You’ve met author Jennifer Roback Morse in these pages before. Now she’s back with her newest book, The Sexual State: How Elite Ideologies Are Destroying Lives and Why the Catholic Church Was Right All Along. In its pages, she makes the case that the Sexual Revolution wasn’t as organic as some teenage no-parents party. Laws were passed, grants were granted, court cases were filed. Case in point: if a certain foundation had not given wads of money to a certain famous sex researcher, the man would been nobody but “an unknown bug doctor with a pathological masturbation and pornography problem.”

Here are the main ideas of the Sexual Revolution:

The Contraceptive Ideology: “separate sex from childbearing.”
The Divorce Ideology: “separate both sex and childbearing from marriage.”
The Gender Ideology: “eliminate all distinctions between men and women except those that individuals explicitly embrace.”

The trouble with revolutionaries is that they wish to make reality fit their own notions. But reality is what it is. As Morse demonstrates, we can’t stop sex from making babies, in spite of birth control. We can’t stop children from wishing they had intact families. And we can’t make men and women as interchangeable as Lego bricks.

Ordinary people might detect the nonsense and unworkability of the Sexual Revolution’s policies and practices. They might resist. According to Morse, that’s where the state comes in, acting as enforcer on everything from custody agreements to bathroom laws.

This is a footnote-heavy book, and Morse backs up her claims with numerous scientific studies and court cases.

Morse herself was a full participant in the Sexual Revolution. Then she returned to her Catholic roots. She now defends a purist view on birth control, and it didn’t go down easy with me. It’s obvious that the Pill made the whole game possible. But it’s also obvious that contraception made my own life more predictable and sane. I would not have given them up.

The second hardest chapters were the divorce chapters, specifically where Morse reminds us that Jesus instructed people not to remarry.

Within Mormondom, we certainly discourage divorce. But once it’s a done deal, we seem to welcome remarriage. After all, staying chaste is a tall order. And it looks to me that we like to insert mothers and fathers in the willie-nilliest of places. For example, we take our youth on trek, organizing them under a Ma and a Pa. Or we set up home evening groups and staff them with a Mom and a Dad. Or, at my local temple, the president and his wife station themselves at the ordinance room door and greet us with a silent nod and a smile.

Morse is the founder and president of The Ruth Institute. Her mission is “to equip people to explain why they believe what they believe.”

Raise your hand if you’re a parent who could use her help.

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