Read the whole thing here.Liberals are so blind to how far out they are on this late-term abortion issue compared to the average American (and importantly, the average Hispanic voter) that they think it’s a plus. They don’t see how it could possibly bite them in the rear. They’ve talked themselves into the idea that their principled opposition to a bill that splinters their own coalition and receives support from 62 percent of the state’s voters is part of their path to victory. They don’t see the analogy they are creating to rightward Republican drift they are constantly decrying. - See more at: http://conservativeintel.com/2013/07/16/hb2-and-demographic-change-texas-liberals-dont-see-the-danger/#sthash.sXyLSz4i.dpufLiberals are so blind to how far out they are on this late-term abortion issue compared to the average American (and importantly, the average Hispanic voter) that they think it’s a plus. They don’t see how it could possibly bite them in the rear. They’ve talked themselves into the idea that their principled opposition to a bill that splinters their own coalition and receives support from 62 percent of the state’s voters is part of their path to victory
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They seem quite content choosing abortion after five months of pregnancy as the hill they will die on. They don’t seem to understand how this could frustrate their fantasy that demographic change will automatically make them dominant because Hispanics will always vote the way they expect them to vote.
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Both the Democrats, with their demographic triumphalism, and the Republicans who talk of immigration as their party’s death-knell, are underestimating Hispanic voters’ intelligence and open-mindedness in how they cast their votes.
Liberals are so blind to how far out they are on this late-term abortion issue compared to the average American (and importantly, the average Hispanic voter) that they think it’s a plus. They don’t see how it could possibly bite them in the rear. They’ve talked themselves into the idea that their principled opposition to a bill that splinters their own coalition and receives support from 62 percent of the state’s voters is part of their path to victory. They don’t see the analogy they are creating to rightward Republican drift they are constantly decrying. - See more at: http://conservativeintel.com/2013/07/16/hb2-and-demographic-change-texas-liberals-dont-see-the-danger/#sthash.sXyLSz4i.dpuf
Liberals are so blind to how far out they are on this late-term abortion issue compared to the average American (and importantly, the average Hispanic voter) that they think it’s a plus. They don’t see how it could possibly bite them in the rear. They’ve talked themselves into the idea that their principled opposition to a bill that splinters their own coalition and receives support from 62 percent of the state’s voters is part of their path to victory. They don’t see the analogy they are creating to rightward Republican drift they are constantly decrying. - See more at: http://conservativeintel.com/2013/07/16/hb2-and-demographic-change-texas-liberals-dont-see-the-danger/#sthash.sXyLSz4i.dpuf
It is a bit embarrassing that Abortion Barbie doesn't even have her facts straight on Kermit Gosnell considering abortion is her issue.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) August 6, 2013
Erick Erickson is the insecure frat-boy id of the Republican Party. Oh, sure, party leaders wring their hands about their problem with women voters, but deep down, we’re all “Abortion Barbie” to a whole lot of them. Only Erickson is creepy enough to say so.Followed by ThinkProgress:
Conservative commentator Erick Erickson referred to Texas Sen. Wendy Davis (D) as an “Abortion Barbie” in a tweet on Tuesday afternoon, sparking outrage over the sexist implications of linking the female lawmaker with the famous Mattel product.According to MediaMatters:
Erickson has a history of inflammatory comments, including directing liberals to a coat hanger sales site after a restrictive Texas abortion bill passed, later responding to criticism by offering his "Sincere Apologies to the Kid Killing caucus." Erickson defended Republican Missouri Rep. Todd Akin after he claimed it was "really rare" for victims of "legitimate rape" to become pregnant and called the opening of the 2012 Democratic National Convention the "First night of the Vagina Monologues."Cahnman's Musings commends Erickson for developing the perfect nickname for Wendy Davis.
Some told of senators ogling women on the Senate floor or watching porn on iPads and on state-owned computers. [Emphasis Ours]This helps explain the budget.
