The Child Experiments
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Fortunately, Kinsey’s findings were not duplicated in the work of Drs. Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, a sexually radical couple5-59 who also worked to free the world from sexual repression. They created the world’s first “erotic” museum in Holland and, in an effort to further Kinsey’s cause, conducted a sex survey of 200 male college students which they reported in their book Sex Histories of American College Men (1960). But whereas Kinsey sought to create the impression that “college level” men were virtual clones of prison populations, the Kronhausens found that even as late as 1960 Joe College was commonly a virgin: “NO SEX WITHOUT LOVE: Many of the students were as blushingly romantic about sex morals as any girl of their age would be. To these young men, sex without love seemed utterly unethical. Some of them did not even think it right to kiss a girl unless they were “in love.”5-60 PREMARITAL INTERCOURSE: In the college group as a whole one still finds considerable resistance toward premarital intercourse. What has changed in terms of sex mores between the attitudes of the older generation… [has been] as Kinsey puts it, the “rationalizations” which serve to justify this resistance against premarital intercourse. In our sample: premarital intercourse is considered highly objectionable for reasons which are primarily derived from religious tenets and beliefs and… overvaluation of virginity with particular respect to the female. This overvaluation of female virginity also prevails in the lower educational groups but there it is apparently not taken quite as seriously as in the upper educational groups.... [I]t remains a fact that this group engages in relatively little premarital sexual intercourse.... The average modern college man is apt to say that he considers intercourse “too precious” to have with anyone except the girl he expects to marry and may actually abstain from all intercourse for that reason. In keeping with this philosophy, the typical college man will say that he feels that marriages work out better if there has been no premarital intercourse and considers himself much “emancipated” as compared to the previous generation because, to him, his reasoning appears to be sounder than that of the older group. However, as Kinsey remarks, this change in the form of their rationalizations has not affected the overt behavior of the two generations in the least.”5-61 [Emphasis added.]
      5-59. Eberhard emigrated to the University of Minnesota from Berlin, Germany in 1945.
      5-60. Drs. Phyllis and Eberhard Kronhausen, Sex Histories of American College Men, Ballantine Books, New York, 1960, p. 219.
      5-61. Kronhausen, p. 255.

Even by 1960, the Kronhausens found that oral sodomy was rare among college males, while anal sodomy and bestiality (intercourse with animals) was unheard of. And while Kinsey had claimed “the homosexual incidence at college age to be about 20 percent,” the Kronhausens found that only one-half of one percent (one in 200 college men) could be considered homosexual.

The Kronhausens caught the fact that Kinsey did not report on “college men,” but on “college level” men, “including those younger males who will ultimately go to college, those in college, and those having had college background.”5-62 Hence, the embarrassing secret of the sexual libertarians was that as much as the Kronhausens wanted to justify Kinsey’s claims of widespread sexual promiscuity among college males, they were unable even by 1960 to locate such activity on campus. Not until a decade of Playboy (which was launched December 1953), and indoctrination of the pertinent professions (education, psychiatry, psychology, health, law, and the mass communications and entertainment media) with Kinseyan sexuality training, did a dramatically changed societal attitude begin to take place.
      5-61. Kronhausen, p. 15.

Although this book does not scrutinize the Playboy phenomenon in depth, two earlier works by this author (“Soft Porn” Plays Hardball, (1991) and Images of Children, Crime and Violence in Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler (1989)) resulted from a U.S. Department of Justice (Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention) grant to study the causes of sex crimes by and against children. Both document the role of the named magazines (and pornography in general) in promoting and normalizing the Kinseyan “anything goes” view of human sexuality, including child sex abuse and incest.

As stated before, the fact that Kinsey was the cradle of the Playboy philosophy was confirmed by publisher Hugh Hefner, who reported during a 1996 BBC telecast that Kinsey was the researcher, but “I” was his “pamphleteer.” The budding Playboy empire provided early and generous financial support for the Kinsey Institute.

During five decades of saturation with the Kinsey-Hefner view of human sexuality, America has witnessed a significant and disturbing change in the conduct of men and boys in general. Kinsey’s misleading data have helped justify the “Me” generation and the general lowering of the status of women from helpmates to playmates. No longer divided into “virgins or whores,” girls and women have increasingly become defined as “whores” in terms of their expected sexual conduct, and they and their children treated accordingly, undermining the moral order on which our nation was founded—our laws, institutions, and social attitudes. The accompanying erosion of the role of fathers has cost the nation dearly.

