Sex, Lies, and Videotape
He called himself a scientist, a pioneer, and the father of a "new biology" that eventually would morph into a worldwide sexual revolution. A tall and distinguished man, Alfred C. Kinsey certainly looked the part of the new American scientist: clean, upstanding, smart. When he wasn't posed behind a desk covered with books and manuscripts, he was photographed with his modest wife and four well-scrubbed children enjoying a summer picnic on the rolling green lawns of Indiana University.
In the eyes of the average citizen of the 1940s, Kinsey was exactly the kind of scientist who made America proud. So when he claimed that new scientific research proved that pornography is harmless, children were sexual from birth, 10 percent of the population is homosexual, and a little fling on the side was good for marriages, who wouldn't believe him?
Kinsey and his staff at the Kinsey Institute published two tomes full of these and other so-called scientific findings: Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1952). Both were sensational best-sellers, due in no small part to the deep pockets of the institute's financier, the Rockefeller Foundation, which managed to keep in place a carefully constructed veneer of respectability around Kinsey.
But when Kinsey died suddenly in 1956, the veneer slowly began to chip away. People started to talk. Private letters were unearthed. Films and photographs emerged. Before long, a whole new side of the genteel doctor from Indiana began to emerge in popular biographies, such as those written by James H. Jones (Alfred C. Kinsey: A Life, W.W. Norton and Co., 1997) and Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy (Sex the Measure of All Things, Indiana University Press, 2000).
It turns out that Kinsey was a pederast who enjoyed the company of adolescent boys well into his college years. Under the guise of "research," he produced professional sex films in the attic of his home using his staff and their families as the cast. A committed atheist, he allowed no Christians or Jews on his staff. His books made no attempt to hide his "grand scheme" to steer society away from its traditional moral standards to one predicated on "free love."
Brave new world
Americans were so enamored with science at the time of Kinsey's debut that they didn't question how a man trained not in psychology but in zoology (with a specialty in gall wasps) could conduct such critical research on human sexuality. Nor did they question how he could quantify his research without having a trained statistician on staff. What was marketed to the public as genuine statistics about the sex lives of "normal" Americans turned out to be founded on data taken from a disproportionate number of incarcerated sex offenders, psychopaths, prostitutes, and pedophiles. Some of these sex offenders were still raping children at the time of their "scientific collaboration" with Kinsey.
Now that these facts about the man behind the sexual revolution have come to light, how can we as a society continue to accept uncritically the conclusions of his "research"?
Unfortunately, it's a bit late to wonder. Extensive damage has been done already.
For instance, a year before Kinsey died, the American Law Institute decided to revise the Model Penal Code. One of its principal authors, Morris Ploscowe, believed in Kinsey's work and felt that it was only "just" to relax the sentencing guidelines for fifty-two major sex crimes. This resulted in early parole for rapists, pedophiles, and other sexual predators. Within thirty years, sex crime rates soared off the charts, and convicted child molesters were allowed to buy homes across the street from elementary schools.
Kinsey's books made millions of Americans rethink their moral habits, including a previously upstanding young college man named Hugh Heffner, who went on to found Playboy, that bastion of American pornography that in turn became a major supporter of the Kinsey Institute. The Kinsey Institute's Sexual Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), founded with seed money from Playboy, is the largest sex-education producer in the country. Kinsey co-authors Wardell Pomeroy, Clyde Martin, and Paul Gebhard all went on to found educational institutes to promote the "new biology," which became the basis for all accredited sex educators in the United States.
The Kinsey-supported sexual revolution was in full swing when Pope Paul VI issued his prophetic encyclical Humanae Vitae in 1968.The Pope warned the world about what would happen if human sexuality were wrenched from its moorings in human love and procreation: Women would become sex objects; abortion rates would escalate; divorces would increase. But the world was too caught up in the revolution to recognize the truth.
Not everyone was fooled, though. Ironically, the slow unraveling of the myths of Alfred C. Kinsey began in earnest in 1966 when a ten-year-old girl was raped by a thirteen-year-old boy. The boy claimed he got the idea from his father's pornography collection. The victim was the daughter of Judith Reisman, a scholar and soon-to-be media expert on the toxic effects of pornography. Reisman found no comfort in the words of well-meaning relatives who said, "You know, Judith, she may have wanted it. After all, children are sexual from birth." Where were they getting these ideas?
Her search for an answer ushered her into a perverse world she never knew existed — the world according to Kinsey — and made her into one of the world's leading authorities on it. Here are the four most destructive myths that were spawned in that perverse world.