In early August, the City Council will consider an ordinance to add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the discrimination ordinances in the city code. The proposal would ban anyone that has ever opposed (“demonstrated bias, by word or deed…”) homosexuality from being involved in city government and/or performing a city contract/subcontract. The proposed ordinance provides no exemptions for religious beliefs on homosexuality, even beliefs expressed in Church. - See more at: http://txvalues.org/2013/07/25/san-antonio-looks-to-ban-christians-from-city-government/#sthash.r9UdVQA2.dpufIn early August, the City Council will consider an ordinance to add “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the discrimination ordinances in the city code. The proposal would ban anyone that has ever opposed (“demonstrated bias, by word or deed…”) homosexuality from being involved in city government and/or performing a city contract/subcontract. The proposed ordinance provides no exemptions for religious beliefs on homosexuality, even beliefs expressed in Church.
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This ordinance is filled with serious legal (and moral) problems (see here for more detail).
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- The ordinance directly violates the First Amendment freedom of religion and freedom of speech.
- The ordinance violates the Texas Religious Freedom Act by infringing on religious liberty while not proving a compelling need for the law and not using the least intrusive way to address the issue.
- The ordinance further violates the Federal and Texas Constitutions by creating a de facto religious test for involvement in city government.
- The ordinance does not provide any protection for religious organizations, non-profits, or businesses, thus forcing these organizations to provide services that may be in direct violation of their religious beliefs.
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The continued push to accept homosexuality and redefine marriage will continue to put our precious religious freedoms in grave peril. As evidenced by this ordinance, little tolerance will be given to those, particularly Christians, that continue stand for the biblical truth on marriage and homosexuality. And, the successful passage of this ordinance will certainly tempt other cities in Texas to follow suit.
I finally got to watch my first episode of “Sex and the City” in 2002 on a family vacation in a hotel with premium cable. Although the viewing experience was punctuated by my parents shouting “close your eyes” every time Samantha brought out her vibrator (which happens a lot in this particular episode, “Critical Conditions”), I instantly fell in love with the humor, fashion and fierceness of the series. Never before in a sitcom had I heard women discussing sex, power and relationships so unfiltered. I knew when I grew up I wanted to be just like these confident, glamorous women.While we've lived in Texas for six years, Cahnman's Musings grew up in New York City. We went to prep school on the Upper West Side during SiTC's first two seasons. We returned during the show's final season and stayed through its early run on TBS. To be honest, there were times in the mid-2000's when we were little more than the token Republican in an SiTC vignette writ small. We've lived large chunks of this lifestyle.
But as I re-watch the series over a decade later as a single woman living in New York City, I find myself distracted by how unrealistically dreamlike their jobs, apartments, clothes, trendy nightclub jaunts and, most of all, sex lives are. I still very much enjoy the series, but the glitter of “Sex and the City” has somewhat faded as I’ve grown to realize these women inhabit a world so glamorous it glosses over reality.
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If Carrie’s, Miranda’s, Charlotte’s and Samantha’s jobs, apartments and clothes looked too good to be true, their sex lives looked flat-out damn amazing. While the four women’s open discussion of sexual desires, problems and queries was ample, the sex itself the majority of the time was pretty stunning. From Samantha coming almost always without fail to the sexy boudoir shots of Carrie in subtle black lace bras, the sex looked either incredibly fun or incredibly elegant.
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Unfortunately, after watching the series as young teenagers, my friends and I embraced not only the cosmopolitans (which we quickly realized were not a particularly affordable habit), but the expectations that glitzy sexual and romantic adventures were just around the corner. To a degree, that was a good thing. As a result of “Sex and the City,” we grew up never fearing being single, no small feat compared to earlier generations of women. Who wanted marriage when we would make love in a firehouse or be whisked onto a horse-drawn carriage through snowy Central Park by a mysteriously sexy older Russian?
