The “critics” also appear to be politically unaffiliated. In the New York Times, Knight was identified as a fellow of the Heritage Foundation, not as “the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank,” its own self-description. Only rarely in the scores of articles mentioning Concerned Women for America was the organization identified as it identifies itself: one that “seeks to instill Biblical principles in public policy at all levels.” During the time I was featured on CWA’s home page, so was a campaign to halt the teaching of “the lie of evolution” in public schools and an indictment of the Bush Administration’s “homosexual agenda,” evidenced by its hiring of a few members of the gay Log Cabin Republicans. Without such details, Concerned Women for America sounds moderate and matronly, another League of Women Voters.
The point of pushing someone to the margins is not only to discredit her in others’ eyes, but to mobilize her own shame, even fear. And it works. Feeling despised as an outsider, one grasps at mainstream status.
Not married? I’ve been in a relationship for eleven years!
Have suspiciously short hair and don’t wear skirts? My partner is a man!
No children? Wait, wait! I’m a doting aunt!
Sexual McCarthyism works with marginalization to discourage solidarity among the accused. In order to secure the credentials of normalcy, to remain in the safe precincts of what anthropologist Gayle Rubin describes as the “systems of sexual stigma,” the targeted person distances herself from those who are even further out on the edges. The sex education community, already reeling from the Right’s pummeling, declined to come to my aid. Thus divided and conquered, it’s not unusual for victims of an attack to blame each other, rather than the real source of their pain. One prominent sex educator wrote me, “You should think about the harm you’ve done to sexuality education by dragging us into your pedophile thing.”
But when called a pervert, one often goes further than not helping others accused of perversion. Ashamed, one wins respectability by expressing disgust for the “real” perverts. “What do you think of NAMBLA?” I was often asked. That’s the North American Man Boy Love Association, an advocacy/support group for men with intergenerational sexual desires. “I think they’re creeps,” I replied to one interviewer. But I am angry at myself for doing that. NAMBLA is a tiny, ineffectual group, exercising its right to free speech; it doesn’t advocate criminal activity. Already utterly despised, NAMBLA’s members don’t need me trashing them, too.
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Naming names of the “true” subversive gains the witness immunity from prosecution. This is how McCarthyism works—until, of course, someone names your name.
Anti-lntellectualism
“The road to hell is paved with academic studies,” wrote the Boston Herald’s Feder. In the Right’s demonology, “academics” are players at the seashore, tossing abstractions back and forth like beach balls, as if all ideas were light, happy, and harmless. A number of well-designed studies led me to find it “conceivable” that sex between a priest and a boy could be a positive experience for both, I told the syndicated reporter. Such data are a good place to start, I implied, because they are neutral and objective.
But if the wrong kind of sex at the wrong time inevitably wreaks unparalleled harm, as my critics contend, then such idle conceiving might itself be harmful, because it might weaken a crucially important social taboo and lead to more sexual abuse. This is the principle behind all censorship: that bad ideas lead to bad acts. To the Family Research Council, no datum is neutral. All are charged with moral freight. Knowledge is propaganda. Indeed, the indictment of both pornography and sexuality education is that they work as advertisements, users manuals for sex.
There is something to this argument. The Right understands that science and art are ideological. They know that ideas matter. Indeed, Gayle Rubin—hardly a Christian conservative—viewed Kinsey’s neutrality toward everything we now call “queer” as a step toward tolerance of sexual difference; she praised him for it. Of course, tolerance of sexual difference is what the Right abhors. They call it “defining deviancy down.”
Lately, the Right has started to appropriate “science” to its own ends—for instance, changing the name of Christian creationism to “creation science” and circulating long-discredited studies that link abortion to breast cancer. Such tactics play on Americans’ faith in scientific expertise. But Americans simultaneously worship and mistrust experts, especially outside the hard scientists. For many, the only unassailable expertise is gleaned from personal experience, and from emotion uninfected by reason.
Thus, the daytime TV talk shows always invite, as foils to the ivory-tower expert with the university press book, a “real person” — a parent, a teen, or best of all, a “victim.” This person is presumed to be a source of down-home wisdom and pain, as if the expert might not also be a parent or the victim of a painful experience.