise
religious and political convictions assumes a cosmic battle between good and evil that is
impossible to reconcile satisfactorily with the inviolate democratic conviction that the basic
In contrast, I have argued that conflictual models of the religious right and modern
American culture are critically misleading in their capacity to explain the strategies of the
political dynamic that operated in the late 20th-century, and then into our own. After 1981,
significant individuals and organisations within the movement grounded their politics in
precisely a defence of scientific rationality and democracy, drawing political traction from
the discursive iconography of the AIDS crisis body panic. As I have shown, its opposition
modern culture by revealing and disciplining the compulsions of homosexuality. This was
the essence of their conservatism, which can therefore be said to have been at least as
much a scientific and democratic conservatism as a religious one. That the relationship
between science and religion cannot be wholly characterised by conflict is now a long-
established premise in the theological literature (for example Watts 1998: 7-14; Drees
32 / 40
1996: 54; Harrison 2010: 4). Yet this dissertation presents a novel contribution in
In the American context, the prewar Deweyan faith in scientific democracy looms large on
theorisations of science and democracy, as the belief that an open scientific culture could
enrich democratic practice (Jewett 2012: 15). Against that backdrop, Jewett argues that it
was the high politics of postwar America, which gradually integrated science into the state
apparatus, that meant that by the McCarthy era of the early 1950s, few science-minded
scholars openly sought to transform American public culture (2012: 15). Yet this
dissertation has nuanced this history in demonstrating that a movement also came in
1981, reaching its crescendo in the 1990s, which by virtue of its homophobia continued to
believe scientific and democratic practices were so entwined. Yet by attributing to both an
3). Postwar scientism therefore cannot be juxtaposed to prewar Deweyan beliefs in the
way Jewett suggests: scientism came to form the normative standard for a new scientific
It has been argued that John Deweys case for a scientific humanism, championing the
cultural value of science for a progressive intellectual and democratic culture, had by the
mid-1940s splintered into two strands (Durbin 2004: 318). There were those who, in an
Enlightenment tradition, tended to see science as an alternative to religion and its dogma
(Durbin 2004: 318). And there were those who became anxious to reassert the wisdom of
traditional religion, and for whom secular culture culminated in scientism - an ideology
based on the assumption that [] anything not scientific was antiquated and
33 / 40
irrelevant (Durbin 2004: 318). Yet this dissertation has shown that a politics emerged in
the 1980s that was neither of these. It did not contradistinguish religious moralism to
scientific rationality, and did believe that scientific rationality could rescue democratic
government from venereal extinction, if democracy could rescue it from the compulsions of
homosexuality. It hoped to make good the promises of secular, modern American culture.
And that a disciplinary public policy concerning sexuality lays at the heart of the Trump-
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