However, once we were older and entering the “real world,” we were disappointed and convinced we were doing something wrong for not having the apartment, parties and, most of all, sex that Carrie showed us we could, and should, have. We expected the hardest part to be finding a man who could meet our sexual needs, not to be struggling to figure out and articulate them ourselves. Like a cooking show that presents a few ingredients and then immediately cuts to a perfect chocolate soufflé, “Sex and the City” never gave us the guidance to put it all together. I recognize that television’s first job is to entertain, not to educate, but for a generation of girls who idolized [emphasis mine] the Fab Four, the show left us grappling with an illusion of what sex is supposed to be like.
It makes perfect sense that by the time “Girls” premiered on HBO in 2012, my peers and I were craving messy, unsatisfying, awkward sex and life in general on TV. We wanted to see the raw, unfiltered discussions and portrayals of sex that “Sex and the City” did so well, but we also wanted it real: the insecurity, the pressure to please, the confusion. We wanted TV that not only encouraged us to embrace our sexuality, but to openly share what perplexed us, frightened us, silenced us.Having lived the reality of Carrie Bradshaw's lifestyle, Mrs. Shire tragically chooses to follow up with Lena Dunham. While SiTC at least produced a seductive illusion, Girls is gross and lame. The solution is to stop chasing the dragon of consequence free promiscuity, not climb further down the rathole of sexual Marxism.
Which is not to say “Girls” is better than or, for that matter, even as good as “Sex and the City.” It certainly is a response, which in and of itself says a lot.
Read the whole release here.Texas Attorney General’s Office Obtains $1.4 Million Settlement against Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast for Medicaid Fraud
Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast fraudulently billed Texas Medicaid program for products, services either not provided or not necessaryHOUSTON – The Texas Attorney General’s Office today concluded the State’s Medicaid fraud investigation into Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast, Inc. Under today’s agreement, Planned Parenthood Gulf Coast must pay $1.4 million for fraudulently overbilling the taxpayer-funded Medicaid program.
The Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance (WSFA) is always working to advance the recognition of sexual, gender, and family diversity. As the nation’s leading sexual freedom and human rights organization, honored by Proclamation in Washington, DC, we are uniquely positioned to bring together allies and partners, thereby maximizing our effectiveness and theirs. Together, with your support, we can move mountains! - See more at: http://www.woodhullalliance.org/about-us/#sthash.FTqzgwVe.dpuf
What did they do last year?!?
The Woodhull Sexual Freedom Alliance (WSFA) is always working to advance the recognition of sexual, gender, and family diversity. As the nation’s leading sexual freedom and human rights organization, honored by Proclamation in Washington, DC, we are uniquely positioned to bring together allies and partners, thereby maximizing our effectiveness and theirs. Together, with your support, we can move mountains!
What do they oppose?!?
We launched the Family Matters Project, which is dedicated to advancing and protecting the fundamental human right to family by eliminating discrimination based on family structure and relationship choices.
But at least they have a solid understanding of their friends and enemies, right?!?
Prostitution-free zones: Working with United Nations human rights treaties as a foundation, we testifiedin Washington, DC against proposed “Prostitution Free Zones.” Our testimony pointed out the PFZs violate DC’s own human rights policies, the US Constitution and the United States’ commitment to the United Nations with regard to ending violence against sex workers.
No condoms as evidence: Part of an on-going effort to eliminate the use of condoms as evidence of commercial sex work in New York, Woodhull joined advocates representing a broad coalition of public health and reproductive rights advocates, civil and human rights organizations, LGBT groups, and sex workers’ rights organizers to meet with dozens of legislators to ask for their support in moving New York SB323/A1008 to a vote in 2013!
Now, who was Victoria Woodhull?!?
We continue to work collaboratively with other organizations, even at the level of the United Nations, to advance and affirm sexual freedom as a fundamental human right...
As part of this collaborative effort, we participate in the ongoing United Nations Universal Periodic Review monitoring process for human rights violations in the United States.
