The left’s latest big lie: there’s always been as much pre-marital sex as there is now

Laura Wood writes at The Thinking Housewife:

THE latest big news regarding marriage is that premarital sex was always normal in America. That’s right. If you thought there was something called the sexual revolution, you were wrong.

In today’s New York Times, Ross Douthat, the “conservative” columnist, writes about the impossibility of a “traditionalist utopia” in which the only sex is married sex. He states:

No such society has ever existed, or ever could: not in 1950s America (where, as the feminist writer Dana Goldstein noted last week, the vast majority of men and women had sex before they married), and not even in Mormon Utah (where Brigham Young University recently suspended a star basketball player for sleeping with his girlfriend).

The study cited by Goldstein and others is, “Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954-2003,” by Lawrence B. Finer. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which funded the study, Finer proves “[C]ontrary to the public perception that premarital sex is much more common now than in the past, the study shows that even among women who were born in the 1940s, nearly nine in 10 had sex before marriage.”

Actually, public perception holds that the sexual revolution began in the 1960s. Those who were born in 1940 would turn 20 in 1960. Therefore, this study does not deflate the general impression that premarital sex was not widely accepted in the past and dramatically increased in the 60s. [entry continues]

I posted this comment at Laura’s site:

The audacity, the audacity of these leftists. Not only do they say, which is of course true, that premarital sex existed in the past, but they have the audacity to declare, “[C]ontrary to the public perception that premarital sex is much more common now than in the past … ” Meaning that premarital sex is NOT much more common now. Meaning (as you put it) that the sexual revolution never occurred. It’s an Orwellian rewriting of history.

But this is a standard leftist mind-control tactic. In order to make it impossible for people to criticize or question the current leftist order, they try to make people believe that things have always been exactly the way they are now, and therefore there is no basis to criticize the way things are now.

For example, they say that “America has always been a multicultural society,” thus making it impossible to criticize multiculturalism as the radical departure from our past that it is. And here, in the same way, they say that “America has always had as much premarital sex as it has now,” making it impossible to criticize the sexual revolution and the current reign of promiscuity.

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Tim W. writes:

Douthat made reference to a “traditionalist utopia” in which there is no pre-marital sex at all. It’s funny how conservatives are always measured against a utopia, which conservatives have never argued could exist. All social conservatives have ever argued is that when there’s a behavior in society that is clearly negative, it should be discouraged and perhaps restricted so that it occurs less frequently. It certainly shouldn’t be encouraged, glorified in the media, and subsidized by the taxpayers. [LA replies: That’s another big leftist lie that we hear all the time, isn’t it? That conservatives believe in some impossible, perfect state of society. And this leftist lie comes from the Times’s “conservative” columnist.]

Instead of explaining the issue correctly, the left argues, for example, that since we can never fully eliminate abortion, then right wing efforts to cut off federal funding of the practice or to require teens to obtain parental consent are utopian fantasies. Or they assert that since homosexuality has always existed, trying to keep it out of the barracks or the Boy Scouts is doomed to failure. After all, if we can’t stop it one hundred percent of the time, why bother?

So we’re falsely accused of trying to create a utopia or, more often, a theocracy. We’re then told that since a utopia is not possible we should not only accept the behavior in question, we should glorify it and suppress all opposition to it, or else we’ll be compared to the Taliban. Meanwhile, Obama promises to roll back the ascending oceans.

By the way, I remember about twenty years ago Planned Parenthood or some other similar group released a study showing that teen pregnancy rates were as high in the 1890s as now (now being circa 1990). The media ran the story triumphantly without noting that the pregnant teens back then were married. Girls got married when they were quite young a hundred years ago. My late grandmothers both were pregnant as teenagers. Both had working young husbands. It was hardly the same as the epidemic of unwed mothers on permanent welfare that we now have.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 09, 2011 08:57 AM | Send