Republican Gomorrah Read online

  “There were so many allegations about improper adoptions being made [against her] and how teenage girls were being pressured to give up their children,” Tim Wilka, one of the state’s attorneys at the time, said. Like Serena Joy, the barren female televangelist of Margaret Atwood’s fictional portrait of the United States as a Dominionist dystopia, The Handmaid’s Tale, the childless Unruh apparently believed the movement’s future was contingent on forcibly indoctrinated children pried from “unfit” but very fertile parents.

  Unruh’s crusading reached a crescendo the same year she battled criminal charges. South Dakota’s legislature had passed a bill she authored banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest, or when the mother’s life was in danger. Unruh’s husband, Allen, served on a state task force a year earlier that recommended a total restriction on abortion to the state’s Republican Governor Mike Rounds. In the wake of her apparent victory in the statehouse, Unruh still found time to wage a futile parallel campaign to ban a new over-the-counter pill—“a pesticide,” she called it—that enables women to shorten their periods. “I’m giving women freedom,” Unruh proclaimed. “We are giving back to the women what they really want. This is true feminism.”

  Even though Unruh’s abortion ban was overturned by popular fiat, her influence continued to grow. Her Abstinence Clearinghouse, a nonprofit that designs programs for public schools across the country, reaped millions of dollars in grants from Bush’s Health and Human Services Department. Unruh leveraged her financial infusion to pump propaganda-laden textbooks into public school classrooms, informing impressionable students that AIDS could be transmitted through sweat and tears and that heavy petting causes pregnancy. One Unruh-reviewed textbook informed teens, “Women gauge their happiness and judge their success on their relationships. Men’s happiness and success hinge on their accomplishments.” Researchers for Representative Henry Waxman who reviewed material created by Unruh and her allies concluded that 80 percent of their data on reproductive health was false or misleading.

  Abstinence education propaganda is valuable perhaps only as a document of the philosophy of right-wing women like Unruh. To Unruh, sex for the purpose of pleasure is a satanic act that ultimately harms women. By coercing girls to deny their essential urges, she and her cohorts believe they can protect them from demonic male aggressors on sexual hit-and-run missions. It is no wonder right-wing women insist they are the “true” feminists. And it is no coincidence that Unruh’s portrait of the ideal male partner is exactly what the radical feminist and former domestic abuse victim Andrea Dworkin might have conjured up had she not foresworn men for lesbianism—both women despise male sexual virility. “I just met with a woman whose husband was paralyzed from the waist down—he was in a wheelchair,” Unruh told me during a 2004 interview. “And the love she has for him has only grown. That to me is so beautiful, that is what it’s really all about.”

  Unruh’s apocalyptic battle against sexual evil was influenced as much by her kulturkampf as it was by a former Yiddish socialist and Captain Kangaroo songsmith named Judith Reisman. “Judith Reisman has affected my life personally through the enormous amount of scientific research she’s done,” Unruh told me. “And without Judith’s impact on my life, I don’t believe the abstinence community would have been impacted.”

  Who is Reisman? She is responsible for volumes of polemical articles and federally funded studies conjuring up a dark world in which Playboy magazine insidiously pushes kiddie-porn, sex-crazed homosexuals lure America’s youth into leather dungeons, and “erotoxins” as powerful as crack cocaine fill the somatosensory cortexes of porn watchers. Like Unruh, Reisman’s radical politics were formed in the crucible of a terrible sexual trauma.

  Reisman was raised far from most of her Christian-right compatriots, in prewar Newark, New Jersey, a haven for Jewish immigrants that also served as the setting for Phillip Roth’s best-selling novel about a covert Nazi conspiracy to seize control of the United States, The Plot Against America. Like Roth, Reisman has portrayed Newark as a garden of innocence, a refuge from the storm of cultural tumult gathering around her. Her mother was a Yiddish theater actress and her father a folk singer; both passed their musical talents on to her. “I lived at a wonderful time,” Reisman recalled in a short memoir she published. “I felt safe with neighbors, uncles or cousins as was the custom of that time.” It was morning in America.