That's just their "about me" page; there's a lot of other terrifying crap on their website here.
Victoria preached a doctrine called “Free Love” that included the odd notion of marrying for love, as well as an easement of the divorce laws. She was radical even by today’s standards, asserting: “Women are entirely unaware of their power. Like an elephant led by a string, they are subordinated by just those who are most interested in holding them in slavery…Sexual freedom means the abolition of prostitution both in and out of marriage, means the emancipation of woman and her coming into control of her own body, means the end of her pecuniary dependence upon man…means the abrogation of forced pregnancy, of anti-natal murder of undesired children and the birth of love children only.” [emphasis mine]
Victoria preached a doctrine called “Free Love” that included the odd notion of marrying for love, as well as an easement of the divorce laws. She was radical even by today’s standards, asserting: “Women are entirely unaware of their power. Like an elephant led by a string, they are subordinated by just those who are most interested in holding them in slavery…Sexual freedom means the abolition of prostitution both in and out of marriage, means the emancipation of woman and her coming into control of her own body, means the end of her pecuniary dependence upon man…means the abrogation of forced pregnancy, of anti-natal murder of undesired children and the birth of love children only.” - See more at: http://www.woodhullalliance.org/about-us/about-victoria-woodhull/#sthash.CCy2JR8M.dpuf
We continue to work collaboratively with other organizations, even at the level of the United Nations, to advance and affirm sexual freedom as a fundamental human right - See more at: http://www.woodhullalliance.org/about-us/#sthash.FTqzgwVe.dpuf
We launched the Family Matters Project, which is dedicated to advancing and protecting the fundamental human right to family by eliminating discrimination based on family structure and relationship choices. - See more at: http://www.woodhullalliance.org/about-us/#sthash.FTqzgwVe.dpuf
The American Psychiatric Association held it's 1970 convention in the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco....In the middle of [the] speech both doors of the Fairmont Ballroom burst open. Down one aisle marched the Gay Liberation Front; down the other came Women's liberation, both shouting obscenities and throwing brassieres and dildos. (emphasis mine) (262/3)Conservative activist Ryan Sorba goes into more detail:
[I]n 1970 the leadership of a faction of pro-sodomy psychiatrists within the APA planned a “systematic effort to disrupt annual meetings of the American Psychiatric Association.” Although politically motivated protests directed at psychiatrists had taken place prior, one can see the beginnings of a coordinated effort to politicize the APA at its 1970 annual meeting in San Francisco....Pro-sodomy activists took over the podium and microphones. Then, Konstantin Berlandt, of the Berkeley chapter of the Gay Liberation Front, “paraded through the hall in a bright red dress. Paper airplanes sailed down from the balcony. With two papers still unread, the chairman announced adjournment.”There's nothing new about what we saw at the Texas Capitol two weeks ago.
"I hear Planned Parenthood rallies are a pretty good place to pick up chicks!"
In the middle of the pro life speeches this was going on. A woman kept getting in front of my camera while I was trying to shoot two guys having a debate. So I gave her the airtime she wanted. A man didnt like that. Though he should get the cops. He was laughed at.
Forcing women to adhere to the anti-choice attitudes of state legislators forces men to do the same, and will have serious consequences both on men's lives and lifestyles.In other words, they just admitted their support for abortion stems from a desire to protect consequence free casual sex.
