You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (35 page)
Read You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos Online
Authors: Robert Arthur
This response can be sharply contrasted with more recent administrations’ reactions to epidemics.
136
Patrick Buchanan, who later became Reagan’s White House Communications Director, helped explain the White House response when he wrote in a 1983 column, “The poor homosexuals—they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”
137
Buchanan also later helped illuminate the White House’s silence:
Homosexuality involves sexual acts most men consider not only immoral, but filthy. The reason public men rarely say aloud what most say privately is they are fearful of being branded ‘bigots’ by an intolerant liberal orthodoxy that holds, against all evidence and experience, that homosexuality is a normal, healthy lifestyle.
138
,
139
In 1987 Reagan himself wondered aloud about AIDS, “Maybe the Lord brought down this plague . . . [because] illicit sex is against the Ten Commandments.”
140
While the Reagan administration publicly chose a tactful hush, others did not. In 1977, the singer and actress Anita Bryant successfully had a gay antidiscrimination law repealed in Florida on the theme that homosexuals abused and recruited children. She referred to homosexuals as “human garbage” and, like the Aztecs, traced drought to divine dissatisfaction on the issue.
141
Her “Save Our Children” campaign inspired similarly successful campaigns across the country and sparked the current fundamentalist Christian political movement via televangelist Jerry Falwell.
142
At her request, Falwell would begin his political career with an anti-gay rally in Miami. Two years later he would found the fundamentalist Christian political organization the Moral Majority, which helped elect Ronald Reagan president in 1980.
The 1970s’ rational approach to sex was derailed by AIDS. Predictably, as it spread to the general population the political right would blame the sexual “revolution,”
not
the painfully slow governmental response.
143
When Surgeon General C. Everett Koop advocated in 1986 that people use condoms and children receive sex education, the religious right was livid.
144
Fundamentalist Christians believed safe-sex education would be “grammar-school
sodomy classes,” and instead called for mandatory testing and a quarantine of those afflicted with the disease.
145
Falwell stated that quarantining people with AIDS was not more unreasonable than quarantining cows with brucellosis, but that it would not likely occur because “homosexuals constitute a potent voting bloc and cows do not.”
146
AIDS refueled the Christian fundamentalists’ anti-sex crusade. In a 1986 sermon covered by ABC, Falwell dished up standard fare when he preached that AIDS was God’s judgment against America for embracing immorality. AIDS illustrated that it was the end of days and that his listeners were possibly the last generation before Jesus Christ’s second coming.
147
Politicians were also well aware of AIDS’ potential. At a conference on “How to Win an Election” sponsored by a Christian fundamentalist group in 1985, Newt Gingrich, future Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, said:
[AIDS] is something you ought to be looking at . . . AIDS will do more to direct America back to the cost of violating traditional values, and to make America aware of the danger of certain behavior than anything we’ve seen . . . For us it’s a great rallying cry.
148
This rallying cry would continue through Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton,
149
and culminate in the election of a Christian fundamentalist, George W. Bush, to the presidency in 2000—a man who ran for president instead of going fishing because God told him to.
150
Like his religious predecessors of the past two millennia, W. Bush blamed society’s problems on sex:
The sexual revolution that began in the 1960s has left two major problems in its wake. The first is the historic increase in non-marital births that have contributed so heavily to the nation’s domestic problems including poverty, violence, and intergenerational welfare dependency. The second is the explosion
of sexually transmitted diseases that now pose a growing hazard to the nation’s public health.
151
And just like his predecessors, he believed he could stop sex by arming the government with the Bible. Through his abstinence-only funding, W. Bush funneled
billions
of dollars to organizations whose explicit mission was to convert people to Jesus Christ.
152
In addition, W. Bush, like his father and Reagan before him, packed the courts with moral conservatives.
153
Instead of legal scholars, W. Bush appointed “common-sense judges who understand that our rights were derived from God.”
154
Common-sense judges who look to God, rather than the accumulated wisdom of centuries of legal scholarship, tend to hear from God exactly what the judge’s personal mores dictate. They tend to defer to Congress on sexual privacy matters with judicial justifications similar to “Congress does not need the testimony of psychiatrists and social scientists in order to take note of the coarsening of impressionable minds . . .”
155
Congress does not need the testimony because Congress’ interpretation of the Bible is the same as theirs.
In this judicial environment it was not surprising that in 2005 former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made a new anti-obscenity squad in the FBI and announced that fighting the producers of pornography (of consenting adults for consenting adults) would be “one of [his] top priorities,” causing even law enforcement to snicker.
156
,
157
When the courts are filled with judges chosen for their religious zeal, rather than their legal reputations, they cease to be a check or a balance on the legislature. The protection from Bible-touting politicians that the courts have given to our bedrooms, our books, our computers, is currently looking frail.
1.
From roughly ten percent in 1900 to roughly two-thirds in 1940. U.S. Dept. of Education,
120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait
(1993).
2.
Robert Lynd and Helen Lynd,
Middletown in Transition
(1937), pp. 163–164.
3.
Going steady allowed teenage girls to obtain some sexual experience while preserving their reputations.
4.