  By the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, Reisman claimed she was still a naïf. “I married, and the hedge of protection about my life was not breached until 1966 when my 10-year-old daughter was molested by a 13-year-old adored and trusted family friend,” she wrote. “He knew she would like it, he said, he knew from his father’s magazines.” According to Reisman, the boy slipped out of the country with his family while her daughter slipped into a deep depression that may have contributed to her death from a brain aneurysm fifteen years later.

  Thrust into a state of all-consuming anxiety by the incident, Reisman sought solace from a college friend living in the countercultural mecca of Berkeley. She claims her friend told her that “children are sexual from birth.” “I did not know it then,” Reisman recounted, “but as a young mother, I had entered the world according to Kinsey.” She referred, of course, to Dr. Alfred Kinsey, the controversial postwar biologist whose best-selling studies destroyed archaic sexual mores by revealing that, for example, Middle Americans have engaged in homosexuality at the same rate as cosmopolitan city dwellers, masturbation is practiced universally, and sex does not begin or end at marriage.

  But before Reisman set her sights on Kinsey, her career as a song-writer would have to collapse under the weight of the liberal media. In 1973, after earning acclaim as a music video creator for various local children’s shows, the producer of Captain Kangaroo recognized her gift for catchy, kid-friendly compositions. Soon after he hired her, however, the producer informed Reisman that she would need to adapt her songwriting style to the changing tastes of American kids, who were tuning in to cartoons at increasing rates. “I would have to speed up my tempo to compete with the fast-action and the increasing violence of the cartoons on other stations. . . . I found myself unwilling or unable to write for children that way,” Reisman recalled.

  Reisman spent her royalties from Kangaroo to put herself through graduate school at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, where she says she studied the mass media’s effects on the minds of children. She emerged from her studies convinced that images of Winnie the Pooh, Mickey Mouse, and other cuddly characters that appeared “in Playboy/ Penthouse would cause sexual acting out on children.” After she delivered a lecture on the Playboy/kiddie-porn conspiracy at a conference on Love and Attraction at Swansea University in Wales in 1977, Reisman said she was taken aside by an unidentified “Canadian professor” who informed her that only one man was responsible for the “global child sex abuse epidemic”: Kinsey.

  “Now I finally knew there was a source authority for children increasingly being viewed sexually,” Reisman wrote. “[M]y friend Car-ole had . . . gotten the idea that ‘children were sexual from birth’ from Kinsey.” Suddenly, the boy who molested Reisman’s daughter became a mere extension of Kinsey. And although the boy had disappeared, Reisman saw Kinsey living on in the mounting women’s liberation and gay rights movements.

  The onset of the Reagan Revolution presented Reisman with a wealth of opportunities. In 1984, Justice Department official Alfred Regnery, now a prominent conservative publisher, provided Reisman $734,371 to analyze thirty years’ worth of Playboy back issues. When she turned in her findings at American University, where she was based, the university refused to publish them. Even Regnery confessed that the grant was a mistake. “This is not science, it’s vigilantism: paranoid, pseudoscientific hyperbole with a thinly veiled, hidden agenda. This kind of thing doesn’t help children at all,” Dr. Loretta Haroian, a leading expert on childhood sexuality, said of Reisman’s findings. Reisman’s report nevertheless formed the centerpiece of present
ations by Dobson and his allies at the Meese Pornography Commission hearings.

  Reisman’s paper prompted the coup de grâce for Regnery’s collapsing career. When it arrived on his desk, the hard-charging lawyer was struggling to suppress an embarrassing story from his past that had resurfaced. In 1976, during the last weeks of Regnery’s flagging campaign for district attorney in Madison, Wisconsin, his wife Christina reported to the police that two men had warned her husband to drop out of the race and then had slashed her seventy-six times with an embroidery knife before forcing her to perform oral sex on them. The police recorded her tale:

  Both men got up, and the [Negro male] grabbed her by the hair and pulled her towards the bathroom. He dragged her to the edge of the tub while he got into the tub behind her. She explained again that the bathroom is extremely small, and that the man had to get into the tub to be anywhere behind her. The [white male] dropped his pants to his knees and raised the lid of the seat of the toilet. She stated that he had an erection, and he leaned towards her. The [Negro male] directed her head motions by jerking on her hair and head, and the [Negro male] forced her head a little forward so that she had to take the [white male’s] penis into her mouth.