Myth #1: Porn
Kinsey was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1894. He was raised in a strict Methodist home during the "Purity Movement," an effort by religious and feminist women's organizations to combat the sex trafficking of young girls, prostitution, public obscenity, and other social vices.
On page 663 of his book Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, Kinsey scornfully dismisses these women and their ideas about pornography: "Local drives against so-called obscene materials . . . are not infrequently instituted by females who not only find the material morally and socially objectionable, but probably fail to comprehend the significance that it may have for most males and for some females."
Kinsey was a heavy user of pornography, which he used to fuel his lifelong obsession with pornography's most common "side effect" — autoeroticism. He claimed that regular engagement in these activities, beginning in childhood, was critical for sexual, physical, and emotional health, especially for homosexuals and "sadistic" males. He believed that pornography should never be considered excessive or pathological.
But retired New York detective Ray Pierce, the founder of the department's Criminal Assessment and Profiling Unit, sees an all-too-real link between pornography and violent crime. Pierce investigated between 750 and 1,000 cases of sexual murder, rape, and adult assault in his career. In those cases, 80 percent of suspects were regular users of pornography.
Moreover, notorious serial killers such as Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy were heavy consumers of pornography. David Berkowitz, known as the "Son of Sam" killer, lived in a rented room that police found filled with pornography and satanic material. The computer owned by David Westerfield, who killed seven-year-old Danielle Van Dam in San Diego in 2002, was loaded with child pornography.
Reisman, who has worked for the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and has authored several books on the subject, writes that:
The widespread availability of limitless varieties of pornographic magazines, videos, and computer graphics has institutionalized an assault on the fabric of our country that is . . . alienating an increasing number of men from real?life women, their wives, and their families (Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences: The Red Queen and the Grand Scheme, Hartline Marketing, 2003).
Like a voice crying out in the wilderness, the Church has long been saying the same thing about pornography. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that it "immerses all who are involved in the illusion of a fantasy world" (CCC 2354).
In recent testimony before the U.S. Senate about the known harmful effects of pornography, Mary Anne Layden, co-director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Therapy, told the Senate: "Research indicates — and my clinical experience supports — that 40 percent of sex addicts will lose their spouse, 58 percent will suffer severe financial losses, and 27-40 percent will lose their job or profession."
Myth #2: Kids
Kinsey claimed that people are sexual "from womb to tomb." His books are filled with tables describing all kinds of sexual responses in children as young as five months. For example, a table appearing in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male entitled "Examples of Multiple Orgasm in Pre-Adolescent Males" presents data taken around the clock from infants and young boys.
"Even the youngest males, as young as two months of age, are capable of such repeated reactions," Kinsey writes. "Typical cases are shown in Table 34. The maximum observed was 26 climaxes in 24 hours (in a 4 year old and a 13 year old)."
How did he get this data?
According to Kinsey, these conclusions were based on statistics gathered from mysterious sources such as "Mr. X" and other "trained observers" who sent him reports about their sexual activities with children. These "trained observers" were later discovered to be pedophiles. "Mr. X" turned out to be Rex King, a man known to have been responsible for the rapes of hundreds of children.
Another consort was the notorious former Nazi and pedophile Dr. Fritz Von Balluseck. Von Balluseck contributed data about his child abuse to Kinsey's research database during the twenty-year period of 1936-1956. Von Balluseck was on trial in Germany for the rape and murder of a ten-year-old girl when correspondence from Kinsey was found in his possession. Kinsey's letters encouraged Von Balluseck to continue sending the results of his "research" on children and even warned him to "be careful."
Considering his sources, one hardly can wonder why Kinsey believed that the vast majority of adult-child sex is harmless. He claimed that adult hysteria over the matter was more harmful than the rape itself. The perpetuation of these outrageous myths has had an enormous impact on the lives of children. Not only has it fueled an ever-growing movement to legalize pedophilia, but it is also behind the graphic sex education allowed in classrooms for children as young as five years.
"Kinsey's philosophy of early childhood sexual development became the standard for today's graphic sex instruction materials in many, if not most, American public, private and parochial schools," Reisman writes. "It is usually camouflaged by such euphemistic captions as sex education, AIDS prevention or awareness, family life, health, hygiene . . . even 'abstinence' education."
Dr. Mary Calderone, the former president of SIECUS, who also served as medical director for Planned Parenthood, once told a group of physicians that making the public aware of the "vital importance of infant and childhood sexuality" was the primary goal of SIECUS.
Myth #3: Affairs
Page 208 of the Model Penal Code cites Kinsey research on adultery as having found that "in an appreciable number of cases, an experiment in adultery tends to confirm rather than disrupt the marriage."
