ESR | March 20, 2006 | Sexual liberty vs. American liberty: The politics of God, family, and country

By Alisa Craddock
web posted March 20, 2006

There is an increased tension in the air. Do you feel it? Social conservatives are making real noise in the political arena, and it’s scaring the heck out of people—even Republicans. Social conservatives (religious conservatives, mostly) scuttled the nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court (recalling the David Souter travesty) and demanded the nomination instead of a true and verifiable conservative, and got their man on the bench. And now it’s as if the battle has taken on a new intensity. In my last column I pointed out that even the Republican Party seems to be trying to steer us toward the least socially conservative of the potential candidates for President in 2008. (You can add Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney to the lineup as well.) Perhaps we social conservatives are getting in the way of the grand designs of the globalists—both Democrat and Republican. But the true nature of that global agenda is revealing itself to ever greater numbers of people. They are seeing through the double-speak of the Left, and they are armed with arguments that 20 and 30 years ago were regarded as little more than narrow-minded, alarmist Christian rant, but are now seen to have been incredibly far-sighted.

Late last year, Larry Jacobs, Vice President of the World Congress of Families, spoke to leaders of several pro-family organizations at the Family Research Council (in preparation for the upcoming meeting of the WCF in 2007) about the war being waged by liberals against what WCF Founder, Allan Carlson, refers to as the “natural family” (a father and mother with one or more children living and growing up together in one home). Don Feder, the WCF’s Media Director, compares the current fight against anti-family forces to the cold war to defeat communism throughout the world. He believes that if the rest of the world surrenders to the anti-family push, America will not be able to hold out against it – the same “manifesto” employed by the Communists during most of the last century to spread their ideology throughout the world. Destruction of faith and family was a key element, in fact, in the advance of communism in the Soviet Union, and persists today in the promotion of its kissin’ cousin, socialism, by various organs of the United Nations, chiefly the IPPF, UNESCO, the UNFPA, and others. In the last year it does seem that they have stepped up their efforts to bully the world into getting in line with their goals.

Liberal anti-family groups both at home and abroad continue to promote the idea that pro-family groups are “radical” and “reactionary”, that the traditional family is regressive, and traditional morality is perverse and oppressive (using words like “heteronormative,” “heterosexist,” and “sexual fascism” to demonize what they present as unhealthy social attitudes, with efforts being made to turn political and social dissent into a hate crime. It’s quite a coup, really, to make what is normal and wholesome sound evil and backward, while perversity is promoted as “diversity”. It rather reminds me of the story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Shall we take a closer look at those clothes?

In the last couple of years, there have been frequent references among some pro-family organizations about British Anthropologist Joseph D. Unwin’s research, the findings of which he published in his book Sex and Culture (London, Oxford University Press, 1934) concerning sexual mores and their relation to the advancement (or lack thereof) of 86 ancient civilizations. He had earlier published, in 1933, a preliminary report of his findings entitled Sexual Regulations and Human Behaviour ( London, Williams and Northgate. Ltd., 1933, 109 pgs.) to which I will, in part, refer here. (Please note that all italics are my emphasis.)

Unwin’s purpose was to study through inductive methods of research the assertion by the psychologists of his day that “when social regulations forbid direct satisfaction of the sexual impulses, the emotional conflict is expressed in another way, and that what we call ‘civilisation’ has been built up by compulsory sacrifices of the gratification of organic desires.” His research into this hypothesis showed that there was indeed a direct correlation between sexual opportunity and cultural condition. So consistent were the findings, in fact, that “if we know what sexual regulations a society adopted,” he asserted, “we can prophesy accurately the pattern of its culture.” What he found was that those civilizations that had strict regulation of sexual activity thrived, grew, produced and expanded. Those with less sexual regulation had less developed civilizations, and those in which the inhabitants were totally free to engage in sexual activity of any kind never progressed at all, but remained stagnant. Further, those civilizations which went from no sexual regulation to strict regulation of sexual activity advanced proportionately, while those that went from strict regulation to complete abandonment of sexual mores collapsed within about three generations. The findings were universal and consistent, no matter where the civilization, no matter what the race. There were no exceptions. “In human records,” he noted, “there is no instance of a civilization retaining its energy after a complete new generation has inherited a tradition which does not insist on prenuptial and postnuptial continence.” Prenuptial continence and monogamous marriage (especially where it was imposed on both sexes) produced the greatest social energy, the greatest advancement. The level of freedom of sexual activity determined exactly how far the civilization progressed in consistent and measurable ways. “The factors responsible for the cultural condition of any society, or for that of any group within the society, came into operation at least a hundred years before” he asserted. “The full effect of an extension or limitation of sexual opportunity cannot be culturally realized before the third generation.” It was observed also that the behavior of women had a greater influence than that of the men because the children spent most of their formative years with their mother.

