New Article: "The Dangerous Rise of Sexual Politics"

I just learned that my scholarly article, "The Dangerous Rise of Sexual Politics", has been published by The Family in America, the journal of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society. Despite the date on the issue, it was just recently published. You can request hard copies from the Howard Center.

The Dangerous Rise of Sexual Politics
Islamic radicalism may be creating a “clash of civilizations,” but sexual radicalism is undermining the social foundation of all civilization.

By Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D.*
*Stephen Baskerville teaches political science at Patrick Henry College. He is the author of Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family (Cumberland Books).

“All politics is on one level sexual politics.” — George Gilder, 1986

Four decades into the boldest social experiment ever undertaken in the Western democracies, the full impact of what was once quaintly known as “women’s liberation” is at last becoming clear. The political class of both the Left and Right have colluded to limit the debate to a series of innocuous controversies: job discrimination, equal pay, affirmative action. Only abortion has any depth, and that debate has been mired in stalemate.

Meanwhile, beneath the political radar screen, the real consequences are finally emerging: a massive restructuring of the social order, demographic trends that threaten the very survival of Western civilization, and perhaps least noticed, an exponential growth in the size and power of the state — the state at its most bureaucratic and tyrannical.

Feminism has now positioned itself as the vanguard of the Left, shifting the political discourse from the economic and racial to the social and increasingly the sexual. What was once a socialistic assault on property and enterprise has become a social and sexual attack on the family, marriage, and masculinity. This marks a truly new kind of politics, the most personal and thus potentially the most total politics ever devised: the politics of private life and sexual relations.

Read the rest here.