Moral freedom and sexual values After Bush reelection

Liberated Christians
Cyber Swing/Polyamory Resource Center
Promoting Intimacy and Other-Centered Sexuality

Moral freedom and sexual values
The Religious Right imposing views more after Bush reelection
Kinsey Movie Example
From The New York Times 12/10/04

NEW YORK When they start pushing the panic button over "moral values" at the bluest of TV channels, public broadcasting's WNET, in the bluest of cities, New York, you know America has entered a new cultural twilight zone.
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Just three weeks after the election, Channel 13 killed a spot for the movie "Kinsey," in which Liam Neeson stars as the pioneering Indiana University sex researcher who first let Americans know that nonmarital sex is a national pastime, that women have orgasms too and that masturbation and homosexuality do not lead to insanity.
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At first WNET said it had killed the spot because it was "too commercial and too provocative" - a tough case to make about a routine pseudo-ad interchangeable with all the other pseudo-ads that run on "commercial-free" PBS. That explanation quickly became inoperative anyway. The "Kinsey" distributor, Fox Searchlight, let the press see an e-mail from a National Public Broadcasting media manager stating that the real problem was "the content of this movie" and "controversial press re: groups speaking out against the movie/subject matter" that might bring "viewer complaints."
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Maybe in the end Channel 13 got too many complaints about its own cowardice because by last week, in response to my inquiries, it had a new story: That e-mail was all a big mistake - an "unfortunate" miscommunication hatched by some poor unnamed flunky in marketing. This would be funny if it were not so serious - and if it were an anomaly. Yet even as the "Kinsey" spot was barred in New York, a public radio station in North Carolina, WUNC-FM, told an international women's rights organization in Chapel Hill that it could not use the phrase "reproductive rights" in an on-air announcement.
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In Los Angeles, five commercial TV channels, fearing indecency penalties, refused to broadcast a public service spot created by Los Angeles county's own public health agency to counteract a rising tide of syphilis. Nationwide, the big three television networks all banned an ad in which the United Church of Christ heralded the openness of its 6,000 congregations to gay couples.
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Such rapid-fire postelection events are conspiring to make "Kinsey" a bellwether cultural event of this year. When I saw the movie last spring before its release, it struck me as an intelligent account of a half-forgotten and somewhat quaint chapter in American social history. It was in the distant year of 1948 that Alfred Kinsey, a Harvard-trained zoologist, published "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male," a dense, clinical 804-page accounting of the findings of his obsessive mission to record the sexual histories of as many Americans as time and willing volunteers (speaking in confidentiality) would allow. The book stormed the culture with such force that Kinsey was featured in almost every major American magazine.
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Though a Gallup poll at the time found that three-quarters of the public approved of Kinsey's work, not everyone welcomed the idea that candor might supplant ignorance and shame in the national conversation about sex. The Reverend Billy Graham, predictably, said the publication of Kinsey's research would do untold damage to "the already deteriorating morals of America." Somewhat less predictably, as David Halberstam writes in "The Fifties," The New York Times at first refused to accept advertising for Kinsey's book.
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Such history, which seemed ancient only months ago, has gained in urgency since Election Day. As politicians and the media alike pander to that supposed 22 percent of "moral values" voters, we're back where we came in. Bill Condon, who wrote and directed "Kinsey," started working on this project in 1999 and didn't gear it to any political climate. The film is a straightforward telling of its subject's story, his thorniness and bisexuality included, conforming in broad outline to the facts as laid out by Kinsey's most recent biographers. But the movie, however unintentionally, taps into anxieties that feel contemporary.
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As for the rightist groups that have targeted the movie (with or without seeing it), they are the usual suspects, many of them determined to recycle false accusations that Kinsey was a pedophile.
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But this crowd doesn't just want what's left of Kinsey's scalp. (He died in 1956.) It is pressing for a whole host of second-term gifts from the Bush administration: further rollbacks of stem-cell research, gay civil rights, pulchritude sightings at football games and reproductive rights for women.
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In the case of "Kinsey," the Traditional Values Coalition has called for a year-long boycott of all movies released by Fox. With the hypocrisy we've come to expect, it does not ask its members to boycott Fox's corporate sibling in the Murdoch empire, Fox News. But such organizations don't really care about "Kinsey." The film is just this month's handy pretext for advancing the larger goal of pushing sex of all nonbiblical (see Dave's note at end) kinds back into the closet and undermining any scientific findings, whether circa 1948 or 2004, that might challenge fundamentalist sexual orthodoxy.
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A new Congressional report, spearheaded by the California Democrat Henry Waxman, shows that various fictions of junk science (AIDS is spread by tears and sweat, for instance) have turned up as dogma in abstinence-only sex education programs into which American taxpayers have sunk some $900 million in five years. Right now this is the only kind of sex education that the U.S. government supports, even though science says that abstinence-only programs don't work - or may be counterproductive.
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A recent Columbia University study found that teens who make "virginity pledges" to delay sex until marriage still have premarital sex at a high rate (88 percent) rivaling those who don't, but are less likely to use contraception once they do. It's California that refuses to accept federal funding for abstinence-only curriculums, and that has had a 40 percent falloff in teenage pregnancy over the past decade, second only to Alaska.
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But no matter what the censors may accomplish elsewhere, the culture revolution since Kinsey's era is in little jeopardy: A movie like "Kinsey" will do just fine; the more protests and more publicity, the larger the box office. But if Hollywood will always survive, off-screen Americans are being damaged by the battle over sex that is being played out in real life.
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You see that when struggling kids are denied the same information about sexuality that was kept from their antecedents in the pre-Kinsey era; you see that when pharmacists in more and more states enforce their own "moral values" by refusing to fill women's contraceptive prescriptions; you see it when basic information that might prevent the spread of lethal diseases is suppressed by the government.
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While "Sexual Behavior in the Human Male" was received with a certain amount of enthusiasm and relief by most Americans in 1948, the atmosphere had changed radically by the time Kinsey published his follow-up volume, "Sexual Behavior in the Human Female," just five years later. By 1953 Joe McCarthy was in full throttle, and, as James Jones writes in his judicious 1997 Kinsey biography, ‘‘ultra-conservative critics would accuse Kinsey of aiding communism by undermining sexual morality and the sanctity of the home.’’
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Kinsey was an anti-Soviet, anti-New Deal conservative, but that didn’t matter in an America racked by fear. He lost the principal sponsor of his research, the Rockefeller Foundation, and soon found himself being hounded, in part for his sympathetic view of homosexuality, by J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson. The parallels between that war over sex and our own may have only just begun.
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The New York Times

Dave notes "biblical sex":
There was absolutely nothing wrong with a man having as many wives as he wanted or could afford, concubines, and "common" prostitutes (vs idolatry of the temple prostitutes worshiping the fertility god and goddesses). Common prostitution is often mentioned with no negative inference. Adultery was wrong only for a married women, never wrong for a married man as long as the "other women" was single - not owned by her husband. Adultery was a property right issue not sexual.

David and Solomon, to name but two such major Old Testament figures, had many wives and concubines. As did a great many other "great men of the bible" who were men of God. It was just normal and accepted.

Concubinage was a legally sanctioned and socially acceptable practice in ancient cultures, including that of the Hebrews; concubines, however, were denied the protection to which a legal wives was entitled. . . . . the concubine's status was inferior to that of a legal wife. Her children had certain rights, including support by the father and legitimacy in the event of the marriage of the parents

The religious right "morality" thumpers, want us to return to the Biblical sexuality morality?