These findings (showing that societal behavior was predictable) did not apply to the individual, but to the civilization as a whole. Unwin compared it by analogy to the behavior of electrons, noting that it was impossible to predict the behavior of one electron by itself, but that “the behavior of a mass of electrons can be [predicted] with assurance.” And (here he was most prophetic) “it can be controlled by men.”

Unwin’s research illustrates that the behavior of individuals has a collective influence– the radical individualism so cherished by left and right alike is, in fact, detrimental to civilization precisely because it rejects the notion of community or society, which reflects the cumulative effect of social trends. He is not the first or only researcher to make this observation. Edward Gibbon, Juvenal, Giambattista Vico ( The New Science, 1725), John Locke, and more recently, s ociologist Pitirim Sorokin ( The American Sex Revolution, 1956) , and others have written of marriage as a civilizing influence on society (the “seedbed of society”, in Vico’s words), and/or the disintegration of marriage and sexual liberation (moral decline) as its death knell. Our own Founding Fathers recognized the fragility of the type of government they set up and placed in our hands, the most representative warning, in my view, from John Adams:

“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion…Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other” – October 11, 1798

The Preamble to the Constitution expresses the intention of We the People that this document and the government it established were to “secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.” With liberty comes individual responsibility. There must be balance between individualism and the responsibilities of an individual to contribute positively to the culture as a member of a society. And yet, despite the dire warnings of our country’s founders, we have gone precisely the way they had feared, and we are paying the consequences. Instead of moving toward a “more perfect union”, that is, a more perfect application of the vision of freedom, equality, and justice laid out in our Constitution, we are instead moving toward totalitarianism as activist judges reinterpret the laws in ways that are clearly contrary to the spirit and intent of those laws, setting legal precedents upon which other activist judges build to reshape the culture to one that looks more like the socialist United Nations. To look at a snapshot of our nation, we are still the most prosperous on earth, and we appear to be free. But there is a palpable anxiety in our country at the grassroots level that the rug is being pulled out from under us. Our education system is well below many other industrialized nations, our family life is in shambles, our divorce rate is outrageously high, our moral standards are weak and self-serving, our teenaged daughters are bearing children at an alarming rate, without benefit (both social and economic) of marriage to the child’s father, practically ensuring the child will be raised in poverty and neglect and lawlessness. Consequently our prisons are full of men who grew up without fathers. And all the while the courts, many of whose appointees are leftist political activists, are codifying as “rights” the very behaviors that are chipping away the foundation beneath our house.

All of these “symptoms” have one root in common: they are all in one way or another tied to the sexual revolution. Even the degradation of our educational system can be traced to the introduction of “free love” as one of the “freedoms” we enjoy, along with the religious, political, and economic freedom guaranteed in our Constitution. But like a weed, it chokes out the good growth around it, and spreads until it has taken over the garden, and there is no room for anything else to flourish. Our schools have become mere “advocacy training” centers for leftist ideologies—tyranny training, if you like. In the name of protecting our “inalienable right” to sexual freedom, our authentic freedoms, the God-given ones like the right to worship in our faith, the right to speak our opinions and act out of conscience formed by faith, the right to associate with whom we wish, the right to protect and govern our children, and more—these rights are being nullified by unelected courts with the help of big government programs that apparently seek to “include” everyone and “offend” no one, but have, I believe, a much more sinister objective.

St. Augustine long ago discoursed that authentic freedom was a condition of the moral man, not of the man enslaved by lust or desire for power. Aldous Huxley noted this correlation himself when he observed, “as political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase.” (Introduction to Brave New World, 1946.) By contrast, tranquility is the condition of the moral man, and a moral man cannot be controlled. In his compelling book, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Political Control, E. Michael Jones traces the roots of the sexual revolution from its beginnings through the end of the Clinton impeachment proceedings . “Reason, especially morals,” he writes, “is the sole source of man’s ability to govern himself. Once gratification of passion becomes the definition of “liberty,” then “liberty” becomes synonymous with bondage because he who controls the passion controls the man. [This type of] liberty… becomes a prelude to the most insidious form of control known by man precisely because it is based on the stealthy manipulation of his passions.”

“A Republic, if you can keep it.”

