This morning while reading the comments in a diary about what happened in Texas last night - I saw people mentioning ALEC and trying to connect the dots for others that there was a connection between ALEC and the war on women legislation we are seeing play out in legislatures across the United States.
There is.
But some may not be aware of the connection - so I am republishing an edited and very slightly modified version of a much longer diary I posted 18 months ago.
In 2004, ALEC released an article to their (at that time) over 2,400+ members which was misleadingly named - yet was foreboding of what was to come: Restoring Legal Protections for Women and Children
At the end of the article there was this statement:
From the first presentation to the ALEC Education Task Force of the Kinsey fraud in 1999 to the final vote at the 2003 ALEC Summit meeting, it has been a pleasure working to make this State Factor a reality. I was honored to serve as the Junk Science sub-committee Chair on this very important project. The evidence herein speaks for itself, documenting the reckless, imprudent decades-long use of fraudulent "sex science" data to cripple the sex laws and public policies that had served our nation so well until they were deftly subverted by a cadre of legal revolutionaries. It is hoped that this State Factor will serve legislators all over the nation by providing a factual history of how the Kinsey frauds came to dictate school sex education and our sex laws nationwide.
Senator Kay O'Connor Chair of the Subcommittee on Junk Science
Note this:
From the first presentation to the ALEC Education Task Force of the Kinsey fraud in 1999 to the final vote at the 2003 ALEC Summit meeting,
1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003
It was on their radar and being worked on for five years.
how the Kinsey frauds came to dictate school sex education and our sex laws nationwide
And ALEC's desired response to this ALEC article?
As stated in the article, by the former national ALEC Chair, Ray Haynes of California
As Kinsey intended, contemplated in the current debate are calls for discrimination laws to protect the full range of sexual activities including transvestitism, transgenderism, polygamy, bestiality and the like and, in education, whether to teach our children all alternate sexual acts as normal - or to teach Chastity and Abstinence until marriage.
Only if enough legislators call attention to Kinsey's questionable findings, can we start to reverse the misguided assault on American law and way of life through investigation, inquiries and repeal of laws and public policies based on junk science
.
repeal of laws and public policies based on junk science
History
In the late 1940's, yeh you heard me right, 1940's Alfred Kinsey published his very controversial reports on sexuality. Most of you have probably never heard of Kinsey, some of you have. As a child of the 60's we listened to people talk about Kinsey's report some of the children of the 60's actually discussed ad nausea, Kinsey's report. His report was very controversial, but it was a topic of some pretty heated conversations.
But, in 2013, we seldom mention Kinsey or his report. But ALEC was obsessed with his report in 1999 - 2003, and still is.
Jump forward to late 1990's
ALEC was not a female-policy friendly organization.
In 1999 ALEC put together a task force that dealt with junk science. That task force included:
The ALEC Education Task Force members who served on the Subcommittee on Junk Science are:
Senator Kay O'Connor (KS) Chair
Rep. Keith King (CO)
Senator Laurie Bleaker (KS)
Del. Janet Greenip (MD)
Rep. Carolyn Coleman (OK)
Rep. Andre Martel (NH)
Del. John Reid (VA)
Senator Jack Westwood (KY)
Dr. Judith A. Reisman, Scientific Advisor to the Subcommittee on Junk Science.
Dr. Linda Jeffrey was the State Factor's Chief Author for
Restoring Legal Protections for Women and Children: A Historical
Analysis of the States Criminal Codes.
A Little Bit About the non-ALECers in this bunch of people
Linda Jeffreys has historically had only one main affiliation and that is RSVP America which holds that the Kinsey report has led to moral decay and rampant sexuality. Jeffrey's has also been affiliated with Concerned Women for America, another religious right organization.
Jeffreys is a right-wing, ultraconservative, extremist - but she is who ALEC specifically chose to work on the report.
Dr. Judith Reisman is an outspoken academician who has spent her entire life writing about Kinsey's report, testifying before the Supreme Court and Congress on the Kinsey report and how it was bad science. It is her life's work - to discredit the Kinsey report. She has made statements such as 'one Kinsey pedophile collaborator was a former WW II Nazi officer's.
Yes, Reisman is a nutjob - but she is who ALEC specifically chose to work on the report.
In a 2004 article about Reisman's work with ALEC on the misleadingly named article named "Restoring Legal Protections for Women and Children" it was noted:
His [Kinsey's] influence can be seen today in the calls for "discrimination" laws to protect the full range of sexual activities including transvestitism, transgenderism, polygamy and bestiality. Also,it [Kinsey's data] influences the debate in education over whether to teach our children all "alternate" sexual acts as normal, or to teach chastity and abstinence until marriage.