One study, now more than 35 years old, found that 45% of white boys 14 years or younger had experienced intercourse. The percentages for Hispanics and blacks were, respectively, 66% and 88% (Family Planning Perspectives 7:256, 1975). These figures help to explain the high sexual experience rate among teenage females. As Dr. Luella Klein of Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, has pointed out, “many [teenage females] see sex as necessary for the social rewards of dating. Sex is often seen as necessary payment to a male if a female is to be popular, go places and do things” (Clinical Obstetrics and Gynecology 21(4):1151,1978).

Teenagers Sean Bury and Anicee Alvina in the movie “Friends”

Playboy, November 1971, p. 174


In big-city ghetto areas it may almost have become a rite of passage for girls to get pregnant by the mid-teens. According to the director of a Chicago Board of Health teenage clinic serving the South Side ghetto, “If a girl gets to be 15 or 16 years old and she hasn't had a baby yet, her friends think there must be something wrong with her” (Newsweek, February 16, 1987).

Although premarital sexual activity among girls increased by two thirds during the 1970s, the teenage birthrate declined because of the great increase in abortion. Still, by 1978 there were about 1.3 million children living with 1.1 million adolescent mothers, half of whom were unwed.

Today, commonly quoted figures state that about one out of four children is being raised by a single parent, about 22 % were born out of wedlock (a third of these to teenage mothers) and one out of five lives in poverty-the poverty rate being twice as high among blacks and Hispanics.

Here is one major cause of welfare dependency. James Marks and Marshall Kreuter of the CDC pointed out in an editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association that “In 1985, $16.65 billion was spent on families begun when the mother was a teen; virtually all of those costs are associated with public assistance including Aid to Families With Dependent Children, Medicaid, and Food Stamps” (Journal of the American Medical Association, 257:3410, 1987).

The rising divorce rate in America mayor may not be related to the sexual revolution. Logic would suggest a connection. Certainly, Kinsey's research indicates that marital infidelity is higher among women with premarital sexual experience. (There were just over 400,000 divorces in 1962, 845,000 in 1972, and 1.2 million in 1981.)

In a new book, Second Chances: Men, Women and Children a Decade After Divorce (Ticknor & Fields, 1989), Dr. Judith Wallerstein presents results of the first long-term study of the effects of divorce on children. After following 60 families over a period of 10 to 15 years, Wallerstein found that ten years after the event “almost half of the children entered adulthood as worried, under-achieving, self-deprecating, and sometimes angry young men and women.” Daughters had difficulty with intimacy and relationships. In other words, as with child abuse, the cycle probably has a tendency to repeat itself.

In June, 1999, the Washington, DC-based National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) released a report which noted that “72 percent of Americans believe that fatherlessness is the most significant family or social problem facing America.” Figures cited in the report paint a disturbing picture of the post-Kinsey view of fatherhood. For instance:
       • Forty percent of the children of divorced parents haven’t seen their dads in the past year.
       • Thirty-six percent of children, approximately 24.7 million, don’t live with their biological father. In 1960, just nine percent of children lived with only one parent.
       • The number of live births to unmarried women increased from 224,300 in 1960 to 1,248,000 in 1995, while the number of children living with never married mothers grew from 221,000 in 1960 to 5,862,000 in 1995.
       • National Fatherhood Initiative analysis found that of the 102 prime-time network TV shows in late 1998, only fifteen featured a father as a central character. Of these, the majority portrayed the father as uninvolved, incompetent or both. 5-63
      5-63. Amy Ridenour, “Be Thankful for Dads,” National Policy Analysis #252, National Center for Public Policy Research Analysis, June, 1999.

In his biography of Kinsey, James Jones states: “In the consensus-minded 1950s, the mothers in television family programs such as Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It To Beaver, Father Knows Best, and I Love Lucy captured the officially sanctioned image of women. Fearful that Kinsey would reveal a contradiction between fictional women and real ones, many Americans did not want to hear what he had to say.”5-64
      5-64. James Jones, Alfred C. Kinsey; A Public/Private Life, W.W. Norton, New York, 1997, p. 679.

Jones ignores the fact that the “officially sanctioned” image of women was significantly less fictional that what Kinsey “had to say.” The image of men and of fatherhood captured by pre-Kinsey television programs, scripted. Fathers largely working hard for their families, faithful to their wives, spending guiding and teaching time with their children, and playing an active role in their churches, communities, and schools. This was indeed the era of “Father knows Best,” and it turns out that while this model of father did have its downside, it certainly had its upside.

