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Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Body panic in late 20th-century America 4

3. The science of religious conservatism 15

4. The politics of confession 24

5. Conclusion 30

Bibliography

Primary sources 34

Secondary sources 38

Word count: 10575


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Introduction

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

diversity of morally conservative Americans as a powerful force in the electoral process -

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

clearer than as regards scientific sexology: the endeavour to accumulate an objectively

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

interviews, claimed to have discovered the pervasiveness of homosexuality in America,

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

1 The trial sought to challenge the teaching of evolution in public schools


2 For example, after researchers Masters and Johnson observed sexual intercourse in their
laboratory (Maier 2009: 172-173)
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their conclusions, often supporting heteronormative models of sexuality, contrasted

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

been spun by his hands.

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

around sexualities (Carver and Mottier 1998: 5).

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;
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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

relationship to the production of knowledge, as I will demonstrate.

I argue that a political history of the campaign against Alfred Kinsey, as it occurred both in

discourse and praxis, can contribute to a revised understanding of religious conservative

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

political implications? This dissertation provides compelling answers to these questions by

grounding itself in empirical sources (archival, journalistic and governmental) which,

though largely drawn from online databases, have rarely been analysed in conjunction with

one another, if at all.

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

the decision to construe Alfred Kinsey as a homosexual child-abuser constituted a political

argument which discursively connected the health of the individual body and the body

politic (Knight 2000: 203).

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
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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

depended on a paradigm of truth as attainable only through rational objectivity, in contrast

to postmodern epistemologies which consider the production of knowledge to be

inextricable from power.

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

defend the nation-state depended on the promise of reversing private subjectivitys

contamination of scientific and political truth. I will demonstrate that this promise was

predicated on a politics of confession underpinned by a distinctly modern valorisation of

Reason over and above the carnal passions.

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

anti-Kinsey campaign challenge standard histories of religious conservatism as

antagonistic to the epistemology and politics of late-20th-century American modernity.

Secondly, this campaign is best understood as a later permutation of Deweyan prewar

debates, which had also problematised the relationship between science, religion and

democracy.

Body panic in late 20th-century America

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
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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

population engages in both heterosexual and homosexual activities [] in the course of

their adult lives (Kinsey et al.: 656-660). Reviewers from the American Statistical

Association established almost immediately that the Kinsey Reports contained key errors:

a host of unsubstantiated assertions, a sampling size inadequate for generalisation, and

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-

century debates about the post-1981 allegations had reached an impasse.

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)
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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:

193), doing so by framing questions of causality, agency, responsibility, and

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
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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

fundamental role of language in defending power relations and in creating new

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

recursively configured as a threat to national security, in a process which renegotiated the

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

which inducted Kinsey as one of America conspirators. He became what Hofstadter in

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,

worried that Kinseys conclusions pertaining to homosexuality will be politically and

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

5 These declassified records were only made available online in 2010


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allegedly subversive influence was investigated in 1952 by the Reece Committee. In this

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

distinction so as to divert public consciousness away from capitalist exploitation (quoted

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

tax-exempt wealth. For example, responding to Hoovers expressed interest in the

security aspects of funds and foundations, a 1959 FBI memorandum argues that

organisations like the Rockefeller Foundation exert tremendous influence on Americans

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)

may have contributed favourably to [] their (the childrens) later socio-sexual

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
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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

accusation of political subversiveness is linked with sexual deviance is a staple of

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

dangerous as communists, but communists themselves were often portrayed as

effeminate seducers who undermined family life (Irvine 1990: 33).

What abruptly changes with Judith Reismans 1981 public attack is not the threat posed by

Kinseyan research, but its reconceptualisation as being motivated by his alleged

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

Kinsey presents measurements testifying to the sexual capacity of infants and

preadolescents: stimulation of arousal, frequency of masturbation or intercourse, and

quality of orgasm (1948: 163-180). Reisman alleges that the measurements were

produced through the abuse hundreds of infants [] in pedophile biased, unmonitored

scientific experiments (1981: 1), in which Kinsey either directed pedophiles to abuse

children, or did so himself, as he sought to justify the paedophilic urges religious

conservatives equivocate with homosexuality; Linda Harvey, founder of Christian right

organisation Mission: America, even contends that Kinseys sexualisation of children is the

foundation of the normalcy of homosexuality (1998). Reisman (1998: 165-169) is joined

by Christian blogger Michael Craven (2004: 9-10), Dr. Linda Jeffrey (2004: 4),7 and John

7Writing a report commissioned by the American Legislative Executive Council (ALEC) - an


organisation which drafts and propagates conservative model state legislation
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West (2007: 284-285),8 among others, in arguing that as part of this project the team

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

also extended to education through government-funded SIECUS,10 founded to lobby for a

public sex education modelled on Kinseyan precepts of non-heteronormative sex and

preadolescent sexual availability as proven by data procured by child-abuse (see Reisman

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

aversion to homosexual activity (34).

