Wingnuts say “Baa” to Kinsey

The forces of conservatism are showing their independent minds regarding the new movie Kinsey, and it’s ad hominem ad nauseum. The essence could be distilled thus:

There’s a new film about Alfred Kinsey out. I haven’t seen it, but Judith Reisman tells me that he was worse than Hitler. He made all his stuff up, and the stuff he didn’t make up was acquired unethically. His data was also flawed, because he was a bad person, although the idea of citing other studies on sexuality or undertaking new research never occurred to Reisman and so is of no interest to me. Because of Kinsey’s work, gay people don’t feel ashamed and dirty, and people started masturbating. This movie is propaganda from godless Hollywood meant to corrupt our youth – we should boycott Fox.

Well, OK, not the last four words. But that’s the herd thinking from the wingnutily correct. We’ve already covered Ted Baehr, who kicked off on the subject:

Recently, the New York Times had an article admitting that Alfred Kinsey made a lot of mistakes in his research on human sexuality, but the article commended Kinsey for showing that all men masturbate and the majority of people are bisexual.

…Well, a whole generation has bought the Kinsey lie, including the author of the New York Times article. And, the fact that just one person does not do this would mean that his blanket statement that “everyone does it” is a self-destructive lie…a Jewish grandmother and researcher, Dr. Reisman, has shown that the addictions that Kinsey promoted are just a bunch of lies that no one has to fall prey to in their own life.

Concerned Women for America also chimes in:

According to early reports, the movie, directed by homosexual activist Bill Condon, glosses over the stunning fact that much of Kinsey’s work has been revealed as fraud, and that he aided and abetted the molestation of hundreds of children in order to obtain data on “child sexuality.”

Kinsey’s work has been instrumental in advancing acceptance of pornography, homosexuality, abortion, and condom-based sex education, and his disciples even today are promoting a view of children as “sexual beings.” Their ultimate goal: to normalize pedophilia, or “adult-child sex.”

…We owe a great debt to Dr. Judith Reisman, who has labored for three decades to expose the truth about Alfred Kinsey and the ongoing effort by Kinsey-connected groups to use bad science to assault the moral order of marriage and family.

“According to early reports”, eh? Glad CWA didn’t soil itself by actually watching the movie. CWA also announces its support for Restoring Social Virtue and Purity to America (RSVP), an anti-Kinsey lobby group run by Eunice Ray, a former member of the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Service.

The baton is then passed to David Kupelian, vice-president of WorldNetDaily, in a lengthy piece. Kupelian takes us back to the halcyon days of the 1950s, when:

Divorce was rare, abortion and homosexuality were “in the closet” and out of view of polite society. It was the age of “Ozzie and Harriet,” “Father knows best” and “Leave it to Beaver.” Classics like “Ben-Hur” and “High Noon” were box-office favorites, and C.S. Lewis was publishing his beloved adventure book series, “The Chronicles of Narnia.”

“Ben-Hur”? The film with that homoerotic javelin scene scripted by Gore Vidal? But Kinsey ruined that innocent era. Moreover, Reisman has shown that Kinsey encouraged paedophiles to abuse children and

Reisman is a world-renowned expert and scholar on this subject, has been a consultant to three U.S. Department of Justice administrations, the Department of Education and the Department of Health and Human Services, and is sought worldwide to lecture, testify and counsel regarding fraudulent sex science. She is speaking the awful truth here.

…Like the socialists, progressives, Darwinists, atheists, humanists and assorted other God-deniers that paved the way for him, Kinsey regarded man as an animal – and only an animal…Read what “The Satanic Bible” says about man and sex, and note how familiar and mainstream it sounds.

Yes, if people are having sex it’s because of the Darwin-Marx-Kinsey-LaVey axis.

Next up, Illinois Leader media critic Arlen Williams (thanks to Jesus’ General for the link):

A movie is now being shown that promotes one of the most evil and destructive figures in the 20th Century. The setting: not Berlin, nor Moscow, nor Peking . . . but Bloomington, Indiana.

The real story on Kinsey may be found in numerous places. I am drawing from the 11/12 WorldNetDaily column, “Selling sex in the U.S.A.” by editor David Kupelian and his citation of the findings of Dr. Reisman. I suggest the very informative albeit tortuous read…Celebrate the movie promoting America’s own 20th Century mega-villian!