The NCPPR report observed that “for the kids who have them, a good dad makes a big difference.” It cited as examples:
       • Children with fathers are twice as likely to stay in school.
       • Boys with dad and mom at home are half as likely to be incarcerated, regardless of their parents’ income or educational level…
       • Girls 15-19 raised in homes with fathers are significantly less likely to engage in premarital sex, and 76 percent of teenage girls surveyed said their fathers are very or somewhat influential over their decisions regarding sex.
       • Girls raised in single-mother homes are more likely to give birth while single and are more likely to divorce and remarry…
       • Paternal praise is associated with better behavior and achievement in school, while father absence increases vulnerability and aggressiveness in young children, particularly boys.
       • Young children living without dads married to their moms are ten times as likely to be in poverty.
       • Children living in households with fathers are less likely to suffer from emotional disorders and depression…
       • A white teenage girl with an advantaged background is five times more likely to be a teen mom if she grows up in a household headed by a single mom instead of with her biological dad and mom.
       • Children with involved dads are less susceptible to peer pressure, are more competent, more self-protective, more self-reliant and more ambitious.5-65
      5-65. Ridenour, op cit.

Our nation is experiencing an epidemic of criminal sexual conduct, a coarsening of society, loss of manners, multiple venereal diseases, adultery, homosexuality, anal sodomy, anonymous fornication, pornography, obsessive masturbation, rape, child sex abuse, and incest. A 1989 assessment by The National Research Council stated that Kinsey had “established, to some degree, social standards of what was acceptable common practice.”5-66 His crimes have indeed had consequences.
      5-65. Turner, Miller, Modes, Ed. AIDS, Sexual Behavior and Intravenous Drug Use, The National Research Council, National Academy Press, Washington, D.C. 1989, p. 79.

Adolescent suicide (up 300% in the last 20 years, according to a 1982 Medical Tribune report) may be another tragic end point for at least some children under the sexual pressures of modem-day America. Harvard psychiatry professor John D. Mack provides an illustration in his book Vivienne: The Life and Suicide of an Adolescent Girl (Little, Brown, 1981).

A special report on the subject of teenage suicide in Sexual Medicine Today, a supplement to the May 12, 1982 Medical Tribune, noted that “sexual matters often predominate among the risk factors for adolescent depression and suicide.” Supporting this conclusion were data provided by Dr. Marlene Payne, a psychiatrist at Georgetown University School of Medicine: 22% of all female adolescents ,who tried to kill themselves were either pregnant or believed they were pregnant at the time; in 36% of suicide attempts, the teenager was breaking up from a serious romantic involvement. Payne also noted that 72% were living in a household from which one or both biological parents were absent.

Some current figures on adolescent suicide are alarming. The National Adolescent Student Health Survey, conducted in 1987 among 11,419 eighth and tenth grade students from 217 schools in 20 states, showed that 25 % of the boys and 42 % of the girls had at some point in their lives seriously considered committing suicide. Self-inflicted injury that could have resulted in death was reported by 11 % of the boys and 18% of the girls. In 1987, approximately 10% of deaths among persons aged 1-24 years were suicides (Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report 38:147, 1989; CDC, Atlanta). (It also was noted in this survey that 6% of the girls reported someone had tried to force them to have sex at school during the past year; 19% reported the same for outside of school.) .

Adolescent suicide statistics may be less of a shock when viewed in the framework of current information on the mental health of American youth. Child psychiatrist James F. Leckman of the Yale University Child Study Center, chairman of the Institute of Medicine Committee (of the National Academy of Sciences) that compiled the report “Research on Children and Adolescents with Mental, Behavioral and Developmental Disorders,” recently pointed out that about 12% of the U.S. population under the age of 18--i.e., 7.5 million children and teenagers--“have a diagnosable mental disorder.” Other estimates put the number as high as 11 to 14 million children, according to Sandy Rovner of the Washington Post (Washington Post, June 13, 1989, Health section, p. 11).

As Brooklyn District Attorney Elizabeth Holtzman pointed out in The New York Times (May 5, 1989), “Sexual violence against women is rampant. More than 3,400 women will report being raped [in 1989] in New York City, and thousands more will be raped and never report it. The FBI says a woman is raped in the U.S. every six minutes; one out of ten women will be raped in her lifetime.”

