The Sex Lies of the Religious RightThe Sex Lies of the Religious Right
how conservatives distort the facts of life
By MARTY KLEIN
  "The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie-deliberate, contrived 
  and dishonest--but the myth--persistent, persuasive and unrealistic."
    --JOHN F. KENNEDY
They lie. When Jimmy Swaggart ranted at the cameras in his televangelical tent 
that sex education classes promoted incest, it was a lie. When Jerry Falwell 
told followers of his Good Time Gospel show that "homosexuals know they are 
going to die and they are going to take as many people with them as they can," 
it was a lie.
Breaking the third and ninth commandments is business as usual for members of 
the religious right. On their television stations, in school curricula, through 
their think tanks and in our national newspapers they lie about sex. They lie so 
big and loud and so often that many people assume they must be telling the 
truth.
At every opportunity these liars construct a false and defamatory image of 
sexuality. Pat Robertson says "oral sex is against nature." Anti-family-planning 
educator Father John McGoey tells a Human Life International Symposium that 
"there is absolutely nothing loving about sex. Lust is as destructive of love 
inside of marriage as it is outside." James Dobson, head of Focus on the Family, 
castigates "sex experts who say abstinence but mean anything goes." The American 
Family Association charges that school systems are "reshaping children's 
attitudes and behavior toward hedonism, heterosexual as well as homosexual."
Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed can tell Ted Koppel on Nightline that 
"this is bestiality, pedophilia, child molestation. According to the Carnegie 
Mellon survey [of the Internet], one quarter of all the images involve the 
torture of women," and go unquestioned. Michael McManus, a conservative 
columnist who wrote an introduction to the Meese Commission Report, can use the 
same media moment to claim that "aberrant sex predominates. Sex between husband 
and wife can be beautiful. But that is not the image being pulled down by 
cyberspace users. What's sought are photos of deviant sex: women in bondage, 
being tortured. It is massively harmful." Never mind that a swift cruise on the 
Internet will refute such claims; most people aren't online. One has to ask: 
Whose sexual imagination is at work? What tortured thoughts go through their 
minds when they consider their own sex lives?
It's easy to refute the sex lies of the right using data from biology, medicine, 
criminology and developmental psychology. But the right doesn't use language to 
communicate facts about sex. Instead, it conveys emotions about sex--fear, 
hatred, self-disgust. Those emotions are far from what sex should and can be. 
Yet those emotions are shaping public policy.
Take Swaggart's idea that sex education encourages incest. Listen to the emotion 
behind his message: I am afraid of my own sexuality and that of my children. It 
is blame-shifting: An outside force creates incest. If the schools didn't do it, 
the devil will take the blame. Witness Bev Russell, a powerful member of the 
Christian Coalition, who began molesting his stepdaughter Susan Smith when she 
was 14 or 15. According to news reports, he would come home from putting up 
campaign posters for Pat Robertson to fondle her. Smith grew up with a warped 
set of sexual values--and drowned her two children in hope of keeping the love 
of a man. Her stepfather continued to have sex with her just months prior to the 
murders. Incest is a powerful, corrupt form of sex education.
Images offer an easy way out. But it wasn't an image that prompted Father Bruce 
Ritter (founder of Covenant House and a member of the Meese Commission) to 
reportedly fondle boys on couches, or that encouraged Jimmy Swaggart to hire 
prostitutes so he could look up their dresses. A sex expert discussing the birds 
and bees was not what drove Jim Bakker to climb on top of a young secretary in a 
hotel room at a religious conference. They do not explain the thousands of 
children who are molested by priests and pastors.
The religious right sees sexuality as an external force, a threat to 
rationality, authority, religion and marital fidelity. A devilishly clever 
energy, sex continually manifests itself in new ways. Fashion ads. Rap music. 
Sex education. Soft-core porn. Videos. Phone sex. Fully clothed cheerleaders at 
high school footbal games.
Once you believe sex is an outside force, you look for it everywhere-which is a 
textbook definition of paranoia. How else to explain the obsessive search for 
temptation that causes someone to find the letters SEX in a few frames of The 
Lion King, or the naked breast of a sunbather in a Where's Waldo puzzle?
Sometimes the obsessive fears of the right are comic: The American Family 
Association in Florida forced the passage of an ordinance banning nude 
sunbathing on a beach near Cape Canaveral with the explanation, "It will allow 
you and your family to walk without fear of being offended, or worse, physically 
attacked by nude or partially nude persons." Beware, beware of the naked man.
Clearly, the religious right and its cohorts are dreadfully frightened of their 
own eroticism. They struggle against their fleshly desires, but they cannot deny 
that their flesh desires. They may loathe their fantasies of legs, breasts and 
