Swingers | Singles Adult Personals - The Plot Against Sex in America

Frank Rich is a weekly columnist for The New York Times, and you can rely on him to write honestly, which usually means provocatively. In this column, Mr. Rich argues that the moving Kinsey is the cultural lightning rod of the year.

The controversy it's raised is of the same cloth as networks pandering to the "moral values" minority by censoring programming to L.A. TV channels refusing to broadcast a message on syphilis created by L.A. County's own board of health. But most importantly, Mr. Rich brings sanity, logic and reason to counteract Judith Reisman's irrational fear and loathing. In this column, he describes how Kinsey's 1948 book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was a massive cultural event when it was first published, with Kinsey appearing on every national magazine, popular songs being written about the study, and 75% of Americans approving of Kinsey's work. But in 2004, the movie has tapped into social anxieties that are empowering the moral values minority, who are pressing "for a whole host of second-term gifts from the Bush administration: further rollbacks of stem-cell research, gay civil rights, pulchritude sightings at N.F.L. games and, dare I say it aloud, reproductive rights for women." In the private sector, writes Rich, "the Traditional Values Coalition is calling for a yearlong boycott of all movies released by Fox. (With the hypocrisy we've come to expect, it does not ask its members to boycott Fox's corporate sibling . . . Fox News.)" But Rich's concern isn't really about the film. It's about "advancing the larger goal of pushing sex of all nonbiblical kinds back into the closet and undermining any scientific findings, whether circa 1948 or 2004, that might challenge fundamentalist sexual orthodoxy as successfully as Darwin challenged Genesis."

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