Kinsey was able to make this statement by incorporating data from a large number of sexual deviants into statistics purporting to represent normal behavior. In this way, he arrived at figures showing 85 percent of men and 50 percent of women engaging in premarital sex and 50 percent of men and 40 percent of women being unfaithful to their marriages.
To understand exactly how outrageous these numbers are, compare them to statistically clean studies such as the General Social Survey, which found that more than 80 percent of women and up to 85 percent of men in every age group had no sexual partner other than their spouses while married.
Unfortunately, Kinsey's flawed numbers convinced the authors of the Model Penal Code that laws against fornication, cohabitation, and adultery were largely unjust. The thinking was that legalizing these behaviors would have little negative effect on society because, according to Kinsey, everyone was engaging in them already. The use of Kinsey's flawed data led to the decriminalization of adultery, cohabitation, and fornication. This led to an overall weakening in the institution of marriage, which eventually led to no-fault divorce. More than 50 percent of American marriages now end in divorce.
This massive erosion of the family is only the tip of the iceberg when considering the havoc wreaked upon society by Kinsey and the specious sexologists he spawned, such as the well-known Masters and Johnson and Shere Hite. An explosion in teen pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, cohabitation, and single-parent families is the result.
Myth #4: Gays
Kinsey reported that 37 percent of males had at least one homosexual encounter in their lifetimes, and of that number, 10 percent were exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five. No subsequent study has validated these numbers — and for good reason. Kinsey's data included men he encountered in homosexual bars, bathhouses, and other homosexual networks. Moreover, he padded the data he obtained from other subjects. Because he was convinced that most people denied their homosexuality, he "corrected" their responses to reflect what he felt was a more "honest" answer. He also counted as a homosexual experience any thoughts about homosexuality, either positive or negative. As Reisman aptly writes, Kinsey didn't just massage his numbers; he cooked them.
Nevertheless, his outrageously high numbers are being touted to this day. By relying on his "disgracefully flawed data base," Reisman writes, Kinsey was able to advance revolutionary notions about homosexuality. Among them, he purported that clandestine homosexuality is commonplace, that all prejudice against homosexuality is hypocritical and based on ignorance, and that people of all ages should be encouraged to engage in both heterosexual and homosexual behavior.
He went so far as to claim that, according to his research, only a small percentage of people (4-6 percent) were exclusively heterosexual, with a somewhat larger number being exclusively homosexual. Everyone else fell somewhere in between or were bisexual. Known as the Kinsey Scale, Reisman says it is the most oft-cited graph in social science history.
When he opened the mainstream's door to homosexuality, Kinsey ushered in a whole new slate of social issues: gay "marriage" and adoption, the codification of "hate crimes" and "hate speech," and the proliferation of special non-discrimination laws.
Reisman's book carefully details the number of court cases across the country that have relied on Kinsey's work to decriminalize sodomy. Perhaps the most sensational and far reaching was the July 2003 Supreme Court decision Lawrence v. Texas, which overturned the state's anti-sodomy law and set the precedent for other states. The Court based its "scientific understanding" on the 1955 Model Penal Code and the 1957 Wolfenden Report. Both sources are based on the research of Alfred Kinsey.
As a result, schools are now teaching children that they are probably bisexual and that homosexuality is just another lifestyle. GLBT (gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender) groups are common on the nation's campuses. Christians who profess biblical beliefs are being tried for hate crimes, such as the recent and highly publicized case of five street preachers who were arrested and charged with committing a hate crime for preaching the gospel at a Philadelphia gay "outfest" event.
The normalization of same-sex relations coincides with an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, including the deadly AIDS virus. Anal cancer rates have increased by 4,000 percent, and mortality rates for homosexual men in some urban centers are now at rates as high as they were in 1871. If the pattern continues, it is estimated that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged twenty will not reach their sixty-fifth birthday.
Truth will out
In April 2004, after two years of study, the American Legislative Exchange Council arrived at the conclusion that the work of Alfred C. Kinsey was fraudulent and contained "manufactured statistics." Their report cites "compelling evidence of illegal and criminal acts masquerading as science." Methods for undoing the damage to America's social and legal systems are presently being studied.
Federal aid for strict abstinence-only sex education is gradually loosening the stranglehold SIECUS has on American sex education. Despite recent and largely unfounded attacks upon the content of these programs, current estimates show abstinence education in as many as a third of the nation's schools, and teen sexual activity rates are beginning to decline.
