"Alfred Kinsey: The American Lysenko," by Edward Feser | www.city-journal.org 8 March 2005
An article speaking truth to the power of the sexual-revolutionary establishment.
Alfred Kinsey: The American Lysenko
A biopic and a PBS documentary whitewash the life and record of this fraudulent pervert. Edward Feser
8 March 2005
Alfred Kinsey is back in vogue. One of the fathers of the sexual revolution, he seemed for a time to have slipped into the margins of public memory, eclipsed by the more colorful avant-gardists of the flesh who succeeded him-Hugh Hefner, say, or even Larry Flynt. Yet those in the business of overthrowing taboos are, in their own way, as capable of honoring the past as any conservative, and it seems Kinsey’s spiritual children have deemed him overdue for the greatest of honors that liberals bestow upon their heroes: the Hollywood biopic. Kinsey’s admirers already regularly compare him to Darwin and Einstein. With Liam Neeson in the film’s starring role, we will doubtless soon be hearing that Kinsey was also a sexual Oskar Schindler, selflessly risking life and reputation to save us from evil Victorian forces.
A new PBS documentary on Kinsey also premiered this month. Both the film and the documentary present the standard liberal “dispassionate man of science versus the forces of prejudice” morality tale-or rather, fairy tale. True, they allow that Kinsey had his faults. But then, the “flawed giant” shtick has now become the customary method of damage control among liberal historians and filmmakers, desperate to restore luster to their tarnished idols. What’s obvious to anyone who examines Kinsey’s life and work dispassionately-indeed, obvious to anyone who watches the documentary itself and sifts the facts it reports from the breathless hagiography-isn’t conceded for a moment: that Kinsey was a fraud whose work did absolutely nothing to provide a genuinely scientific or rational justification for the revolution in morals he nevertheless helped foster. ...
[Full article]