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Times Watch for
November 9, 2004
Don't Get "Too Radical," Republicans
Sheryl Gay Stolberg pens a comforting piece (for Democrats, anyway) for Sunday's Week in Review: "On Capitol Hill, the Majority Doesn't Always Rule," arguing that Republicans can be dissuaded from "too radical an agenda."
Stolberg writes: "So while Democrats may be forced to cave on some Bush priorities, like drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or capping jury awards in medical malpractice cases, they may be unyielding on others, like supplanting the traditional Social Security retirement system with private investment accounts. And they may get help from Republicans, particularly those up for re-election in 2006, who cannot afford to anger constituents by pursuing too radical an agenda."
For the rest of Stolberg's analysis, click here.
• Campaign 2004 | Congress | Republicans | Sheryl Gay Stolberg
Alfred Kinsey the Brave
The front page of Tuesday's Science Times is devoted to Benedict Carey's "Long After Kinsey, Only the Brave Study Sex," timed to coincide with the new movie about the sex researcher long lionized by liberals.
Carey takes a self-righteous tone: "In a scene from the movie 'Kinsey,' opening in theaters on Friday, government agents seize a box of study materials being shipped by Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, the pioneering sex researcher, and impound the contents as obscene. The scene portrays a time in American history, the 1940's and 1950's, when marital relations were rarely discussed and frank reporting about sex was greeted with a collective anxiety verging on horror. In 1948, when Dr. Kinsey published 'Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,' he was called a pervert, a menace and even a Communist. Much has changed in the years since then. But scientists say one thing has remained constant: Americans' ambivalence about the scientific study of sexuality."
Carey sees the same sort of Puritanism today: "In July 2003, for instance, Congress threatened to shut down several highly regarded sex studies, including one of emotion and arousal, and another of massage parlor workers. And last summer health officials refused to finance a widely anticipated proposal backed by three large universities to support and train students interested in studying sexuality. As a result of this continued hostility, researchers say they still know precious little about fundamental questions, including how sexual desire affects judgment, how young people develop a sexual identity, why so many people take sexual risks, how personality and mood affect sexual health and how the explosion of sexual material on the Internet and trysts arranged online affect behavior….Much of the suspicion is rooted in religious belief. Many devout believers see any effort to catalog sexual behavior as akin to publishing a field guide to carnal sin, an invitation to deviancy. 'We know the formula for sexual health, which is sex within a monogamous lifelong relationship,' said the Rev. Peter Sprigg, director of marriage and family studies for the Family Research Council, a conservative lobbying group based in Washington. 'Studying permutations of it, we think, is an effort, like Kinsey's, to change the sexual mores of the society so that what most people consider deviant behaviors look more normal.'"
Carey seems to see resistance to such government studies as founded in reactionary, small-town morality: "Although religious conservatives have always objected on principle to sex research, several things have changed since Dr. Kinsey's time, said Dr. John Gagnon, an emeritus professor of sociology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the author of 'An Interpretation of Desire.' 'Back then, white small-town Protestants' morality was American morality, and it spoke with one voice,' he said. 'Now they no longer solely define the conversation; there are competing secular voices talking about sexual health, about pleasure, feminism, the gay movement and so on.' In response, Dr. Gagnon said, the critics of sex research have become more organized and politically connected. Mr. Sprigg agreed that conservative groups like Focus on the Family and the Family Research Council have coordinated their critiques of sex research to bring more public scrutiny to the projects."
He describes American reticence on sexual matters: "A concern for privacy, which some trace to the small-town morality of Kinsey's time, also has contributed to the wariness many Americans feel when asked to reveal sexual preferences they know may be perceived as quirky or strange. Kinsey's original sex surveys revealed the diversity in Americans' sexual behavior: many heterosexual men reported having homosexual experiences. A teenage rock guitarist down the street might stick to conventional monogamy, while her neighbor, an accountant, might prefer role-playing games with multiple partners."