mouths, but they cannot banish the images. They preach that desire is weakness. 
And their own weakness terrifies them.
To overcome this emotional conflict they project their terror onto others: I'm 
not the bad one, you are. I'm not afraid of me, I'm afraid of you. Repelled by 
their own sexuality, they loathe and thus fear others' sexuality. And as a 
misplaced attempt to control their own eroticism,they try to control others'. 
That's how we get a Randall Terry telling peration Rescue supporters, "I want 
you to let a wave of intolerance wash over you. We are called by God to conquer 
this nation."
The key consequence of these lies is a personal and cultural environment of fear 
of sexuality, especially male sexuality. People learn to mistrust their 
eroticism, which leads to suffering, acting out, self-repression and the desire 
for salvation. Feeling the need to protect self, family and community, people 
turn to institutions (such as the church and conservative political 
organizations) that acknowledge this fear of sexuality. The resulting culture of 
fear and mistrust fits perfectly into the right's political-moral worldview. 
Satan already exists, as do temptation, the battle for good and evil, a theory 
of human guilt, an infallible instruction book and an angry, asexual god. The 
right can integrate any new sexual phenomenon (phone sex, cyberporn, etc.) into 
its existing model (temptation, immorality) and proposed solution (repression).
Most recently we have the Reverend Donald E. Wildmon charging that Calvin Klein 
ads are "child porn," and insisting that they be investigated by the Justice 
Department. Only a mind obsessed with sex could perceive child porn in images of 
fully clothed teenagers mostly doing nothing.
While the Calvin Klein ads may strike you as tasteless, creepy or simply hot, 
they are not sexual abuse or exploitation. Wildmon, however, demands that the 
Justice Department go through photographer Steven Meisel's files to see what 
else happened at the shooting of the commercials. Calvin Klein is the best thing 
that ever happened to the zealous and priggish Wildmon. The reverend wants the 
feds to go after every magazine that ran the print ads and go after every city 
that had the images plastered on the sides of its buses. Are you now or have you 
ever been aroused by a Calvin Klein ad? In all of the coverage of this issue 
only a handful of columnists had the courage to describe the crusade as 
nonsense. Child porn is a new form of redbaiting. Since no one can seem to be 
for child porn, no one will rise to defend the accused.
Wildmon is outraged by images of underwear---because those images focus 
attention on sexual anatomy. That which underwear conceals, it reveals. At some 
point, underwear ceases to be a tool of personal hygiene and becomes part of our 
erotic vocabulary. Cotton briefs become lingerie in sexual awakenings. And that 
is exactly what upsets Wildmon: He thinks, I must draw the line here, or I will 
lose control. He cannot admire, fantasize, express awe or warm his soul over 
nature's heat. If he had his way, Calvin Klein's penance would be to design 
underwear that could not be removed until the wearer was 21 and married.
And so Wildmon sponsors clinics for porn addicts--devoted to the notion that 
even the briefest exposure to sex leads inexorably down the path to debauchery. 
What others call sexual growth, or discovery, Wildmon views as a force of 
satanic proportions.
Wildmon's own approach to sex education is a comic book (distributed by the AFA) 
called God's Quiet Voice. In it, a young boy wrestles with the choice of looking 
at a classmate's collection of pinups. A pastor tells the boy, "Jesus would have 
been upset if you had looked at that magazine. We wouldn't want that, would we?"
The boy answers, "No way! I don't want to do anything to upset Jesus, 'cause he 
died on the cross to forgive me of my sins!"
This is an agonizingly simplistic view. Phyllis Schlafly, head of the Eagle 
Forum, says, "The facts of life can be told in 15 minutes." She also says, "Sex 
education is robbing children of their childhood." But the sex lies of the 
religious right are sex education. Imagine the brainwashing that led three 
12-year-olds to write a letter to the Chicago Tribune that reads, "We watched 
The Lion King and unfortunately, we saw SEX spelled out in a cloud of dust. We 
can't believe Disney would do such a thing! Little kids watch this movie. Now 
you can't even watch a movie without being faced with pornography!" A spelling 
bee becomes pornography? No doubt these kids will grow up to be sexually healthy 
adults.
The right's picture of pure, nonerotic humans is a fantasy, a yearning for a 
simple, guilt-free existence without ambiguity or moral conflict. It idealizes 
this imaginary state and urges us to protect ourselves from any lust that might 
crawl across our virtue.
Having scared people about others' sexuality, the right promises to rectify the 
situation. It will take your fear seriously and tell you exactly what to do, 
feel and believe. It will press legislators to limit the sexual choices you can 
make. It will continue to find new instances of sexual danger and keep you 
informed of the ever-growing scourge. It will seek and destroy all temptation. 
This last is the most dangerous lie of all.
If the members of the religious right are unable to control themselves, should 
we let them control America?