Holtzman blames dehumanizing attitudes about women, citing “a recent study of junior high school students in Rhode Island [in which] 50% of the boys said it was acceptable to rape a woman if a man spent at least $15 on her.” She noted another “survey of college students [in which] one man in 12 admitted to a rape--but not one considered himself a rapist.” According to Holtzman, in New York City there has been a 27% increase in rape arrests of boys under 18 and a 200% increase among boys under 13.

“For a minute there, I thought that bastard was going to give us a ticket anyway!”

Playboy, September 1969, Marty Murphy, p. 274


That such increases are linked in complex and powerful ways to the messages of pornography has been convincingly argued by feminists among others who, without adopting simplistic causal explanations, have nonetheless indicted the use of women in humiliating ways for the entertainment of men as a major contributor in shifting attitudes toward acceptance of sexual violence, and desensitization to the negative consequences of such behavior. Such relations have been argued theoretically, shown in laboratory experiments and correlated in social-psychological studies (e.g., Baron and Strauss, 1984).3 The Surgeon General summarized the research by saying that “I am certain that pornography that portrays sexual aggression as pleasurable for the victim is at the root of much of the rape that occurs today.”
       Baron LA, Strauss MA: Sexual stratification, pornography! and rape in the United States. In Malamuth NM, Donnerstein E (eds.): Pornography and Sexual Aggression, Academic Press, 1984.

Despite the fantasy of pornography as an “adult right,” children testify they are serious consumers. Psychologist Aaron Hass says that children “learn how to do it” from pornography, that “she discover[s] what he looks like” from pornography (as does he) and he believes he knows “what she really enjoys” from pornography. Says Hass: “Almost all teenagers have seen or read some form of pornography . . . . Pornography provides teenagers with a sexual education. Many adolescents turn to movies, pictures, and articles to find out exactly how to have sexual relations. 12-5
      12-5 Aaron Hass, Teenage Sexuality (Macmillan: New York, 1979), 153-177.

Burgess and Clark (1984) found that 62 percent of children entrapped in child sex rings had been shown “adult pornography.”12-2 Other researchers (e.g., Battaglia, 1983; Burgess, 1984; Keating, 1970; Linedecker, 1981; and Lanning, 1984) described popular sex magazines (Playboy, Penthouse etc.) as tools to entrap youngsters into sex, child pornography, and child prostitution. Most readers of this book will, on reflection, recall some such small personal trauma in their own lives.
      12-2 Ann Burgess and Marianne Clark, Child Pornography and Sex Rings (Lexington Press: Lexington, MA, 1984), 78. See Images of Children, Crime and Violence in Playboy, Penthouse, and Hustler (Huntington House: Lafayette, LA, 1990) for extensive documentation.

The following is a typical scenario cited by M. O’Brien and W. Brea in Preventing Sexual Abuse, of what they call “The Naive Experimenter (Type 1)”: “Johnny is a 13-year-old boy who had been asked to baby-sit a neighbor girl, age 5, named Nicky, [He] . . . discovered a Playboy magazine hidden under the couch and Johnny found the explicit photographs arousing. While helping Nicky change into her pajamas he wanted to see what it was like to kiss and touch her in the way depicted in the photographs. After a short time he felt guilty and stopped. Later that week Nicky told her mother, and Johnny was arrested for criminal conduct.” 12-1
      12-1 M. O’Brien and W. Brea, “Adolescent Sexual Offenders: A descriptive typology,” Preventing Sexual Abuse 1 (3), 2.

Here, the baby-sitter, Johnny, was angrily reported to the police by the very parents who supplied the stimulus for Johnny’s crime against their own child. Since Johnny, a thirteen-year-old minor was asked into their home, his parents could have sued Nicky’s parents for the crime of child sexual abuse against Johnny! Certainly the boy was badly damaged by this exposure to Playboy--an exposure that branded him criminally. One wonders about the long term effects of this abuse on both child victims--Johnny and Nicky--and of Johnny’s future--having been classified as a sex criminal. (However, it is also true that a juvenile’s crimes are largely cancelled once he becomes an adult. Even homicide is no longer a crime of record once a child reaches eighteen years of age.)

