America's War on Sex: The Attack on Law, Lust and Liberty

Marty Klein's expert analysis of our sexually repressed society reminds me of H.L.Mencken's definition of a puritan as a person with the terrible fear that someone, somewhere,is having a good time. And with our born-again president insisting on funding nothing but abstinence only sex ed in our schools, we have the dubious distinction of having the highest teenage unwed pregnancy rate of all the industrial nations. It's a terrific, enlightening read.

America's War on Sex--the title may sound a bit hyped, but it's isn't. It's true: Social conservatives have truly declared war on sex, and no one lays out their agenda better than Marty Klein in this frightening and cogently argued book. Frightening because sexual civil rights are in jeopardy. Klein describes how the forces of sex-negativity are working to set up camp in our bedrooms. After reading America's War on Sex, I sent a contribution to the ACLU. Anyone concerned about the sexual side of civil rights should read this book--now.

I'm very excited about this book. And it's such easy reading! It's full of dramatic facts, creatively presented and woven together. Almost anyone who cares about sex or current events would enjoy it.

Quite simply, there isn't a single page in America's War On Sex that doesn't yield some brilliant insight about the suppression of sex and sexual information by conservative and religious leaders in America -- but more than that: Dr. Klein asks the questions about that suppression that the average person would be too afraid to ask, or wouldn't think to ask -- and he gets the answers to those questions correct! "The goal of this war is to control sexual expression, colonize sexual imagination, and restrict sexual choices," Klein says, and then goes on to give examples of how this suppression is visible in every corner of American society, from sex (non-) education in the schools, to communities restricting the locations of adult stores that many of them patronize, to attempts to sanitize the Internet. Klein presents his case in such an engaging manner that the text flow almost demands that the reader continue to the end in one sitting. We are unlikely to see an examination of this subject that is this thorough and this insightful in our lifetimes.

C. S. Lewis had his own restrictive views of what Christianity had to say about morality, but he objected to those Christians who thought that the chief sphere governed by morality was sexuality, and he objected to the prejudice that anything having to do with sex was automatically wrong. "I know some muddle-headed Christians have talked as if Christianity thought that sex, or the body, or pleasure, were bad in themselves," he wrote in _Mere Christianity_. He could not have predicted that in the richest and most powerful country in the world, members of that camp should have become so influential, and are condemning anything but a narrow range of sexual activity within marriage. This sexual tyranny is the subject of _America's War on Sex: The Attack on Law, Lust, and Liberty_ (Praeger) by Marty Klein. The author is a marital and sex therapist, and anyone who knows his fine blog _Sexual Intelligence_ will be familiar with his themes in this book, but the ideas here are forceful, broad, and referenced, with various battlefields summarized. Though Klein's writing is often amused and upbeat, much of what he has to report is dismal, a slope sliding into sexual ignorance and intolerance. Religious conservatives may be rejoicing, but as sexual pluralism is rejected in favor of a single morality and reduction of anxiety, we risk what we value most about democracy. Klein frames the battle between "erotophiles" who value or tolerate sexuality and "erotophobes" who are made anxious by it. In America, the erotophobes not only are gaining political and social power, they are able to portray themselves as victims, captives who cannot get away from sexual imposition, and they feel that it is the responsibility of government to help them out. The religious call for American laws to regulate bedroom activity (and, Klein shows, even between married people), entertainment, information access, or medical treatment is little different from the law imposed by the Taliban elsewhere. Among the assumptions of puritans are that people cannot explore sexuality safely, that kids are damaged when they are exposed to sexual words or pictures, that sexual predation is on the rise, or that being scared about sexuality will produce good behavior. There are no studies to show that these core beliefs are true; rather, they are based on emotion and anxiety, not rationality. Even if scientific studies showed, for instance, that emergency contraception promoted promiscuity, Klein writes, "It wouldn't matter if they did, because this government and its religious allies don't trust science. They don't trust sex, and they don't trust you." Other countries are different. The teens of Europe or Canada are about as sexually active as those in America, but they have grown up in nations which think that young people have a right to factual sexual information; as a result, they have much fewer teen pregnancies, abortions, or sexually transmitted diseases. American advocates of