The World's a Mess (It's in My Kiss)

There are some terrific off-line articles in this week’s New Yorker magazine (November 23, 2004) that you should read. One posits that the wide-spread belief that moral values largely shaped the outcome of the presidential election is complete bunk (or crap, for you young’ins). Essentially, the media (and crazy evangelical Christian right-types who want to run our lives) misinterpreted the results of the polling (which, itself, was somewhat skewed, due to the manner in which the questions were framed). Moral values had little to no effect on the election. It was all about 9/11, stupid. The other article is about a weird born-again guy, Ole (pronounced ‘Oh-lee’) Anthony, who runs this ministry out of Dallas that is based on sort of a redemption-through-suffering theology, which is really beside the point. The best part is that they go after the televangelists, like Robert Tilton, and expose their sham, money-grubbing, scam ministries!

In the ‘make your skin crawl that anyone could actually believe this lunatic’ category, the New Yorker also features Judith Reisman and her looney anti-Kinsey crusade. Here’s a teaser for you:

She claims that Kinsey actively solicited pedophiles to molest children and report back to him. In fact, she said, “there is absolutely no reason to believe that Kinsey himself was not involved in the sexual abuse of these children.” (None of Kinsey’s four biographers have turned up any evidence that he was.) Reisman also believes that Kinsey died not from heart failure but from what she calls “brutal, repetitive self-abuse.”

To a reader of Reisman’s scholarly papers, it sometimes appears that there is little for which she does not hold Kinsey responsible. In her research on gays, for instance, she has written that the “recruitment techniques” of homosexuals rival those of the Marine Corps. The Kinsey paradigm, she holds, created the moral framework that makes such recruitment possible. Reisman also endorses a book called “The Pink Swastika,” which challenges the “myths” that gays were victimized in Nazi Germany. The Nazi Party and the Holocaust itself, she writes, were largely the creation of “the German homosexual movement.” Thanks to Alfred Kinsey, she warns, the American homosexual movement is poised to repeat those crimes. “Idealistic ‘gay youth’ groups are being formed and staffed in classrooms nationwide by recruiters too similar to those who formed the original ‘Hitler youth.’”

Can’t make this stuff up…well, actually, I guess she can!

Oh, and note to self: ease up on the masturbating!