....Your sex life is at stake. Can you think of anything that kills the vibe faster than a woman fearing a back-alley abortion? Making abortion essentially inaccessible in Texas will add an anxiety to sex that will drastically undercut its joys. And don't be surprised if casual sex outside of relationships becomes far more difficult to come by. [Emphasis Mine]
The article is written by Vivian Norris de Montaigu, whose bio states:Texas Women: Stop Having Sex With Men Who Vote Against Your Best Interests
Vivian Norris is based in Paris and holds a PhD, focusing on Globalization Studies, and wrote a dissertation on Globalization and Media.Apparently a native Texan, the Parisian by choice has a proposal for Texas Women:
How perfectly patriarchal, these Texas men trying to not hear what women want have shown themselves to be, but how incredibly out of touch with today's reality....Sultry, sweaty summers can be made much nicer when good old-fashioned sex is part of the picture. But women, take heed: Don't give in if your man, boyfriend, husband, toyboy is not voting for your best interests, your reproductive health -- do not sleep with that man!Instead, make politics your sex life:
Do not make him dinner, do not go fetch him a cold beer from the fridge, do not iron that shirt, hell, do not change that diaper... do not make his life a little nicer this summer if he does not "get it" and learn to respect women! Instead, volunteer some time for senators like Wendy Davis, go with a group of women to Austin and make your voices heard. Get on the computer and the social networks and organize.Because George W. Bush hates ovaries:
Remember what happened last time when a Texas good ole boy governor took that patriarchy all the way to become President of the United States.But don't listen to those counter-revolutionary Texas Women:
[M]en in Texas who have not woken up and smelled the coffee simply do not deserve any loving. Houston has more strip clubs than libraries. You can buy a gun easier than you can get reproductive health care. There is still a virgin and whore fundamentalist mentality which is more dangerous to women as it often is also promoted by the women themselves. These women, like women who hurt other women everywhere by criticizing and judging them, need to wake up as well. Women hurting other women is suicidal. Women who play into the hand of patriarchy need to be shown the way out of that prison. Wendy Davis and Leticia Van De Putte and others are leading the way.After threatening counter-revolutionary Texas Women, she then makes one of the most ironic statements of all time:
The GOP will threaten and they will use silence and fear against anyone who challenges what is an outdated and unhealthy and dangerous system which abuses power against more than half of the citizens of Texas.Says the woman who just threatened her counter-revolutionary co-genderites.
Senate leaders “chose to push through their red meat, partisan political agendas, sacrificing women’s options and endangering their health in the process.”
Many Texans are “afraid, genuinely afraid, of how this Legislature treats women,” state Sen. Kirk Watson, D-Austin, said before the final vote on SB 5. He said the bill would create obstacles to safe, legal abortion services and “creates a back room process to negate women’s constitutional rights over their own bodies.”Congressman Lloyd Doggett (D - Austin):
Governor Perry's war on women's health advances, and as I told this reporter, it's not another “oops” moment, but another of many “ugh” moments so typical of Rick Perry’s wrongheadedness.Cahnman's Musings finds getting your insides scraped out by some abortionist to be a strange definition of 'women's health.'
Kudos to Governor Perry for vetoing HB 950 on Friday.You can read our endorsement of Konni here.
And right on cue came the same old "war on women" rhetoric from Wendy Davis. After the veto, she wrote on FB: "In yet another attack on Texas women, Gov. Perry has officially vetoed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act." Please don't be fooled by her rhetoric! That bill was not about preventing wage discrimination. That's already illegal. HB 950 simply extended the statute of limitations on lawsuits. Frivolous lawsuits that would result from that bill becoming law would actually hinder employment for women. Perry's veto was not an attack on women, but if the bill had become law it would have been a gift to trial lawyers! In this case, Governor Perry used his veto pen wisely.
We need lawmakers who are ready to fight for policy which will actually provide more opportunities to anyone who is seeking employment. Eliminating the business margin tax would be a great start. Wendy Davis is playing politics as usual instead of fighting for policy that works!
Before the push to loosen America's sexual mores really got under way in the 1950s, the only widely reported sexually transmitted diseases in the United States were gonorrhea and syphilis. Today we have more than two dozen varieties, from pelvic inflammatory disease (which renders more than 100,000 American women infertile each year) to AIDS (which presently infects 42 million people worldwide and has already killed another 23 million). According to a report by scientists at the National Cancer Institute, a woman who has three or more sex partners in her lifetime increases her risk of cervical cancer by as much as 1,500 percent. In another finding that runs contrary to all that the sex researchers preached, a survey at the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center showed that married men and women, on average, are sexually happier than unwed couples merely living together. And even if live-in couples do marry, they're 40 to 85 percent more likely to divorce than those who go straight to the altar.So what happened? Was science simply wrong? Well, not exactly — the truth is more complicated than that.