Leaving out the impossibility of a "teenage rock guitarist" answering a sex survey in 1948, one would never know from Carey's gloss that Kinsey's surveys have been called into question even by his supporters. Carey doesn't get into Kinsey's dubious methodology, although 25% of Kinsey's survey group either were or had been prisoners, and 5% were male prostitutes, which surely skewed the data. Other research shows that over 60 percent of those prisoners were sex offenders, making the data "grossly deviant and unrepresentative."
And nowhere in Carey's fretting over American Puritanism is Kinsey's dark personal side mentioned. You have to turn to the Arts pages for Dinitia Smith's interview with Liam Neeson, who plays Kinsey in a new movie. Smith relates: "A few years before he died [Kinsey] circumcised himself with a pocketknife (without anesthesia). After recording the sex history of a pedophile who boasted of sexually molesting boys as young as two months, Kinsey wrote to the man, 'I rejoice at everything you send, for I am then assured that that much more of your material is saved for scientific publication.'"
For the rest of Carey on Kinsey, click here.
• Benedict Carey | Alfred Kinsey | Religion | Sex | Dinitia Smith
"Conservative" Sen. Reid to the Democrats' Rescue?
A Tuesday editorial posits Sen. Harry Reid as a potentially effective new leader for Senate Democrats: "With the Democrats clinging to 45 seats in the Senate, the party is turning to a new Senate leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, who is short on charisma and silver-tongued oratory but, perhaps more usefully, is a conservative with a reputation for steeliness and attention to detail and a knack for floor skirmishing."
"Conservative"? While Reid isn't as liberal as Sen. John Kerry, his lifetime rating of 21 from the American Conservative Union puts him well left of center.
For the full editorial, click here.
• Campaign 2004 | Democrats | Labeling Bias | Sen. Harry Reid | Senate
What Can Save the Democrats Now?
Dean Murphy pens a think piece, "Can History Save the Democrats?" for Sunday's Week in Review speculating on just what kind of act of God it will take for the Democrats to regain power: "Now, with George W. Bush's re-election, God and a newly triumphant Republican president are once again in the headlines. And there are signs that the present national divide, between the narrow but solid Republican majority and a Democratic party seemingly trapped in second place, may be hardening into a pattern that will persist for years to come. Democrats, especially, are left to wonder: What will it take to break the pattern -- an act of God? History suggests several possibilities for a major reshaping event -- a national calamity, a deep schism in the ruling party, the implosion of a social movement under the excesses of its own agenda or the emergence of an extraordinary political figure."
Some of Murphy's thoughts sound close to wishful thinking: "The war in Iraq could become so unpopular that it would dog Mr. Bush and the Republicans the way that the Vietnam War did President Johnson and the Democrats. Fault lines are already visible in the Republican party between social and fiscal conservatives, and they could split open."
Murphy concludes: "'The Republicans are basically unchecked,' Professor Wilentz said. 'There is no check in the federal government and no check in the world. They have an unfettered playing field.' Until the next act of God, that is."
For the rest of Murphy, click here.
• George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | Democrats | Dean Murphy
Hard Cheese for Krugman After Bush's Win
Wisconsin Public Radio had
Paul
Krugman on the Friday after the election, and host Kathleen Dunn found the Bush-bashing columnist in a glum mood.
Some choice quotes from Krugman from the first 15 minutes of the show:
"This was a victory for, in my view, dishonesty and intolerance and it will take a long time, a long hard struggle to recover from this and a great deal of damage will be done to America in the process."
"From Day One, this has been a hard-right administration."
"This is not just a hard-right administration but it's one that is inward-looking."
"There's clearly a block of the American electorate that is, for whom what are, what we're calling moral issues, but in any case, for whom things like abortion, gay rights and I believe lurking in the background, basically opposition to the whole civil rights movement."
• George W. Bush | Campaign 2004 | Paul Krugman
E-mail TimesWatch Director, Clay Waters, with TimesWatch feedback at cwaters@mediaresearch.org