Best of all, Pope John Paul II's brilliant writing on the meaning of human sexuality (known as the theology of the body) is beginning to make its way into the mainstream of the Church. This revitalized version of fundamental Church teaching is being received enthusiastically by young people. The Christian meaning of human sexuality speaks to their hearts' desire.
"If we live according to the truth of our sexuality, we fulfill the very meaning of life," said John Paul. His message is having an impact, striking hearts much like the sound of a robin's song at the end of a long, dark winter.
Kinsey's Stranglehold on Sex Education
After Kinsey's death, co-authors Wardell Pomeroy, Clyde Martin, and Paul Gebhard remained at the Institute and began to train others in Kinsey's "new biology." Pomeroy left the institute in 1968 to become the director of the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality in San Francisco, which offered the most extensive training available in the Kinsey model. (Pomeroy, who was also a board member of the Penthouse Forum, was joined in this venture by other major pornography personalities such as Hustler magazine ( contributors Ted McIlvenna and Erwin Haeberle.) Other accredited sexology degrees in Kinsey's "new biology" became available from the New York University Health Department's School of Education, directed by homosexual activist Deryck Calderwood, who later died of AIDS. The University of Pennsylvania Department of Health School of Education began offering similar training and degrees, directed by homosexual activist Kenneth George.
These three major academic centers became the first institutions to grant degrees in human sexuality, training teachers, counselors, and safe?sex coaches. The "sexologists" who graduated from these programs went on to design and implement the sex-education curricula for American youth of all ages. They did this through the establishment of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex (SSSS), a joint venture by Pomeroy, Gebhard, Calderwood, and Vern Bullough (then-editor of Paidika: The Journal of Pedophilia).The SSSS then established a Commission of Accreditation for the field of sexology. They granted approval only to those who espoused Kinsey's beliefs.
Examples of course work to fulfill sexology degree requirements: Sexual Attitude Restructuring, Erotic Massage, Self Massage, Fantasy, Masturbation, Forensic Sexology, and Sex Surrogate Use in Therapy (see Reisman, Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences, 2nd ed., 174-80).
With grant money provided by the Playboy Foundation, the Kinsey Institute in 1964 launched its own organization, the Sex Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) to promote its "new biology."
The American Society of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (a Kinsey-based organization founded in 1967 by Drs. Phyllis Schiller and Albert Ellis) applies the Kinsey model to public outreach agencies such as Planned Parenthood and from them into classrooms.
Post-Kinsey Sex Crimes
Of the 324 homicides in New York in 1930, 1935, and 1940 (108 per year), only seventeen, or six per year, involved the rape of women or children. FBI data for 1995 show that New York experienced 4,654 murders in 1995; 3,333 were rape-murders. (Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences, 224).
Christians Charged with Hate Crimes
Philadelphia, 2004 — Five members of the Christian group Repent America are arrested and charged with hate crimes for preaching the gospel at a gay "outfest" event. Charges were dropped only after lawmakers threatened to change the wording of the hate crimes law specifically to exclude speech (Family Research Council, Culture Facts, Jan. 2005).
Saskatchewan, 2000 — A complaint was filed in Canada regarding an advertisement run in the Saskatoon Star Phoenix that displayed Bible verses against homosexuality. The Saskatchewan Human Rights Commission recommended that the individuals who purchased the ad pay $2,000 in damages to each of the three complainants and that the defendants share the $4,500 cost for the government's expert witnesses. The ruling was upheld by a Canadian court (Free Republic Online, Sep. 2003).
England, 2001 — A broadcaster in the United Kingdom known as the "God Channel" was fined 20,000 pounds stirling (about $36,000) for an ad that described homosexuality as an abomination. The Communications Commission ruled that the ad violated several provisions of the advertising code and fined the broadcaster (National Liberty Council, NLJ Online, Dec. 2000 / Jan. 2001).
Sweden, 2003 — Pastor Aake Green, a Pentecostal minister in Oeland, Sweden, was convicted in 2003 under Sweden's hate-crimes laws and was sent to jail for thirty days for calling homosexuality "a deep cancer tumor on all of society" during a sermon (Family Research Council, Culture Facts, Mar. 2005).
Netherlands, 2000 — A complaint was filed in a Dutch court against Pope John Paul II for his statement that "homosexual acts are contrary to the laws of nature." The complaint was dropped when the court ruled that the Pope's status as a leader of the Catholic Church and the Vatican state afforded him immunity from prosecution (National Liberty Council, NLJ Online, Dec. 2000 / Jan. 2001).
Susan Brinkmann is a reporter for the Catholic Standard and Times, the newspaper of the archdiocese of Philadelphia.
©2005 Catholic Answers, Inc.
This item 6793 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