  The police swiftly determined that Christina Regnery had fabricated the attack—the lurid story was a fantasy—possibly with the assistance of her husband. During a subsequent search of the Regnerys’ home, police discovered a large cache of pornography, including “several catalogues for various prophylactic devices and erotica.” When this sordid tale circulated through the Washington press corps, Regnery resigned, citing (what else?) a desire to spend more time with his family.

  While Regnery retreated into his conservative publishing empire, Reisman found a newly receptive audience for her discredited ideas. At a May 1994 conference sponsored by Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs, described by the Washington Times as “top secret,” Reisman introduced her theory of a proselytizing homosexual movement. “I would suggest to you,” she told the conference, “that while the homosexual population may right now be 1 to 2 percent, hold your breath, people, because the recruitment is loud; it is clear; it is everywhere. You’ll be seeing, I would say, 20 percent or more, probably 30 percent, or even more than that, of the young population will be moving into homosexual activity.” By the meeting’s conclusion, representatives of the forty organizations in attendance agreed to move anti-gay politicking to the forefront of the movement’s long-term agenda.

  While winning friends among the Christian right, Reisman was also seeking to influence people on Capitol Hill in her push for an investigation into whether Kinsey had sexually abused children during his research. Reisman’s lobbying piqued the interest of Texas Republican Representative Steve Stockman, a former drifter with well-established ties to anti-government militia leaders. In 1995, Stockman introduced HR 2749, “The Child Protection and Ethics in Education Act,” a bill Reisman helped author that proposed “to determine if Alfred Kinsey’s [books] Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and/ or Sexual Behavior in the Human Female are the result of any fraud or criminal wrongdoing.” Even in the House’s right-wing atmosphere, the bill went nowhere. A year later, Stockman lost his reelection campaign, depriving Reisman of terra firma on Capitol Hill.

  But when George W. Bush entered the White House, Reisman’s anti-porn crusade gained steam again. In February 2003, Bush appointed her longtime friend Bruce Taylor as senior counsel to the assistant attorney general. Taylor has prosecuted over seven hundred obscenity cases in his career, including the famed 1981 Ohio v. Larry Flynt trial (Flynt was paralyzed outside the trial by a bullet fired by serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin, an American Nazi Party member incensed by an interracial Hustler photo spread.) With a $5 million annual budget, Taylor oversaw a beefed-up FBI task force responsible for jailing pornographers such as Paul Little, who was sentenced in October 2008 to over three years in federal prison for the monstrous crime of distributing pornography “over the internet and through the mail.”

  “We should probably call her Detective Reisman for finding the hidden clue to Kinsey’s crimes against children and families,” Taylor said in a quotation Reisman published on her personal website. “‘Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences’ is a blueprint for justice for victims of sexual exploitation and abuse.”

  In November 2004, Reisman spent a week on Capitol Hill at the invitation of Republican Senator Sam Brownback, a Catholic traditionalist from Kansas who waged a hapless campaign for president in 2008. Reisman testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Science, Technology and Space on “The Science Behind Pornography Addiction,” declaring that “Pornography triggers myriad kinds of internal, natural drugs that mimic the ‘high’ from a street drug. Addiction to pornography is addiction to what I dub ‘erotoxins’—mind-altering drugs produced by the viewer’s own brain.” She added, “A basic science research team employing a cautiously protective methodology should study ‘erotoxins’ and the brain/body.” Although Reisman’s tacit plea for government funds to study “erotoxins” was never answered, she managed to ingratiate herself with the federally funded Abstinence Clearinghouse.

