You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (37 page)

149.
    Clinton fired his surgeon general for discussing masturbation and signed the bill that officially deemed extramarital sex harmful.

150.
    W. Bush told a televangelist that he preferred to be a retired governor buying fishing lures at Wal-Mart, but God wanted him to run for president because America would need him. Stephen Mansfield,
Faith of George W. Bush
(2003), p. 109, and Jim Wallis, “Dangerous Religion,”
Sojourners
, Sep./Oct. 2003.

151.
    George W. Bush, “Working Towards Independence—The President’s Plan to Strengthen Welfare Reform,” Feb. 2002, ret. from
WhiteHouse.gov
on 14 June 2006.

152.
    One missionary said, “Our mission was to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ throughout the world. We put that in our proposals and said, ‘If we don’t get funded, so be it.’ And we got the money.” W. Bush pushed funding for domestic abstinence-only teaching to $250 million annually. $1.5 billion of his global AIDS initiative was tagged for abstinence-only teaching. Esther Kaplan,
With God on Their Side
(2005), pp. 42, 217.

153.
    Reagan was arguably the first modern president to insist on ideological purity in his judicial nominees. More than a third of Reagan’s second-term nominees were rated as barely qualified by the American Bar Association (ABA) as compared to six percent for his predecessor, Jimmy Carter. W. Bush cut the ABA out of the process altogether. Ibid., pp. 262–263, 266–267.

154.
    “Remarks Prior to Discussions with President Vladimir Putin of Russia and an Exchange with Reporters in Kananaskis,”
Weekly Compilation of Presidential Remarks
, 1 July 2002, p. 1099.

155.
    
Action for Children’s Television v. FCC
(ACT III), 11 F.3d 170 (D.C. Cir. 1993).

156.
    This led one exasperated FBI agent to say, “I guess this means we’ve won the war on terror,” and an experienced national security analyst to say, “It’s a running joke for us.” It has also resulted in quips such as, “Honestly, most of the guys would have to recuse themselves,” and “I already gave at home.” Barton Gellman “Recruits Sought for Porn Squad,”
Washington Post
, 20 Sep. 2005.

157.
    Some U.S. attorneys did more than snicker, as resistance to these prosecutions was reportedly a factor in at least two of the controversial attorney firings that led to investigations and Gonzales’ eventual resignation. Josh Gerstein, “Porn Prosecution Fuels Debate,”
Politico.com
, 31 July 2009.

SEX VI

R
EPERCUSSIONS

T
HE
G
OVERNMENT
W
ANTS
Y
OUR
S
EX

America’s sex taboo has four general repercussions that contribute to unhappiness—government dysfunction, widespread ignorance, unhealthy attitudes, and sexual deprivation.

In the government, hypocritical politicians censor the schools and our media, and criminalize consensual adult sexual activities. To justify this enforcement of sexual morality, they grossly exaggerate sex-related dangers and lie. Their dishonesty damages the government’s credibility, distracts voters from substantive problems, erodes civil liberties, and results in fallacious policies that cost billions.

Government censorship has caused widespread ignorance. Past censorship has left sex scholarship far behind other academic areas. The resulting ignorance regarding homosexuality and the different male and female sex drives causes shame, guilt, and persecution. The transformation of high school sex education into abstinence celebration programs causes more sexually transmitted diseases, abortions, and unwanted pregnancies. G-rated high school textbooks have turned fascinating subjects, like history and world cultures, into bores. The resulting
ignorance in these areas allows a majority of Americans to believe their sex laws are normal and that sexual freedom would be disastrous.

Lastly, because of the taboo millions are prevented from having sex by law (since those unable to find a sexual relationship cannot pay for it), and millions more are ashamed to explore the gamut of sexual pleasure.

The hypocrisy can be seen clearly in America’s last four presidents. Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush have built the billion-dollar federal abstinence-only sex education program that teaches that all sex outside of marriage is damaging.
¹

None of these men restrained their own sexual behavior to the marital bed. (Details in
Appendix Two
.) Three of the four have not been able to constrain their sexual behavior to the marital bed
even
while married. The man who first fiscally forced the program on the states could not even keep his extramarital sex out of the Oval Office.

Reagan bedded so many young Hollywood beauties between his two marriages that he lost track of their names. He abandoned one after impregnating her and was accused of date rape by another.
²
Despite these sexual shenanigans, as president he formed the Meese Commission. This farcically biased and unscientific investigation sought to prove pornography was harmful to adult viewers so that it could be criminally prosecuted.
³
As a 40-year-old man, Reagan was using models half his age as disposable sex toys, yet he later wanted to make it criminal for men to
view pictures
of models having sex.

