By DONALD DeMARCO
On the dustcover of James H. Jones’ 937-page biography of Alfred Kinsey, we find the following glowing tribute: “Kinsey remains the most influential and respected figure in the field of sex research and is widely regarded as the principal architect of the sexual revolution.”
This, needless to say, is the kind of promotional blurb that we come to expect from advertisers. Someone has said that when the gods seek to punish man, they get him to believe in advertising.
Psychiatrist Karl Stern has a different appraisal of Dr. Kinsey’s work. He wrote, in Love and Success, that if anyone “attempted to set the stage for a dehumanized, depersonalized society, for the great beehive, he would start with the Kinsey report.”
Rev. Billy Graham, in referring to Kinsey’s book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, claimed that “it is impossible to estimate the damage this book will do to the already deteriorating morals of America.”
Education becomes problematic in a culture of intense controversy. St. John Paul II reminded his readers, in his encyclical, Evangelium Vitae: “False prophets and false teachers have had the greatest success” (n. 17). If a student aspires to conform to the age, he will surely become seriously miseducated. The end of education is not the mere accumulating data, as Kinsey claimed; it is the acquisition of wisdom.
According to Jones, his definitive biographer, Kinsey saw himself as a great reformer in the mold of Martin Luther and John Calvin. Just as these reformers anointed every man his own priest, “Kinsey had come to proclaim a secular revolution that would wrest control of intimate affairs from religion and make people everywhere the priests of their own private parts.” “Priests of their own private parts,” may be good alliteration, but it is not good philosophy, theology, or morality.
Kinsey, with his grandiose plans to lead the sexual revolution, did not know the first thing about sex. And what is, indeed, the first thing we must know about sex?
Sex is not for the self, but for another. It is essentially a gift. Just as mother’s milk is not for her, but for her baby, sexual expression is for the loved one, specifically, one’s spouse in a loving, marital context. Kinsey is, perhaps unwittingly, a disciple of Jean-Paul Sartre who redefined the human being as a “beings-for-itself” (être-pour-soi). This is an anthropological error of extreme significance.
Human beings are essentially communal. They are not closed individuals. Given all the colorful things the eye can look at, the one thing it cannot see directly is itself. The eye is for looking out, not looking in. Life is to give and sex is its most personal gift.
Thus, Kinsey, for all his bravado, was not a reformer who made things better, but a deformer who, by reducing sex to something beneath itself, was actually a deformer. In losing sight of both the nature of the human being and the natural purpose of sex, he also lost sight of the distinction between the sexes. Kinsey was intensely homosexual and proposed a view that purported to normalize all homosexual relations, even those of a sadomasochistic kind.
Biographer Jones is unsparing in his recounting Kinsey’s masochism and episodes of self-torture. Following Charles Darwin, Kinsey believed strongly in “individual variations.”
“It is fundamental of taxonomy,” he wrote, “that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeonholes.” Kinsey sought to free everyone from all sexual restraints by convincing them that there is no binding morality apart from individual choices. Consequently, he became strongly anti-religion and opposed with equal vehemence any attempt to speak in moral terms about human sexuality.
Yet, his support of pedophilia, spouse swapping, sadism and masochism could hardly be expected to usher in a better world. His gospel of sexual self-indulgence invited disease and exploitation. In order to retain certain homosexual partners, he convinced his wife, who readily complied, to sleep with them.
What Kinsey did was not to eradicate morality but to invert it. He invited libertines to be free of morality, but castigated traditional moralists for views he deemed immoral. Jones tells us that Kinsey “would have opposed the pro-life movement.”
For Kinsey a disorder was to recognize a disorder as a disorder. He turned the moral universe upside down. His influence is being felt today in the area of sex education, specifically, in the deconstruction of gender and the reduction of human beings to mere individuals who have no moral responsibilities to anyone but to themselves.
The isolated individual, however, is dehumanized, depersonalized, desperate, and endangered.
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(Dr. Donald DeMarco is a senior fellow of Human Life International. He is professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario, an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College in Cromwell, Conn., and a regular columnist for St. Austin Review. His latest work, How to Remain Sane in a World That Is Going Mad, is available through Amazon.com. Some of his recent writings may be found at Human Life International’s Truth and Charity Forum.)
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