Yes, Williams has read Kupelian writing about Reisman, so can authoritatively state that Kinsey was a wicked man responsible for all that is wrong with modern society. Who says a “media critic” needs to actually watch some media anyway?

Williams’s deep insights are also echoed by one-time Pulitzer runner-up Ross Mackenzie at Townhall:

First, this year, it was Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” followed by Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Comes now the year’s third culturally divisive flick, “Kinsey” – about sexologist Albert Kinsey, one of the early popularizers of “If it feels good, do it!” Notes Judith Reisman, author of the 1990 book “Kinsey, Sex, and Fraud: The Indoctrination of a People”: The consequences of the dubious Kinsey’s “sexual adventurism include AIDS, sexually transmitted diseases, child sexual abuse, incest, and pornography.” The movie may make him out to be just another guy with – you know – an excess of passion.

Jane Jimenez at Agape Press adds:

…Kinsey’s authority on sexual behavior went virtually unchallenged for 30 years. Then on July 23, 1981, at the Fifth World Congress of Sexology in Jerusalem, a diminutive American psychologist stepped to the podium to present her research findings to a standing-room only session.

Dr. Judith Reisman laid out her charges methodically, presenting slides of Tables 30-34 [in Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male] and analyzing the specific entries which calculated the rates and timed the speeds of orgasms in at least 317 infants and children. How, she challenged the audience, did rape and molestation of children ever make the transition from criminal activity to research? And she rested her case.

Apparently nobody had ever noticed these tables before, hidden in the middle of a bestseller for decades. She concludes:

[Paul Gebhard, Kinsey’s coauthor] gives a thumbs-up to Kinsey — but consider who is behind the thumb. Endorsing fame and adulation for one of the greatest child abusers of the modern world is child’s play for a man unmoved by the “screaming,” “weeping,” and “convulsing” of innocent children.

Considering seeing Kinsey? Don’t.

Meanwhile, Sue Ellin Browder holds up the Catholic end. Browder actually does a better job than the other conservatives, ignoring Reisman in favour of serious academic critics and pointing out serious flaws with Kinsey’s work that I would agree with. However, like the others she is not interested in doing better research, and turns authoritarian demagogue:

Kinsey’s pseudoscience arguably did the most damage through our court systems. That’s where attorneys used the researcher’s “facts” to repeal or weaken laws against abortion, pornography, obscenity, divorce, adultery, and sodomy…The legal fallout from Kinsey’s work continues. The US Supreme Court’s historic decision last year striking down sodomy laws was the offshoot of a long string of court cases won largely on the basis of Kinsey’s research. And 50 years of precedents set by Kinsey’s “false 10 percent” are now being used in states like Massachusetts to redefine marriage.

The main problem with all of the above is not that Kinsey’s work or the movie should not be criticised, but the gaping black hole of anti-intellectualism. As with conservative support for Creationism, the strategy is not really to engage with a complex field of study, but to concentrate attacks on a long-dead figure seen as the founder of an area of research. It is hoped that these attacks will conceal the fact that the attackers actually have no useful new data on the subject in hand worthy of serious consideration. Reisman is a crank whose lawyer deserted her when she tried to sue to Kinsey Institute for defamation and whose dodgy methods have been considered by Miss Poppy Dixon; the uncritical reliance on her work by the various pundits above (in most cases not even used directly!) except Browder exposes this anti-intellectualism ever more clearly (I drew on Miss Poppy’s article on the subject here).

Reisman and her supporters are know-nothings. Reisman is quoted by Daniel Radosh in The New Yorker as saying

One doesn’t measure American sexual habits…That’s not a science.

This attitude can also be seen in a Guardian report on the controversy over the film, in a quote from Family Research Council “director of culture studies” Peter Spriggs:

We know the formula for sexual health, which is sex within a monogamous, lifelong relationship… Studying permutations of it is an effort like Kinsey’s to change the sexual mores of society, so that what most people consider deviant behaviours look more normal.

Kinsey is not really hated because his research was flawed or biased, or because he used a paedophile to get information (at a time when any child who dared to allege sexual abuse by a respected adult would most likely have been dismissed as a liar), but simply because by asking questions he made it a bit more difficult for people to use ignorance as a tool of control.

UPDATE: Yet more of the same from Don Feder in FrontPage.