The ALEC Report
I refuse to go into it too deeply because I refuse to publish their archaic and myopic thinking but you can read it as linked in this entry (multiple times, different sources).
ALEC distributed this report to all of their (then) over 2,400 state legislators and to their Congressional Alumni in the form of a document known as the State Factor issued in 2004. This report is part of the myopic, archaic, ideologically biased education your ALEC legislator receives from ALEC.
I also want to remind you from earlier in this diary that this report was the culmination of a four to five year process of - The ALEC Education Task Force members who served on the Subcommittee on Junk Science
The conclusions made from the report were basically:
The Kinsey Report was junk science. A lot of academicians would agree with that but they wouldn't take it to the ideological extremes of the ALEC report' - roll back anything and everything that we even remotely think was influenced by the Kinsey report.
Laws since the Kinsey report have been based solely on the junk science in the Kinsey report and should be abolished.
The increase in sexual crimes reported is directly related to aberrant behavior perpetrated by the Kinsey Report.
Any type of sex education that has been developed has used the junk science of the Kinsey report and thus should be abolished. In correlation to that they introduced the following resolution: Resolution on Non-Verified Science Curriculum Funding:
This legislation is established that the state legislature will no longer fund curricula and textbooks that present science that promotes and advocates for or against only one side of the issue.
Yes, ALEC and the people on the task force believed that everything that is going on today, as far as sexuality is concerned, is aberrant behavior and the result of Kinsey controversial social science studies done in the late 40's. With that conclusion being drawn, then ALEC LEGISLATORS and TWO RIGHT WING EXTREMISTS decided everything in the field of sexuality is corrupted because Kinsey's report was junk science and THEY decided everything that ALEC can link to the Kinsey report has to be destroyed.
So what needs to be destroyed?
So the question needs to be asked and answered
What are ALEC legislators and ALEC congressional alumni targeti in relation to suggestions made in the ALEC report that concludes (based on a right-wing ultra-conservative bias) the Kinsey report is junk science?
As the ALEC report states;
The plans legal revolutionaries made and acted upon overturned or trivialized 52 designated laws protective of women and children, aided and enabled by the indispensable sex science of the Kinsey Reports. Over the past fifty years, our sex and reproduction laws have been deconstructed on the basis of a fraudulent set of data.
Linda Jeffries stated in an article after the publication of the ALEC report:
The American Legislative Exchange Council has recommended a recall of laws and public policy based on the Kinsey Reports junk science. It is a call that reaches deeply into the altered foundations of our American Republic.
This basically comes down to the following: ANY Law from 1950 to present that even mentions the Kinsey report as supporting documentation or had anyone who testified about the law that mentioned the Kinsey report has got to go per ALEC.
The ALEC article specifically takes focus on sex education and devotes a great deal of time to:
SIECUS
Since 1964, the Sex Education and Information Council of the United States (SIECUS) has provided sex education materials to public schools. SIECUS is dependent upon Indiana University's Kinsey Reports, including the scientific tables documenting the Kinsey protocol
And
AASECT
Just as SIECUS was founded to promote Kinseyan sex education to school children in 1964, the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists (AASECT) was created in 1967 to train and accredit educators, health personnel and other helping professionals in the area of human sexuality based on the Kinsey findings.
Concluding that
abstinence programs calling for modesty and saving sex until marriage guarantee taxpayers a major reduction in costly post-Kinsey disease and dysfunction.
During an interview, Judith Resiman may have let a cat out of the bag that ALEC never intended public (from the secret work of the task force):
Planned Parenthood
Judith Reisman: We certainly are calling for, at last, a congressional investigation. ALEC (The American Legislative Exchange Council) has called for states to hold an immediate investigation of Kinsey's influence, to end funding of all groups that are grounded in Kinsey's work, including Planned Parenthood and SIECUS. The most important thing is to educate both the law courts and the court of public opinion, that we've been conned, tricked and manipulated by a corrupt man, a corrupt institute, and a corrupt field of "sexology" with its offshoots - or we'll never survive.
Now you have to figure that if sex education and Planned Parenthood were on ALEC's radar for destruction that a big old bulls-eye also had to be placed on another issue - abortion. Especially when you consider that the State Factor's Chief Author for Restoring Legal Protections for Women and Children was:
Linda Jeffreys: has historically had only one main affiliation and that is RSVP America which holds that the Kinsey report has led to moral decay and rampant sexuality.