8 Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute (center for intelligent design)


9 Defined as sexual activity with a person below the legal age of consent
10Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, an organisation which
promotes safer sex, rather than abstinence-only curricula
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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-

attracted adults, has resulted in an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases among

(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

moment in which epidemiological or conspiratorial connections between individual and

nation-state are renegotiated, a process whose control constitutes a veritable political

opportunity (Knight 2000: 203). Ergo, homosexualitys conflation with venereal and

paedophilic motifs litter the discussions of religious right commentators such as Robert H.

11 Ray Haynes was a Californian Republican senator


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Knight12 (2003; 2004) and Michael Craven (2004). As a senior professor of Fuller

Theological Seminary, John H. Court, argues, Kinseys false conclusions pertaining to

preadolescent sexuality has become the springboard of homosexual advocacy, to the

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

conservatism because it was not fringe to broader conservative efforts to defend

reproduction, heterosexuality, and marriage as pillars of a healthy American nation. Judith

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

championed by major Christian conservative advocacy organisations like Liberty Council

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

prominent: homosexuality not as a moralised evil but an epidemiological error. In the

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).

Newt Gingrich, appearing at a 1985 conference sponsored by evangelical minister Tim

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)
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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

in Weimar Germany (Durham 2000: 56).

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

society (2011). Such metaphors reveal straightforwardly Hobbesian connections

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

religious rights own longstanding sexual conservatism constitutes an intensified political

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.

Similarly, Colonel Ray, suggesting that homosexuality is because of its subversiveness by

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

revolution, totalitarianism and anarchy, always antithetical to American democracy.

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

iconography, so much as its relative absence. Religious conservatisms political currency

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

ordering unruly bodies, becomes a political resource, articulated in a secular-scientific

vernacular of personal integrity, national security and public health, here pivoting on the

threat of homosexual contagion.

The science of religious conservatism

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
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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

same: he portrays the appropriation of scientific discourse as a mere attempt to produce

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

established prevalence of homosexual behaviour would undermine the belief that

homosexuality was wrong, compromising prevailing moral values (2004: 21-26). John

Gagnon14 refers to the conservative enemies of Kinsey as enemies of secular

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

engagement with political-discursive strategy is precluded. While moralism certainly is a

13 Advocates therapy to convert homosexuals into heterosexuals


14 Senior researcher at the Kinsey Institute from 1959 to 1968
16 / 40
significant element of post-1981 religious revivalism, the way in which it has come to

characterise the totality of its politics is a result of the disproportionate skew towards male

preacher-figures, and their rhetoric, in the historical literature:15 historiographies almost

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

boundaries and future (Yuval-Davis 1997), to reoccupy sciences discursive territory.

Therefore, the anti-Kinsey campaign is best understood as forming a historical continuity

with the 19th-century evangelical revivalist women who, also drawing from their position as

moralised agents, organised on issues problematised as pertaining to male sexual

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

flexibility conservative family values served a political engagement with scientific

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

establishment is questioned - and not just by conservatives. Scientists, feminists, and

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

feminists identify as (hetero)sexist (Morrow 2008: 39-41). Their Crisis: Heterosexual

Behavior in the Age of AIDS (1988),17 co-authored with Robert Kolodny, is denounced for

its conservative ideology, tacit homophobia, and profit-oriented scaremongering by

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

(1990) decry as unfounded misanthropism, heterosexism and conservatism (see also

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

conservatives mirrored their liberal counterparts.

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

themselves as rescuing it from the subjectivities of political ideology.

It is only against this backdrop that we can explain why Kinsey has been so often

mobilised in opposition to sexological surveys (Grundmann 2005: 4; Larson 2004).

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

William Dannemeyer, to which he imputes the most responsibility, believed it was an

19 National Institute of Child Health and Human Development


19 / 40
opportunity for homosexuality to once again exaggerate its prevalence, Dannemeyers

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-

Congressman of Kinseys own state of Indiana, argued: It would be offensive to the

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

presented to that years World Congress of Sexology - not a church congregation. It

sought to separate what she later termed science (based on observation and

experimentation) and scientism (quasi-scientific techniques or justifications) (2004b). In

1981, she had spoken of shared scientific principles, arguing that the influence of

pedophile propaganda constitutes a violation of scientific ethics - a conflict of interests

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

decries mercantile pseudo-science, as it defames the entire scholarly community, and

tends to implicate us all (1981: 1; emphasis added).

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

the value-free objectivity of his approach, presenting himself as a pioneer of research

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

designate whole sections to scientific methodology and demonstrating his statical-

taxonomical expertise: he describes his work as an objective, fact-finding investigation,

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

score sex research la Kinsey is said to rank just below phrenology).

