It usually STARTS with sex workers, but it never, EVER ends with us. https://t.co/PGpM1AdTAm
— Maggie McNeill (@Maggie_McNeill) May 11, 2023
Culture warriors just keep plunging that ice pick into society’s frontal lobes, hoping they can make the Bad Thoughts which plague them go away. The latest target is the Kinsey Institute, the world’s leading center of sexological research since shortly after the Second World War:
Indiana [politicians have]…voted…to approve a budget that specifically blocks Indiana University from using state funding to support the Kinsey Institute, and…Gov. Eric Holcomb [has] signed it into…law…The Kinsey Institute…is the leading sex research institute in the world. We publish dozens of scientific and academic articles each year, across multiple disciplines. Our faculty are internationally renowned biologists, psychologists, anthropologists, health scientists and demographers. We house the world’s largest library and research collection of sexuality-related materials, and scholars from across the globe visit us to study these materials and to train in our research theories and methods…
As one might expect, Kinsey has always been a target for prudes, bluenoses, pearl-clutchers, religious fanatics and other assorted creeps and wackos:
Since its founding in 1947, the institute has been the target of disinformation and attacks. The original “Kinsey reports” (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953)…were…met with shock and moral panic — especially following the second volume, which documented the real sexual lives of America’s wives, sisters, mothers and daughters. So much controversy ensued that the Rockefeller Foundation withdrew its…funding for the institute in 1954. In 1950…U.S. customs…seized a shipment of…materials being mailed to the institute’s research collection on the basis of their being “obscene”. The federal court case that followed, United States v. 31 Photographs, resulted in a historic ruling in favor of the institute’s right to collect materials and data for sex research…Another wave of attacks came in the 1980s, whipped up by conspiracy theories that Kinsey’s research had unleashed the sexual revolution and, with it, a moral decay on America…
But those 20th-century attacks pale in comparison with the sheer lunacy of the current ones, driven by control freaks publicly sharing their disgusting sexual fantasies:
…[Indiana politician] Lorissa Sweet…alleged without evidence that the Institute’s founder Alfred Kinsey sexually abused children and insinuated that Kinsey researchers continue to enable child abuse. “Could they be hiding child predators?” Sweet [panted with her hand in her pants]. “If there is any place where Chris Hansen needs to bring To Catch a Predator, it is Indiana University”…[to his credit one politician,] Matt Pierce[, said:] “This…is based on old, unproven allegations of conspiracies that did not exist…these are warmed-over internet memes that keep coming back…I don’t believe for a minute that the leadership really wanted that provision in the bill…but…they couldn’t bring themselves to say no to this rising base of power within the legislature”…
With rare exception, politicians can always be counted on to pander to hordes of ignorant lackwits who view any knowledge that might contradict their deeply-stupid weltanschauung as an existential threat. But until recently, they were opposed by a vocal minority of Establishment intellectuals who, while hardly intellectual titans themselves, at least recognized the necessity of defending intellectual freedom against violent imbeciles who would be hard-pressed to out-think the average baboon. Now, unfortunately, those same Establishment intellectuals are too busy promoting their own idiotic, fact-free belief system to have the energy, intellectual bandwidth or credibility to defend the Library and the Academy against smooth-brained cretins with torches, and there seems to be very little left to stop Western society from sliding into another dark age.
