Opinion
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November 15, 2018 (LifeSiteNews) – “The Sexual Revolution needs the State because it needs enormous amounts of power to accomplish its impossible objectives,” writes the Catholic intellectual Jennifer Roback Morse. She amply proves this conclusion in The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologies are Destroying Lives and Why the Church was Right All Along, an excellent book that is essential reading for understanding today’s sexual culture wars.   

Morse reviews the Sexual Revolution with its tenet that “[s]exual activity without a live baby as a result is an entitlement for men and women alike” and accordingly “children must accept whatever the adults choose to give them.” The results have been family breakdown, abortion, and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) on a massive scale. This evidences a “simple fact: the Sexual Revolution has harmed millions of people.”

Morse exposes various Sexual Revolution myths. For example, the “Contraceptive Ideology” promises “unlimited, problem-free sex, but this is wishful thinking.” In reality, the “average contraception failure rate hovers around 10 percent.”

While a “Liberationist Narrative” promised increased sexual freedom, Morse notes, freedom has suffered greatly from no-fault divorce’s devastation of families.  

“Involving the family court in the minutiae of family life is hardly the behavior of a minimal government, so beloved by libertarians and many conservatives,” she writes. Americans additionally spend the equivalent of New Zealand’s GDP on broken families.

Morse analyzes that divorce is no panacea for family conflict and its effects on children.  

“People divorce because they believe divorce will end the conflict,” she once stated to a group of family law attorneys. “They burst out laughing. The main part of their business is managing post-divorce conflict.”

Morse similarly debunks the “Gender Ideology” of interchangeable sexes. “People who do manual labor aren’t deluded for a moment that men and women are interchangeable,” she notes. “Men are highly overrepresented in the ‘death professions’ like lumberjacks” and suffer 92 percent of workplace fatalities.

The Sexual Revolution is “at war with the human body, with nature itself, and ultimately with the entire human race,” Morse summarizes. “Sex does make babies. Children do need their parents, and therefore marriage is the proper and just context for both sex and childrearing. Men and women are different.” By contrast, sexual radicals shockingly redefine pedophilia as “intergenerational sex.”

Morse examines how a powerful few produced such radicalism. The “Sexual Revolution…always has been a movement of the elites justifying their preferred lifestyles, imposing their new morality, and, in the process, allowing them unprecedented control over others.” These elites in academia, government, and media “support the Sexual Revolution with a continual flow of propaganda,” such that “[every] TV sitcom showing the happy fatherless family is part of this effort to remake human nature.”

Morse details how the Sexual Revolution’s pedigree could not be more prestigious. The efforts to abolish all contraceptive laws that resulted in the 1965 Griswold v. Connecticut Supreme Court decision became known as the “Yale project” due to heavy Yale University faculty involvement. Meanwhile “no one would have heard of Alfred Kinsey if it weren’t for the Rockefeller Foundation. He would’ve been an unknown bug doctor with a pathological masturbation and pornography problem.”

The Sexual Revolution also has enormous financial resources, Morse notes. For a variety of reasons, “big business is completely at peace with the entire Sexual Revolution. Corporations support Planned Parenthood and sponsor gay pride events.” For example, the “relative instability of marriage also benefits employers. Women can’t count on their husbands to provide for them financially for a lifetime” and therefore emphasize careers.

Yet grassroots people power remains opposed to the Sexual Revolution, as shown to Morse by California’s 2008 Proposition 8 campaign to preserve the definition of marriage as an institution of one man and one woman. Over 5,000 pages of financial contributors supporting man-woman marriage crashed the secretary of state’s webpage with mandated donations reporting.  Meanwhile, same-sex “marriage” supporters totaled merely 6,000 individual contributors.

These counterrevolutionary masses make all the more important that “elites captured the coercive power of the State,” Morse notes. Laws like those in New York City criminalizing “misgendering” references to the actual biological gender of “transgender” individuals indicate the terrifying government power the Sexual Revolution has enabled. “If you can make people afraid to say, ‘Bruce Jenner is a man,’ you can make them afraid to say anything.”

Morse insightfully observes that this “Sexual State” has become

our governing ideology. The government policies implementing the Sexual Revolution now have the priority that peace and prosperity used to occupy in political loyalties and discourse. The revolutionary ideology now holds the place of esteem once held by the Judeo-Christian religions.

Morse analyzes that, “like both Nazism and Communism,” the “Sexual Revolution is a totalitarian ideology,” as the Little Sisters of the Poor Catholic nuns learned the hard way. President Barack Obama’s administration tried to force them to violate their convictions and pay for contraceptive coverage in their healthcare. Clearly the “Sexual State today has absolutely no intention of allowing competing worldviews the space they need to function,” but seeks “to create cultural hegemony, and to wipe out all remaining pockets of resistance.”

Against the Sexual Revolution, Morse notes that the “Judeo-Christian tradition proposes an alternative vision of life.” Analyzing sex from the perspective of asking what obligations children’s rights demand of adults “will end up with traditional Christian sexual morality.” Her feminism entails the “right to get married and stay married, not the right to raise our children alone and to spend larger and larger portions of our lives alone.” And contrary to the narrative of gay activists, same-sex attracted individuals can actually find happiness in chastity.

As with her book, Morse believes that a sexual counterrevolution must begin with reaffirming the truth about human sexuality that the Sexual Revolution strives so hard to suppress:  

Every one of us can do something positive to build up the civilization of love within our own sphere of influence. The first and most basic thing you can do if the sexual revolutionary ideology has harmed you is to tell your story.