A former prostitute, she was the first woman to run for president and she and her sister were the first female Wall Street stock brokers. She said of women who gloried in never experiencing sexual desire, “No
sexual passion, say you. Say, rather, a sexual idiot, and confess that your life is a failure . . .” Barbara Goldsmith,
Other Powers
(1999), p. 149.
5.
The Victorian marriage was unjust. A wife had no legal rights, could be beaten as long as death did not result, could not refuse sex, and could be recaptured if she ran away.
6.
John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman,
Intimate Matters
(1988), pp. 223–224.
7.
Amanda Frisken,
Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution
(2004), p. 97.
8.
Alfred Kinsey, et al.,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(1953), p. 300.
9.
D’Emilio,
Intimate Matters
, p. 214.
10.
Ibid.
11.
A 1938 study found that twenty-eight percent of those born between 1890 and 1900 had lost their virginity before marriage, in contrast to over half of those born after 1910. Lewis Terman,
Psychological Factors in Marital Happiness
(1938), p. 331.
12.
Fully a third of the women born before 1900 usually remained clothed during sex, in contrast to only eight percent of those born during the 1920s. Kinsey,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
, p. 365.
13.
Starting with the women born after 1900, each successive generation of women experienced orgasm more frequently from sexual intercourse than those before them. Ibid, p. 380.
14.
Ibid., pp. 360–364.
15.
Ben Lindsey and Wainwright Evans,
Revolt of Modern Youth
(1925), pp. 18, 32.
16.
Bamey-mugging was sexual intercourse. Males who frequently attended these parties were known as snugglepups.
17.
Winston Ehrmann,
Premarital Dating Behavior
(1959), p. 87.
18.
D’Emilio,
Intimate Matters
, p. 279.
19.
James Morone,
Hellfire Nation
(2003), pp. 347–349, 365–366.
20.
Ibid., pp. 347–349.
21.
Their threat was severely exaggerated. By 1956 the Communist Party USA’s membership had dropped to 5,000 with at least 1,500 of these being undercover FBI informants. One FBI counterintelligence head said that by the mid-1950s, “The Communist Party was basically a bunch of discussion groups.” Ronald Kessler,
Bureau
(2003), pp. 96–97.
22.
John Jessup, “The World, the Flesh, and the Devil,”
Life
, 26 Dec. 1955, p. 143.
23.
Morone,
Hellfire Nation
, p. 381.
24.
Marjorie Heins,
Not in Front of the Children
(2001), p. 51.
25.
One example of this was comic books. They were an addictive “marijuana of the nursery” that could turn a child into a “sex maniac.” A Senate committee toured the country in the early 1950s and confirmed the threat. Morone,
Hellfire Nation
, p. 397.
26.
Alfred Kinsey, Wardell Pomeroy, and Clyde Martin,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male
(1948), p. 392.
27.
Kinsey’s surveys were flawed in that he did not use a scientific sampling of the population. (Due to the political climate this was not feasible.) However, Kinsey’s theme that sex beyond marital missionary intercourse was significantly more pervasive than Victorian America acknowledged has remained valid.
28.
D’Emilio,
Intimate Matters
, p. 287.
29.
Stephen Whitfield,
Culture of the Cold War
(1996), p. 186.
30.
Heins,
Not in Front of the Children
, p. 53.
31.
Ibid., p. 48.
32.
D’Emilio,
Intimate Matters
, p. 284.
33.
A notable publisher was Samuel Roth (1893–1974) who spent years imprisoned for obscenity convictions. Another was Ralph Ginzburg who was indicted by Robert Kennedy. A comedian who fought censorship despite legal persecution was Lenny Bruce.
34.
Ranked the fiftieth best novel of the twentieth century by the Modern Library Board, a division of Random House, July 1998.
35.
Adjusted to 2012 dollars. David Allyn,
Make Love, Not War
(2000), p. 65.
36.
Henry Miller,
Tropic of Cancer
(1961, orig. pub. 1934), pp. 5–6.
37.
Test from the English case of
Regina v. Hicklin
(1868).
38.
Heins,
Not in Front of the Children
, pp. 49, 284–285.
39.
Allyn,
Make Love
, p. 70.
40.
Griswold v. Connecticut
, 381 US 479 (1965).
41.
A more recent example was the prosecutions of Larry Flynt, publisher of
Hustler
magazine, as portrayed in the movie,
The People vs. Larry Flynt
(1996).
42.
Beat was black slang for exhausted. Allyn,
Make Love
, p. 26.
43.
D’Emilio,
Intimate Matters
, pp. 275–276.
44.
Barry Miles, ed.,
Howl
(1986), pp. 3–4.
45.
Ibid., p. 174.
46.
Poland would later legally change his name to Jefferson Fuck and then to Jefferson Clitlick.
47.
It was well known that then-president, Lyndon Johnson, swam naked in the White House pool. Allyn,
Make Love
, p. 42.
48.
Ibid.
49.
The hippie movement was unorganized, ergo there were multiple themes, such as anti-materialism, anti-war, mysticism, back-to-nature, racial equality, socialism, and drug usage.
50.
Allyn,
Make Love
, pp. 99–102.
51.
Hippie guru Timothy Leary was particularly outspoken in his criticism of promiscuity and his support of monogamy.
52.
Allyn,
Make Love
, p. 100.
53.
Ibid., p. 103.