  Reisman met Unruh through a mutual friend, Eunice Ray. Ray is the founder and director of Camp American, a summer camp where kids can play volleyball, go canoeing, and attend workshops led by theocrats such as Gary DeMar, an acolyte of R. J. Rushdoony who openly advocates the death penalty for gays, abortion doctors, and adulterers. Other options for campers have included shooting seminars with Larry Pratt, the Gun Owners of America president who once argued that right-wing “citizen defense patrols” modeled after Guatemalan death squads should assume law enforcement responsibilities in American cities. Ray’s promotional material assures parents, “Students will discover the deception of evolution, the importance of purity and morals in a free society, and the pagan connection to the radical environmental movement.” But she admonishes them: “NO ‘Speedo’ style swimwear for young men. Shorts style swimwear only.”

  Reisman was the guest of honor at the Abstinence Clearinghouse’s 2004 leadership conference. After being greeted by White House public liaison Tim Goeglein, she took the stage alongside Eunice Ray to warn, “Pornography is training all your sex educators.” (Goeglein resigned his White House post in 2007 after admitting to plagiarizing over thirty of the columns he wrote for a local newspaper; he is now the Washington lobbyist for Focus on the Family.) Unruh told me that Reisman received several standing ovations and “everyone just loved her.” Later in the evening, President Bush addressed the conference by video link-up, promising to double federal funding for abstinence-only programs. Finally, Reisman received an “Abstie Lifetime Achievement Award,” her crowning achievement.

  When the Democrats seized control of Congress in 2006, the abstinence education movement’s fortunes shifted dramatically. Although the Democrats failed to defund abstinence-only education, they made it easier for states to opt out of Title V funding that mandated the discredited programs. Unruh and her panicked allies responded by forming a trade association, the National Abstinence Education Association, to pressure legislators for a slice of federal largesse. But with congressional committee chairs occupied by Democrats, their machinations were futile; by June 2008, at least twenty-two states had opted out of abstinence education. The social wreckage wrought by youth deprived of medically correct sex education by abstinence activists had become too much of a burden for local governments to bear.

  But all was not lost for the movement’s female vanguard. Amid the rubble of the GOP after its 2006 midterm decimation was a newly elected woman from the Last Frontier who would become an unlikely symbol of the movement’s future. A former beauty pageant runner-up and self-described “feminist for life,” Alaska’s new governor, Sarah Palin, was an archetype of right-wing womanhood. Adored by Dobson and his allies, Palin would soon play a pivotal role in consolidating the Republican Party’s radical image.

  Back in Washington, the movement had mobilized to defend
its fallen ones, especially David Vitter, a staunchly conservative Louisiana senator the Christian right had helped elect. Vitter, who had been dogged for years by rumors that he had had an affair with a prostitute, was finally exposed as a serial customer of high-priced hookers, New Orleans bordellos, and possibly even S&M dungeons. Not content to let a reliable ally lose his seat, his family values cadre committed itself to saving his career.

  CHAPTER 17

  HUMAN TOOLS

  The 2004 election turned on fear—fear of enemies at the gates and fear of enemies within. In eleven states, the Christian right placed ballot measures that successfully banned same-sex marriage. James Dobson and his close allies, Tony Perkins and Gary Bauer, mounted a ferocious effort to pass these measures, packing stadiums for rallies to “Stand for Marriage.” Dobson incited crowds by reciting from his new polemic, “Marriage Under Fire,” which warned that the legalization of same sex marriage would lead to “group marriage,” “marriage between daddies and little girls,” and “marriage between a man and his donkey.” Same-sex marriage, he railed, threatened to “destroy civilization.”

  The “Stand for Marriage” rallies were also furtive campaign events for right-wing Republican senatorial candidates. Jim DeMint from South Carolina, who boldly opposed allowing homosexuals and single mothers to teach in public schools, was among Dobson’s beneficiaries. DeMint’s absurdities, which helped get him elected, were exceeded only by those of another gay-baiting Senate hopeful, Oklahoma pediatrician and longtime anti-condom activist Tom Coburn. Another Dobson acolyte, John Thune, a fresh-faced South Dakotan and graduate of Biola University (founded as the Bible Institute of Los Angeles), defeated Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle with campaign ads proclaiming himself a “servant leader” for Jesus.