21 January 1984 the New York Times had reported on what was then called “random, senseless killing,” or "motiveless crimes.” What the public did not know about this new kind of violence was that the victims were mainly children. Police on the sex-crime beat often observed that those who were entertained by seeing sex and violence linked, frequently became entertained by acting out both sex and violence: “[A]fter a study of homicide reports spanning the last few decades, the officials assert that history offers nothing to compare with the spate of such murders that has occurred in the United States since the beginning of the 1970’s . . . as many as 4,000 Americans a year, at least half of them under the age of 18, are murdered this s way . . . .” Something’s going on out there . . . . It’ s an epidemic.” . . . [Robertson and Heck charged a link] to an increase in movies that depict sexual violence uncritically and may encourage it. “[I]n the past 20 years . . . I think you’ll find sex as the dominant factor in almost all the serial murders,” said Captain Robbie Robertson of the Michigan State Police, who is regarded as one of the nation’s foremost investigators of such crimes.”

In an interview with the Detroit Free Press (12 October 1980), John Preiesaik, Jackson State Prison clinical psychologist, maintained that most of the five hundred sex offenders in his program are “definitely influenced by pornography”: “We had a guy here who stabbed a woman 23 times. I asked him why he stabbed her so often, more than was needed to kill her, and he told me, “That’s the number of times I need to get an erection.” They may sometimes have an orgasm during a violent act . . . They’re fighting to control their impulses all the time-it takes an inordinate amount of energy . . . pornography lowers their controls, and away they go.”

Back at OJJDP, Police Specialist Robert Heck and the OJJDP Assistant Deputy, James Wootton, were concerned about the “motive” in these new pornography-associated sex crimes. Were the offenders feeling “sexual” arousal when they tortured and murdered women and children? According to the Washington Post (20 February 1984): “In 1962 there were 644 U.S. murders, 6 percent with no known motive. By 1982 that had soared to 4,118, or 20 percent. “Get scared about that if you want to get scared about something,” said Robert O. Heck, Justice Project Manager.”

And Life magazine reported, in an August 1984 piece entitled “An American Tragedy”: “For years on end, many of them fed these emotions on horror movies, slice-and-dice pornography [which] filled them with murderous frenzy [so] the ritual drama of death and rebirth began.”

The pervasive availability of sexually aggressive materials (and probably non-violent materials also) in magazines, books, films and videos has sexualized the home environment in an unprecedented manner, such that home is no longer a place of safety from sexual harassment. There are many to tell us it never was totally safe, but the steep increase of child sexual abuse being reported strongly suggests that even the appearance of civilized taboos is under threat from the advocates of the sexual revolution.

Child sexual abuse reporting is still new enough to provide only a partial indicator of the extent of such abuse, and estimates vary widely. A responsible representative estimate based on the reporting of cases to state reporting agencies in the U:S. moves from 7,559 in 1976 to 37,366 in 1980 and 71,961 in 1983 (Finkelhor, 1986). Clearly this is an alarming upward trend.
       Finkellior D: Sourcebook on Child Sexual Abuse, Sage Publications, 1986.
       It is currently estimated that there are about 200,000 new cases of child abuse each year in the U.S. (Raskin DC, Yuille JC: Problems in evaluating interviews of children in sexual abuse cases. In Ceci SJ, Ross OF, Toglia MP: Perspectives on Children's Testimony, Springer-Verlag, 1989).

Many sociological and psychological forces are converging to elevate child sexual abuse from a whispered rarity to a rampant tragedy of enormous proportions.

As a further footnote, it should be noted that Dr. David Finkelhor of the Family Violence Research Program at the University of New Hampshire has done research showing that 19% of American women and 9% of all men may have been sexually victimized as children. He has “speculated” that between 2 million and 5 million American women have had incestuous relationships (Newsweek, May 14, 1984, p. 31).

According to the Centers for Disease Control's 1988 report on sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), 2.5 million teenagers had an STD (excluding HIV infection) in 1987. Today gonorrhea is the most common reportable disease in school age children-surpassing chickenpox, measles, mumps and rubella combined.

In Kinsey's day, there were only two known STDs, both of which were treatable with penicillin. But that number has blossomed to over 24 today, with over a dozen having no cure! What has remained underreported in the mainline press is that STDs have reached epidemic proportions, affecting one out of every five adolescents.
       For these and other statistics, see Meg Meeker, Epidemic: How Teen Sex is Killing Our Kids (Washington, DC: Lifeline Press, 2002).