America’s Founding Fathers insisted that religion and morality were indispensable to the maintenance of a free constitution. They recognized that with the amount of freedom our newly formed government afforded us, if we did not maintain a strong religious and moral society, we would destroy ourselves. Through school “sex education” programs and incremental changes in law, and other means such as media, psychology, school and extracurricular clubs and such, our children are being gradually indoctrinated with ideologies that can only lead them down one path: that of moral degradation and spiritual poverty. They are being encouraged (sometimes blatantly) to engage in sexual activity at an earlier and earlier age. But why? Why is it being force-fed to them? Knowing what we know about the emotional and psychological impact of early sexual experiences on children, how the breakdown of the family has caused untold harm in damaged lives, abortion, divorce, unwed pregnancy (leading to increased crime and poverty), and seeing how our culture has become coarse and callous and saturated with lewd images that assault our children’s innocence and virtue at every turn, how can our leaders and our courts continue to let our culture be shaped by moral degenerates and sexual deviants? Why give the stamp of legitimacy to their conduct? Why enshrine it in law, and make it a crime to oppose it?

It has become too obvious to ignore that our “sexual revolution”, our false freedom, is being engineered. It is not something that merely “happened” to us, but is by design. It is just too ferocious, too insistent. It is being aggressively “marketed” and legally protected in new interpretations of constitutional law, and those who oppose it are finding themselves coming up against, not the culture, but the state, the courts, in trying to defend their families and themselves from the assault, while at the same time, religion and morality are being demonized and abolished in that same legal system, again under the auspices of protecting “freedom”. WCF’s Larry Jacobs observed that it was “pretty clear that, in the area of culture, the same-sex ‘marriage’ initiatives, homosexuality, ‘hate crimes,’ we are definitely losing ground. We may be winning a few battles here and there but, overall, we are in big trouble in these areas.” The culture war is really just another version of the anti-family, anti-Christian tactics used by the Soviet Union, but played out more gradually so that we won’t recognize what has happened until it’s too late.

Ultimately all such efforts have as their goal the crushing of Christian faith, and the very idea of God, throughout the world, because one cannot serve two masters, and the UN is determined to be ours (they obviously think they’ve got a better plan). A revival of Christian faith in the world is the one thing that could stand against it. But we Americans are proud of our country and our heritage, and we will not, as long as we remember what it is to be American, go meekly into the New World Order. Yet go into it we must, apparently, for those who are directing our destiny will not be deterred. Our sovereignty is gradually being signed over to the UN, and so to bring us into compliance with the UN and its objectives, our memory of our heritage and everything that we are must be brought low. That is why I believe our “sexual freedom” is being engineered in order to weaken us from within, to reshape our society consistent with the planned global government. It is not only us, but the whole world. By force-feeding the world “reproductive health services” the UN is encouraging, even compelling, promiscuity, bringing the world into submission. I can find no better explanation for it. Greed? Perhaps, but why introduce it in kindergarten? Sexual self-interest by various organizations? Why are the courts supporting it?

I am convinced that introducing children to sex at the earliest possible age is an effort to destroy them morally and spiritually so that they can be controlled politically when they are adults, to destroy their conscience, to destroy the family, which is the only building block upon which civilization can thrive, and to destroy their faith, without which they cannot stand against the secularist riptide. They are being indoctrinated to a new set of secular humanist “morals” and “values” consistent with “world citizenship.” Even the culture war itself acts as a smoke screen to distract us while the rest of our sovereignty is slowly being signed over to the UN. That’s why I believe our leaders are not intervening more. We are not going to leave the UN or abandon the globalist agenda with all its economic advantages, and so we are being brought into line with its godless ideology. Whatever special interests are at the forefront pushing their agendas, I believe this is the overarching goal. However much lip service is paid to human rights and development, this agenda does not serve the deepest needs of the common man, but promises only disconnection and misery and ultimate slavery.

The most important step in regaining control of our culture and our country is to overturn Roe v. Wade, to outlaw abortion and reestablish a view of our rights as God-given, and return to Constitutional principles. The introduction of the contraceptive pill (which is an abortifacient) launched the sexual revolution in earnest. Abortion was an inevitable link in the chain. (Over 50% of abortions are performed on women or girls who were using some method of contraception.) Removing the abortion link would direct the behavior of women toward continence. It is women who must take the lead in making this happen. It must happen to restore the family, without which our culture cannot survive. Reversing Roe v. Wade would also once again compel men to share in the responsibility for their conduct and its consequences, but also restore them to their proper role in family life (a role deeply undermined by radical feminism). If the political and legal organs of our country do not support it, we must reclaim our heritage ourselves. We must be bold enough to point out that the king isn’t wearing any clothes. We must speak up in such great numbers that even the meekest among us will be bold to speak the truth, and the gainsayers will be put to shame.

At the dawn of our Republic Edmund Burke wrote “Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained…that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.” Let us not let that happen.