The billions of dollars that the last president, W. Bush, extended to combat
AIDS internationally was hamstrung by morality. Roughly $1.5 billion of the aid was tagged specifically for abstinence-only teaching. Missionary groups receiving this money were allowed to use faith-based approaches and reject any HIV-prevention strategy they found morally objectionable.
⁴

Money was forbidden for any group that did not pledge opposition to prostitution. Even though sex workers in third-world countries are some of the hardest hit by AIDS, under these constraints humanitarian groups were not even working with them for fear of losing funding.
⁵

All this was from a man who was asked by a reporter what he talked about with his presidential father and responded, “pussy,”
⁶
and whose brother, Neil Bush, testified to having sex with prostitutes in Asia numerous times while married to his first wife.
⁷

The hypocrisy extends beyond presidents, however, there is not enough space to cover all the congressmen and women who have fought to straitjacket our populations’ sexuality to the marital bed, while their own behavior has been egregiously different.
⁸
Perhaps their hypocrisy should not be surprising because it merely reflects the hypocrisy of those who elect them.
⁹

Usually the comments about pornography are merely misleading, as when Senator Orrin Hatch said “[Pornography] can be very addictive and harmful.”
¹⁰
This statement is technically true, however, if you define
addictive
and
harmful
that broadly then the same could be said of pizza.

Other statements are more egregious. Representative Joseph Pitts said on the floor of the House of Representatives in 2005, “[T]he cause and effect between pornography and crime, violence against women and children, rape and child abuse, is clearly defined.” That same year Representative Charles Pickering stated in a Congressional hearing, “[A] culture of obscenity leads to a greater culture and exploitation of children. . . . They contribute to each other. And until you address both, you are going to see a dramatic increase.”
¹¹
These wild claims have no scientific support.

The lies are not limited to individual politicians. Ann Jordan, the Director of The Initiative Against Trafficking in Persons at Global Rights, had to write an April 2005 letter,
¹²
co-signed by eight female academics in related fields, to the State Department pointing out the numerous lies in the fact sheet on the department’s website titled “The Link Between Prostitution and Sex Trafficking.”

One of its most egregious deceits said that “[w]here prostitution is legalized or tolerated, there is a greater demand for human trafficking victims and nearly always an increase in the number of women and children trafficked into commercial sex slavery.”
¹³

A problem occurs when these lies are vigorously publicized. For example, people of all ages see federally funded television advertisements like this one from 2002:

For informed people this fearmongering may be comical, but the young girls who get pregnant because government ads and sex education teachers say condoms do not work will likely miss the humor.
¹⁵
This disinformation destroys the government’s credibility. Helpful information that our government and schools give in the future will be disregarded.

In addition, financing and pushing fake science on the populace hampers factual inquiry. Resolving the issues of our day is difficult even when honest information is being presented. When the United States’ government is spending billions on spreading fake science, the resulting quagmire of mixed messages can make the search for truth appear overwhelming.

Obfuscation may be the purpose because sexual alarmism distracts the population from truly debilitating concerns. One hundred years ago “white slavery” hysteria focused the nation’s attention on the apparition of white girls being forced into prostitution, and legislative action was promptly taken. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of children were working long hours in factories without inciting similar outrage or action.
¹⁶

Child predators are still media and political darlings. In the early 1980s, an uproar surrounding child kidnapping led to voluminous legislation and missing kids’ faces on milk cartons. Representative Paul Simon stated at the time, “The most conservative estimate is that fifty thousand young people disappear each year because of stranger kidnapping.” The actual number was closer to two or three hundred a year.
¹⁷

When California Governor Pete Wilson signed into law the chemical castration of child molesters in 1996 he stated that child molesters “have a drive to do what they do . . . three out of four will commit a new offense or parole violation within two years.” This was false. The rate was closer to twenty-five percent, with many of those being technical violations.
¹⁸
(The recidivism rates for pedophiles are among the lowest of the criminal population.)
¹⁹

Unlike white slavery, missing children and child molestation are not a myth. However, the popular conception that drives the hysteria is that of kids being snatched by a pedophile from the mall and ending up molested and dead. This is extremely rare. The overwhelming majority of missing children are runaways or are kidnapped by a family member, such as a parent in a custody battle.
²⁰
Likewise, the overwhelming majority of child molestations are done by someone the child knows intimately, usually a parent or guardian.
²¹

A Department of Justice study determined that roughly forty-six American children are abducted and killed by strangers in a year. Kidnappings by strangers that do not result in death amount to roughly 115.
²²
To put that into perspective, sixty-six Americans die a year from being struck by lightning.
²³
Meanwhile, these extremely rare cases of child kidnapping and murder continue to drive the belief that kids must
be monitored at all times, and that all child molesters must be chemically castrated, jailed for life, tracked for life, or executed.
²⁴