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

paedophilic-homosexual interests have funded many of the respected sexologists in

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

21 Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality


21 / 40
example, is suggested to have in her theses on cultural relativism merely produced a

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

picture: the temptation to rationalize [] to use the intellect, or science, to make

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

proponents (Jones 1993: 17); in Kinseys case, it is sexual compulsion masquerading as

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).

Rather, the production of scientific sexological knowledge is perceived as having operated

according to schemas of Nietzschean-Foucauldian savoir-pouvoir, in which the will to

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

conservatism challenging sciences value-neutrality amid widespread fears about

secularization, which is what historian of science Andrew Jewett suggests (2011: 367-368)

the anti-Kinsey movement campaigns precisely to establish sciences rational

disinterestedness. It implicates itself in the strategic paradox of a political project in pursuit

of an soi-disant epistemology separated from power. It is against this backdrop that

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

unusual power, especially when it is not properly controlled - undisciplined, it leads

naturally to compulsive behaviour, and compulsive sexual behaviour is the antithesis of

rationality (1989: 27; emphasis added).

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,

premised here on the secular redemption of scientific epistemology.

The politics of confession

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

early 1960s, of which Kinseys homosexually-motivated perversion of science were the

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

guaranteed by the MPCs stipulation that criminal responsibility requires psychologists to

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

anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic, its encroachment making the American nation


24 / 40
susceptible to the disastrous results that ensue when experts claiming to speak for

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

(quoted from West 2007: x, 361-369).

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-

state establishment, the anti-Kinsey movement also imputes responsibility to political

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

answer is presented as a popular-democratic resurgence - what Canovan describes as a

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

the broader religious conservative movement, the channels of legislative influence it

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

to implement abstinence-only heteronormative public educational curricula, on the

assumption that political ideologies should never be represented as science to vulnerable

school children (quoted from Jeffrey 2004: 14).

On Capitol Hill, the Child Protection and Ethics I Education Act of 1995 is introduced to the

House of Representatives by Steve Stockman, having been cosponsored by fifty-one of

his fellow Republicans (US Congress 1995). It demands a federal investigation to

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,

Concurrent House Resolution No. 16 is passed in 1998 (Haase 1997). It recommends

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

understood against the backdrop of public revelations of multiple government-sponsored

non-consensual experiments in the 1970s, which had prompted professional associations

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

sexual experiments conducted on children, but targets the Environmental Protection

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

appropriate investigation and action in defense of children, of science [] (2; emphasis

added).

The aims of the anti-Kinsey campaign are best understood as a response to post-

Enlightenment critiques of scientific rationality, as famously articulated by Horkheimer and


27 / 40
Adorno: that there is no necessary affinity between Reason and ethics, not least because

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,

what de Sade had referred to as an indifference that is free of pangs of

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.

Religious conservative calls for an investigation into unethical experimentation and

scientific malpractice presume a guilty verdict in the emotions inherent to Kinseys alleged

homosexuality. As Jones argues, in Kinseys case homosexuality is the piece that

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

democratic) by the private (the subjective, instinctive and homosexual).

For Foucault, to confess ones subjectivity was a compulsion wrought by an itself-sexless

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

religious right bestows upon homosexuality a psychological primacy which necessarily

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

anchor for a confessional-rational politics that aims to reveal it as inherently a cabinet of

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

Reason, the subjectivity antithetical to science and democracy. Confession operates as a

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

[S]exual story telling is a political process in which contemporary politics is being

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

terms emancipatory politics: the diversity of stories attests to a democratising impulse

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

traditional values or family values, have no grasp of modernity (1995: 146).

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

contrast to Plummers emphasis on the emancipatory potential of narration, the other

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

the promises of Enlightenment. Sexual confession, or story-telling, here is not a


30 / 40
deliverance from the straitjacket of Reason. It redeems modernity by revealing the

homosexual desire antithetical to scientific rationality and the democratic good. In Freudian

terms, it offers as an answer to Kinseys person and politics a proverbial superego, to

control an impulsive id that has overpowered a rationalistic ego. Sexual story-telling thus

forms the linchpin of a modern disciplinary politics.

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

among intellectuals, as the popularity of Thomas Kuhns Structure of Scientific Revolutions

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

autonomy with an apparently servile scientific establishment, as radicals confronted the

hypocrisy of claims of value-neutrality by researchers who embedded in a government

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

resilience of a premodern anachronism. It is argued that conservative evangelicalisms

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

fact about the human condition is equality (Capps 1999: 6, 213).

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

to homosexuality permitted it to tie a defence of laboratory and ballot-box. In doing so, it

championed an Enlightened politics of confession which defended these twin pillars of

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

demonstrating how this is also true in the American political domain.

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

ideal of disinterested rationality, the anti-Kinsey campaign was scientistic in Jewetts

sense of an epistemological and methodological approach in which investigators aim at

value-neutrality by rigidly suppressing their emotions and normative commitments (2012:

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

democracy (2012: 16-19).

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-

Pence ticket is testament to how deep-rooted this politics remains.


34 / 40
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