Sex education does not seem to be helping. In the journal Pediatrics, Dr. James Stout and Dr. Frederick Rivera of the University of Washington and Children's Hospital and Medical Center, Seattle, reviewed studies of the effects of sex education on teenage sexual behavior (Pediatrics 83:375, 1989). They concluded that “sex education programs in junior and senior high schools have little or no effect either positively or negatively on altering the age of onset or frequency of adolescent sexual activity, on increasing contraceptive use, or on preventing unplanned teenage pregnancy.” They noted that “a classroom course alone cannot be expected to change sexual behavior in a direction that is in opposition to the adolescent's sexual world as molded by the television, motion picture, music and advertising industries, as well as peer group and adult role models.” Besides, some classroom courses seem designed to increase teenage sexual activity.

One of the aims of “progressive” sex educators has been to promote “sexual alternatives,” sex without guilt, the pursuit of orgasm, and recreational sex. To that end, sex education in some schools employs as teaching aids what would have been called pornography a few years ago. Dr. Vernon Mark, a Harvard surgeon and author of the book The Pied Pipers of Sex, has accurately pointed out that this strategy of eliminating guilt has actually eliminated morality: “If you don't feel guilty about anything you have no morality” (The Pied Pipers of Sex, Haven Books, 1981).

Does the development of a sexual amorality in young people have consequences beyond venereal disease, single parenthood, inability to relate, insecurity and poverty? Common sense would dictate that it does. Several destructive cycles are operative in society. The cycles of abused-child-to-child-abuser and child-of-alcoholics-to-alcoholic are well known. To these can be added other cause-and-effect pathologies connected in some way to a breakdown in what used to be regarded as norms of male-female relating. There is a cycle involving promiscuity, teenage pregnancy, single parenthood and welfare dependency. There is the cycle of divorce, children of divorce, and more divorce. The relationship of premarital sex to extra-marital infidelity has already been mentioned. It appears there may even be a cycle of sex education leading to increased teenage sexual activity leading to the perceived need for more sex education. The commonly proposed solution for all of this is better access to contraceptives--a band-aid approach that is truly simplistic and naive when viewed in the context of the total social pathology involved.

In his article “Teenage Pregnancy in the United States” (Family Planning Perspectives 20:262, 1988), James Trussell, professor of economics and public affairs at Princeton University, writes of some insights on teenage sexuality based on research principally on black adolescent mothers:

First, there is a discrepancy between the values adolescents express and their actual behavior. Their “ideal” sexual code places emphasis on waiting until marriage to have sex and on the practical dangers of becoming pregnant. These values, however, must be “stretched” because of the dangers of everyday life.

As if to corroborate this, an abstinence-oriented, school/community-based sex education program in South Carolina has been shown effective in achieving a remarkable decline in pregnancies in comparison with a control population where there was an increase. Among the objectives of the program were the enhancement of self-esteem and alignment of personal values with those of family, church and community (Journal of the American MedicalAssociation 257:3382, 1987).

Many voices are raised about the imperative to get back to teaching “values.” New York Governor Mario Cuomo told columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak that drugs are not America's biggest problem, “I think the biggest problem is values.” He also said, “We have to find a better word for it” (Washington Post, June 19, 1989). Of course, there are dissenting voices on values. A recent major report on the AIDS epidemic by the National Academy of Sciences was critical of government programs as “imposing values” and thereby making the programs less effective.

Finding a better word for values is not the only problem. As Irving Kristol, a senior fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, pointed out in a Wall Street Journal editorial-page piece a few years ago (September 15, 1987), “One might think that knowing right from wrong is not so remarkable as to merit comment. But, in fact, there are two major institutions in our society where such knowledge is regarded with suspicion and distrust. The first consists of the media. . .. The other is our universities, which cheerfully allow that they are much too sophisticated to know right from wrong, and regard any claim to such knowledge with disdain.”

Kristol went on to point out that great universities in the past have always taught some form of moral philosophy. It was usually-as in Adam Smith's case, a professor of moral philosophy--“an intellectual effort to justify, by philosophical analysis alone and without reference to divine revelation, the traditional tenets of our Judeo-Christian moral code.” Today, however, it has become fashionable in academe to be “value-free” and, as Kristol says, “committed to radical, rationalist and supposedly scientific skepticism.” This kind of thing let loose in the school system has the potential to “provoke severe moral disorientation among the young and immature.” A whole philosophy of sex education has been designed with that very intention.

If education in the art of healthy living is still possible, however, then finding a better word for “values” makes sense, as too often this expression is seen as the property of the religious Right. As Will and Ariel Durant point out in their book The Lessons of History (Simon and Schuster, 1968), a larger knowledge of history stresses the universality of these codes and ”concludes to their necessity.” They are actually matters of health more than “morality,” which is another way of saying that health and real morality are much the same thing.

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