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Alfred C. Kinsey had a secret. The Indiana University zoologist and "father of the sexual revolution" almost single-handedly redefined the sexual mores of everyday Americans. The problem was, he had to lie to do it....The science that launched the sexual revolution has been used for the past 50 years to sway court decisions, pass legislation, introduce sex education into our schools, and even push for a redefinition of marriage.
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Many traditionally forbidden sexual practices, Kinsey and his colleagues proclaimed, were surprisingly commonplace; 85 percent of men and 48 percent of women said they'd had premarital sex, and 50 percent of men and 40 percent of women had been unfaithful after marriage. Incredibly, 71 percent of women claimed their affair hadn't hurt their marriage, and a few even said it had helped. What's more, 69 percent of men had been with prostitutes, 10 percent had been homosexual for at least three years, and 17 percent of farm boys had experienced sex with animals. Implicit in Kinsey's report was the notion that these behaviors were biologically "normal" and hurt no one. Therefore, people should act on their impulses with no inhibition or guilt.The 1948 report on men came out to rave reviews and sold an astonishing 200,000 copies in two months. Kinsey's name was everywhere from the titles of pop songs ("Ooh, Dr. Kinsey") to the pages of Life, Time, Newsweek, and the New Yorker. Kinsey was "presenting facts,"Look magazine proclaimed. He was "revealing not what should be but what is." Dubbed "Dr. Sex" and applauded for his personal courage, the researcher was compared to Darwin, Galileo, and Freud.But beneath the popular approbation, many astute scientists were warning that Kinsey's research was gravely flawed. The list of critics, Kinsey biographer James H. Jones observes, "read like a Who's Who of American intellectual life." They included anthropologists Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict; Stanford University psychologist Lewis M. Terman; Karl Menninger, M.D. (founder of the famed Menninger Institute); psychiatrists Eric Fromm and Lawrence Kubie; cultural critic Lionel Trilling of Columbia University, and countless others.By the time Kinsey's volume about women was published, many journalists had abandoned the admiring throngs and joined the critics. Magazine articles appeared with titles like "Is the Kinsey Report a Hoax?" and "Love Is Not a Statistic." Time magazine ran a series of stories exposing Kinsey's dubious science (one was titled "Sex or Snake Oil?")
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Problem #2: Skewed SamplesKinsey often presented his statistics as if they applied to average moms, dads, sisters, and brothers. In doing so, he claimed 95 percent of American men had violated sex-crime laws that could land them in jail. Thus Americans were told they had to change their sex-offender laws to "fit the facts." But, in reality, Kinsey's reports never applied to average people in the general population. In fact, many of the men Kinsey surveyed were actually prison inmates. Wardell B. Pomeroy, Kinsey co-author and an eyewitness to the research, wrote that by 1946 the team had taken sexual histories from about 1,400 imprisoned sex offenders. Kinsey never revealed how many of these criminals were included in his total sample of "about 5,300" white males. But he did admit including "several hundred" male prostitutes. Additionally, at least 317 of Kinsey's male subjects were not even adults, but sexually abused children.Piling error on top of error, about 75 percent of Kinsey's adult male subjects volunteered to give their sexual histories. As Stanford University psychologist Lewis M. Terman observed, volunteers for sex studies are two to four times more sexually active than non-volunteers.Kinsey's work didn't improve in his volume on women. In fact, he interviewed so few average women that he actually had to redefine "married" to include any woman who had lived with a man for more than a year. This change added prostitutes to his sample of "married" women.In the December 11, 1949, New York Times, W. Allen Wallis, then chairman of the University of Chicago's committee on statistics, dismissed "the entire method of collecting and presenting the statistics which underlie Dr. Kinsey's conclusions:' Wallis noted, "There are six major aspects of any statistical research, and Kinsey fails on four."