From an excerpt taken from a document entitled
Scientific Fraud at the Heart of Roe v. Wade: Kinsey's Abortion Legacy published by Linda Jeffreys and Colonel Ronald D. Ray of RSVP America:
Roe v. Wade cites to the 1959 Draft of the ALI Model Penal Code, another Rockefeller funded project. This MPC draft cites to both Calderone's 1955 conference proceedings and the Kinsey Institute third volume, both published in 1958. Alan Guttmacher, who presented his data on therapeutic abortion at the Planned Parenthood conference, was taken to the ALI meeting by his twin brother, MPC Advisor, Psychiatrist Manfred Guttmacher, whose considerable influence on the MPC is recorded in the published correspondence between him and chief MPC author Herbert Wechsler. Said the ALI-MPC's psychiatrist, Guttmacher:" Kinsey's findings were the points by which we steered. The debt that society will owe to Kinsey and his co-workers for their researches on sexual behavior will be immeasurable.
The ALEC article spends almost five pages discusses the ALI Model Penal Code.
The report by Jeffreys and Ray goes on to state:
The third volume of the Kinsey Institute, Pregnancy, Birth, and Abortion, continues its influence today from the abortion mills of Planned Parenthood, to the indoctrination of our children through sex education based on fraud. The American Legislative Exchange Council has recommended a recall of laws and public policy based on the Kinsey Reports junk science. It is a call that reaches deeply into the altered foundations of our American Republic.
NOTE: They don't say ALEC wants recall of laws and public policy only on Planned Parenthood and sex education also note that abortion was the focus of this paper - their statement about ALEC includes the issue of abortion as well. That is their paragraph. not mine.
And then there is this
Reisman has her own "in your face" Kinsey agenda which may have caused her problems with ALEC, especially when she made statements like this in an article published in 2004.
Judith Reisman, the scientific adviser to the [ALEC] Subcommittee on Junk Science for the project, notes that the ALEC article villifies Kinsey's junk science" as the "unquestioned foundation for all the legal, legislative and media debate on marriage and civil unions."
Reisman also notes (her caps, not mine):
AN ANONYMOUS ALEC STAFFER DELETED A SENTENCE PUBLICIZING THE EFFECTS OF KINSEY'S FRAUD ON THE SAME-SEX MARRIAGE DEBATE FROM HAYNES' INTRODUCTION
Reisman doesn't stop there, she goes on to contend that ALEC doctored the report before publishing it.
Another entire paragraph was missing on the effect of Kinsey's fraud on the debate about homosexuality in legislatures nationwide, and the statement that these bogus data were cited by the US Supreme Court to normalize sodomy in the Lawrence decision in 2003:
The ALI Model Penal Code Reporters cite Kinsey's junk science claiming that in 1955, 72% of males experiment with mouth-genital contact, 40 to 50% of farm boys have animal contact, and 37% of the total male population has at least some overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm between adolescence and old age. This accounts for nearly 2 males out of every 5 that one may meet.
In spite of its reliance on junk science, this section of the Model Penal Code was cited favorably by the Supreme Court to normalize sodomy on June 26, 2003. (p. 11)
The ALEC article spends almost five pages discusses the ALI Model Penal Code.
Reisman concludes (her caps, not mine):
NONETHELESS, THE MONOGRAPH IS A POWERFUL DOCUMENT WITH LEGISLATIVE CREDIBILITY AND CLOUT
POWERFUL DOCUMENT WITH LEGISLATIVE CREDIBILITY AND CLOUT
What's to be done by ALEC legislators?
One section in the ALEC report notes:
How Should Legislators Respond?
... Undoing harmful changes to sex education curricula and sex offense laws since each state's penal code revision would be prudent.
And then finally - finally they reach their crescendo - the conclusion.
They start the conclusion of the ALEC State Factor Report with a quote from The Journal of Law Reform, I will pull only two snips:
By recommending the legalization of fornication, cohabitation, adultery, sodomy, etc., the MPC transformed what were known as Public Morals or vice laws into private sexual behaviors between consentingindividuals. The new freedom, Privacy, would allow one to be left alone to pursue one's one sexual tastes,according to Judge Learned Hand.
The case is strong for real fact-based reform to remove the fraudulent findings of the Kinsey Reports from publicly funded programs, policies, and laws beginning with sex education and criminal law.
"The case is strong for real fact-based reform to remove
the fraudulent findings of the Kinsey Reports from
publicly funded programs, policies, and laws beginning with sex education and criminal law."
"beginning with sex education and criminal law."
But, where does it eventually end?
And I guess from my perspective the ALEC article is fraudulent findings to further a biased, partisan, ultra-conservative agenda that was grounded in the megalomaniac psychopathology of the man who founded the Moral Majority,Paul Weyrich, and continues today through the actions of right-wing, ultraconservative, extremist ALEC Legislators in every state.
ALEC Annual Meeting
August 7- 9
Chicago Hilton
Actions planned for all three days
August 8 - Noon, AFL-CIO rally planned
Please join us to proclaim
The-USA-is-Not-OK-with-ALEC