SEX LIES REFUTED


LIE: "Condoms do not protect you from AIDS."
  --MICHAEL SCHWARTZ, FREE CONGRESS FOUNDATION
FACT: Even the worst quality condom is "10,000 times better in terms of reducing 
exposure to HIV" than unprotected sex.
  --DR. RONALD CAREY, FDA


LIE: "At first the girl (and guy) [who choose abortion] may feel relieved that 
they no longer have to worry about the responsibilities of parenthood. But in 
the long run, they will feel guilt, depression and anxiety... making it nearly 
impossible for her ever to forget the abortion."
  --Sex Respect HIGH SCHOOL CURRICULUM
FACT: "A review of more than 250 studies of possible psychological effects of 
abortion by the U.S. Surgeon General and the American Psychological Association 
found that abortion does not cause short-term or long-term negative effects for 
the majority of women undergoing the procedure."
  --Kinsey Institute New Report on Sex


LIE: "How do people become pedophiles? Usually, pornography walks you down that 
path until you get to the place where you've seen everything that a man and a 
woman can do together, and then you make that little jump over to perversions."
  --JAMES DOBSON, FOCUS ON THE FAMILY
FACT: "The FBI has no evidence that pornography causes crimes. Pedophilia has 
absolutely nothing to do with adult pornography."
  --FBI AGENT KEN LANNING


LIE: "Too much sex education too soon causes undue curiosity and obsession with 
sex."
  --BEVERLY LA HAYE, CONCERNED WOMEN FOR AMERICA
FACT: After taking a Planned Parenthood-approved course, "teens were more likely 
to delay initiation of sexual intercourse; and when they did initiate it, they 
decreased their levels of unprotected sex by 40 percent."
  --Family Planning Perspectives


LIE: "Gays and lesbians live perverted, twisted lives that feed upon the 
unsuspecting and the innocent, like our children."
  --THE REVEREND LOU SHELDON TRADITIONAL VALUES COALITION (Sheldon produced a 
  video, Gay Rights/Special Rights, that claims gays are 18 times more likely 
  than straight people to be child molesters.)
FACT: "In this sample [of 352 evaluated children], a child's risk of being 
molested by his or her relative's heterosexual partner is more than 100 times 
greater than by someone who might be identified as being homosexual, lesbian or 
bisexual."
  ---C. JENNY ET AL., Pediatrics


LIE: "Sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortion."
  --PHYLLIS SCHLAFLY
FACT: "Most sex education classes in the U.S. do not discuss abortion. In fact, 
in many states such discussion is prohibited."
  --LESLIE KANTOR DIRECTOR, SEXUALITY INFORMATION AND EDUCATION COUNCIL OF THE 
  U.S.


LIE: "Cyberporn is pervasive. Half of 8.5 million downloads involved child 
pornography and 83.5 percent of the images seen on Usenet, a part of the 
Internet, were pornographic."
  --MICHAEL MCMANUS, COLUMNIST
FACT: According to the Carnegie Mellon study, pornographic image files represent 
three percent of all messages on the Usenet newsgroups. As for kid porn, the 
research found no images depicting hard-core sex acts with children.


LIE: "There is no way to have premarital sex without hurting someone."
  ---Sex Respect CURRICULUM
FACT: "The vast majority of Americans have intercourse before marriage. There is 
no evidence that this damages individuals or marriages."
  --LESLIE KANTOR, SlECUS


LIE: "Feminism encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, 
practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians."
  --PAT ROBERTSON
FACT: Try consulting your nearest reality. 



This article originally appeared in the January 1996, Playboy Forum. It is 
repinted with permission.
Marty Klein is a marriage counselor and sex therapist in Palo Alto, CA who has 
written several books about sex. His email address is 75254.3214@compuserve.com
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