In an already combustible atmosphere of sexual panic, distortions and lies raise the temperature and throw in the match. Voila, a “firestorm of controversy.”
Guilt by Association, or Sexual McCarthyism
The charge against me was not only that I am an advocate of pedophilia, but that I am part of an organized and increasingly influential “pro-pedophile lobby,” whose aim is “normalizing” child abuse. One clue to my membership was that citation of Bruce Rind. Another was the author of the book’s foreword, Joycelyn Elders. You may remember Elders’ pro-pedophilic crime. She told an audience of sex educators that masturbation would be an appropriate topic of sex-ed classroom discussion; this inspired the Republican House of Representatives in 1994 to demand her resignation. Knight, on Concerned Women’s Web site, described the events this way: “Elders was fired by Bill Clinton shortly after she began a campaign to teach children to masturbate.”
The pro-pedophile lobby allegedly has been around for a long time. In a U.S. News & World Report column rebuking me, John Leo recalled his own prescience in uncovering the conspiracy. “Back in 1981, an astute writer at Time magazine (that would be me) noticed that pro-pedophilia arguments were catching on among some sex researchers and counselors, [psychologist] Larry Constantine, [sex researchers] Wardell Pomeroy, and Alfred Kinsey,” he wrote, leading up to my own connections to the lobby. “Harmful to Minors has a foreword by former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, so don’t say you weren’t warned.” Washington Times writer Robert Stacy McCain contributed a catalogue of my “pedophile sources” to the Web site of Concerned Women. “Yes, Virginia,” he wrote. “There is a pedophile movement, and Judith Levine’s book is part of it.”
But pedophiles and their lobbyists were not bad enough for some, so worse co-conspirators were proposed. While Reisman linked me to Hitler, a NewsCorridor columnist named Gregory J. Hand located me at the other end of the political spectrum, as a “bisexual Marxist Jewess,” apparently part of the international Jewish conspiracy that not only controls the banks and the press, but also is “promoting adult-child sex.” McCain’s Concerned Women piece offered this bit of commentary: “A Google search reveals that [Levine] has described herself as a ‘red-diaper baby’—that is, the child of Communist Party activists—and a socialist herself, who has written that she is ‘allergic to religion.’ Very interesting, but not a word of it in the New York Times or USA Today.” This revelation, along with the writer’s insinuation that the press was covering it up, evoked a charming bit of nostalgia. The John Birch Society and Christian Crusade in the 1960s called the Republican Quaker founding president of SIECUS, Mary Calderone, and her colleagues “atheists” and “one-worlders,” a code word for communists. They also frequently pointed out how many sex educators and sexologists were Jews (who were also suspected of traitorous sentiments) and declared that together these people were softening up America’s youth for conversion by the godless Reds. When the “red-diaper” comment came up at the end of a long phone interview, I broke the news to McCain: “I hate to tell you, Rob, but the Communist Party’s position on sex was about as progressive as the Catholic Church’s.”
Marginalization
The claim about Rind, Elders, SIECUS, and me is not only that we have a political agenda, but that it is a radical one held by a small minority. Even sympathetic reporters played up this alleged eccentricity. “Their theories are explosive,” read the blurb of an even-handed piece in the LA Times. “A handful of maverick[s]…” Don Feder in the Boston Herald repeated the claim that sex educators, and I as their fellow traveler (see Guilt by Association), are libertines and hedonists: “Levine thinks we interfere with the primary mission of sex educators — teaching kids that whatever feels good by definition is good.” Actually, sex-ed has always been an eminently moderate project, since its inception teaching kids to wait until marriage. Moreover, in survey after survey, upwards of 80 percent of American parents say they want comprehensive sexuality education of the kind Feder decries.
Another rhetorical tactic is to quote something that would sound reasonable to most people and call it perverted. Among “Levine’s bizarre theories” that Knight kept invoking was the “theory” that children are sexual from birth and, left to their own devices, will probably engage in masturbation and sex play. This “bizarre theory” is explicitly accepted by every reputable developmental psychologist and anthropologist in the industrialized world and implicitly by most everyone else in the world.
While the object of an attack is portrayed as a wild-eyed radical, the critics are described as reasonable, and legion. “In Harmful to Minors: The Perils of Protecting Children From Sex, its author, Judith Levine, says parents should recognize their children as sexual beings and that in some instances, sex between adults and minors may actually be a good thing,” Greta Van Susteren introduced me on her show, misrepresenting the book. She added: “As you may expect this has parents around the country in a uproar.”