Ellis Washington serves up a big heap o’ silliness in his July 5 column.
The first comes in the second paragraph, in which he describes “Dr. Michael Savage” as “my favorite radio talk show host and a bona fide conservative intellectual.” Because nothing says “intellectual” like telling someone to “get AIDS and die” or calling Nancy Pelosi “Mussolini in a skirt.”
Washington followed that by repeating Savage’s assertion that “[Alfred] Kinsey was a sexual pervert who made up his own data,” adding, “Dr. Savage, as usual, is right on point.” The only evidence that Kinsey “made up” anything come mostly from notoriously anti-Kinsey “researcher” Judith Reisman, who has a habit of making up her own claims. Further, as the Kinsey institute points out, Kinsey’s statistics largely hold up today.
That leads to the premise of his column, and the silliest claim of them all: that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy was channeling Kinsey when he wrote the majority opinion blocking the death penalty for child rapists. He offers no real evidence for it other than citing an attack on Kinsey by Benjamin Wiker from his book “10 Books That Screwed Up the World” (of which Kinsey’s “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” is listed as one), which includes this statement that Washington approvingly quotes:
Kinsey’s pseudo-science became foundational for the sexual revolution, used both in courts and classrooms to push a limitless sexual revolution that began in the 1960s and through which we are still living. … It will not be complete until it extinguishes all opposition, the greatest of which is Christianity. Once again, we see atheism at the root of rebellion.
Again, we have to ask about something Washington was involved with: What does that even mean? Wiker seems to be invoking the Butterfly Effect on top of the Depiction-Equals-Approval Fallacy.
Somehow we suspect Wiker has read a lot of Judith Reisman, which makes his rantings inaccurate as well as incomprehensible. And Washington probably has read Reisman as well — if not directly, than through Wiker, as statements like “Kinsey’s evil ideas on human sexuality” suggest.
Washington does invoke the Depiction-Equals-Approval fallacy himself through the statement, “Kinsey’s one-man sexual revolution of the late 1940s lobbied and received academic legitimacy to render normal and to promote the vilest sexual ideas imaginable including, pedophilia, child rape, sadomasochism and bestiality.”
Only a person who thinks Michael Savage is a “bona fide conservative intellectual” would be found spewing such stuff.