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Problem #3: Faulty StatisticsGiven all this, it's hardly surprising that Kinsey's statistics were so seriously flawed that no reputable scientific survey has ever been able to duplicate them.Kinsey claimed, for instance, that 10 percent of men between the ages of 16 and 55 were homosexual. Yet in one of the most thorough nationwide surveys on male sexual behavior ever conducted, scientists at Battelle Human Affairs Research Centers in Seattle found that men who considered themselves exclusively homosexual accounted for only 1 percent of the population. In 1993, Time magazine reported, "Recent surveys from France, Britain, Canada, Norway and Denmark all point to numbers lower than 10 percent and tend to come out in the 1 to 4 percent range." The incidence of homosexuality among adults is actually "between 1 and 3 percent;" says University of Delaware sociology and criminal justice professor Joel Best, author of Damned Lies and Statistics. Best observes, however, that gay and lesbian activists prefer to use Kinsey's long-discredited one-in-ten figure "because it suggests that homosexuals are a substantial minority group, roughly equal in number to African Americans — too large to be ignored."
....Kinsey's deceptions do matter today, because we're still living with the Kinsey model of sexuality. It permeates our entire culture. As Best observes, bad statistics are significant for many reasons: "They can be used to stir up public outrage or fear, they can distort our understanding of our world, and they can lead us to make poor policy choices."
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Influencing Court Decisions
The whole article is worth a read, you can find it here.Kinsey's pseudoscience arguably did the most damage through our court systems. That's where attorneys used the researcher's "facts" to repeal or weaken laws against abortion, pornography, obscenity, divorce, adultery, and sodomy. In the May 1950 issue of Scientific Monthly, New York City attorney Morris Ernst (who represented Kinsey, Margaret Sanger, the American Civil Liberties Union, and Planned Parenthood) outlined his ambitious legal plan for Kinsey's findings. "We must remember that there are two parts to law," Ernst said. One was "the finding of the facts" (Kinsey's job); the other was applying those findings in court (Ernst's job). Noting that the law needed more tools "to aid in its search for the truth," the attorney argued for "new rules," under which "facts" like Kinsey's would be introduced into court cases in the same way judges allowed other scientific tools, such as fingerprints, lie-detector results, and blood tests. The inexhaustible Ernst also urged the courts to revise laws concerning the institution of marriage.The legal fallout from Kinsey's work continues. The U.S. Supreme Court's historic decision last year striking down sodomy laws was the offshoot of a long string of court cases won largely on the basis of Kinsey's research. And 50 years of precedents set by Kinsey's "false 10 percent" are now being used in states like Massachusetts to redefine marriage.A Sorry LegacyInspired by the first Kinsey report, Hugh Hefner founded Playboy in 1953. A decade later, Helen Gurley Brown turned Cosmopolitan into a sex magazine for women. Even today magazines like Self and Glamour continue to quote Kinsey with respect, never acknowledging the grave errors riddling his research. An estimated 30,000 Web sites offer pornography, and U.S. producers churn out 600 hard-core adult videos each month. Although reliable figures are difficult to come by, the U.S. sex industry pulls in an estimated $2.5 billion to $10 billion a year. Clearly, we're living Kinsey's legacy.In his book The End of Sex, an obituary of the sexual revolution, Esquire contributor George Leonard accurately observed that "wherever we have split 'sex' from love, creation, and the rest of life . . . we have trivialized and depersonalized the act of love itself." Treasuring others solely for their sexuality strips them of their humanity. When Kinsey tore the mystery of love from human sexuality, he abandoned us all to a sexually broken world. It's time to heal.
