On September 9, 2022, Indiana University (IU) issued a press release announcing that in honor of the 75^th anniversary of the Kinsey Institute, the university has installed a life-size bronze statue of entomologist and pervert extraordinaire Alfred C. Kinsey after whom the Kinsey Institute is named.

Demonstrating the astonishing ignorance of leftists, the press release says,

The sculpture’s installation on the Bloomington campus demonstrates the university’s pride in the living legacy of research and academic freedom Kinsey helped to forge and the institute’s ongoing commitment to equity regarding sexual diversity established by Kinsey’s research.

Well, Kinsey was inarguably a fan of what IU calls euphemistically “sexual diversity,” and his legacy tragically lives on, but neither his predilection for “sexual diversity” nor his legacy are deserving of prideful honors.

Demonstrating a risible absence of irony, Justin Garcia, executive director of the Kinsey Institute, said this—I kid you not:

Dr. Kinsey left us with the extraordinary legacy of his endless scientific curiosity, his unwavering commitments to academic freedom and his passion for understanding humanity’s sexual diversity. … This spectacular sculpture honors Kinsey’s international scholarly and public impact.

I would agree if by “spectacular,” Garcia means “of, relating to, or being a spectacle.”

“Legacy of “endless scientific curiosity” is Newspeak for unbridled, morally untethered sexual license, which is really not all that extraordinary. Countless numbers of perverts share Kinsey’s endless curiosity. The diverse porn pandemic reveals that sick reality. What Kinsey possessed that ordinary, run-of-the-mill perverts lack is the imprimatur of academia.

Having a life-size bronze sculpture of a creeper/criminal who self-identified as a serious scholar is definitely a spectacle and one wholly unworthy of any institution committed to “Lux et Veritas—”Light and Truth.”

Here are some of the salient features of Kinsey’s salacious life and research:

• “In Kinsey’s 1948 report he recounted using nine men to ‘observe’ the sexual responses of children for his research. … ‘Some of these adults … are technically trained persons who have kept diaries or other records which have been put at our disposal.’ He included a chart that indicated that these ‘trained’ adults were inducing sexual ‘orgasms’ in babies as young as five months of age. One four-year-old is reported to have had 26 ‘orgasms’ in 24 hours. An 11- month-old baby had 14 ‘orgasms’ in 38 minutes.”

• In reality, it was revealed in 1995 that all this data came from the diaries of one pedophile named Rex King who attempted to “bring to orgasm boys between the ages of 2 months and 15 years, in some cases over a period as long as 24 hours.” Kinsey eagerly encouraged King to send all his diaries: “I rejoice at everything you send.” In the 2004 movie starring Liam Neeson as Kinsey, the actor portraying King says this:

My grandmother introduced me to sexual intercourse when I was 10. My first homosexual act was with my father. I was 11. The 33 members of my extended family – I’ve had sex with 17 of them. That’s five generations now. … I’ve had sex with 22 separate species of animals. I’ve had intercourse with 9, 412 people. I’ve had sexual relations with 605 pre-adolescent males and 231 pre-adolescent females.

• “In his 1953 report the sexual data was mainly taken from ‘adult partners’ of 609 pre-adolescent girls. Kinsey called these molestations ‘play’ and claimed them harmless.”

• Criteria used to determine when infants were experiencing “orgasm” included “violent convulsions, groaning, ‘an abundance of tears’ (i.e., sobbing), extreme trembling and fainting. In other words, what any normal adult would view as a child’s severe reactions to trauma Kinsey interpreted as children enjoying themselves.”

• Kinsey’s “research” has been criticized for serious methodological and ethical flaws, including using significant numbers of imprisoned child molesters and prostitutes as well as a Nazi pedophile (Friedrich “Fritz” Von Balluseck) but reporting their responses as representative of the population at large.

• The married Kinsey had sex with many men, including students and research assistants.

• Kinsey encouraged his wife to have sex with other men.

• Kinsey recorded sexual activities between his wife and other men, and homosexual acts between men and group sex in his attic.

• Kinsey circumcised himself with a pocketknife at about age 60.

• Kinsey had himself filmed masturbating while inserting objects into his urethra.

American historian and art critic Kelly Grovier writing for the BBC about the BLM rioters who went on a statuary-destruction tear offers this about the meaning of statues:

From their earliest inception … statues were … less about the individuals they depict than about how we see ourselves.

Clearly, Kinsey represents favorably how many Americans see themselves.

While the Founding Fathers, whose statues were defaced or torn down in 2020, were men with moral blind spots, it was not their moral failings that were honored. Today’s Americans don’t see themselves in or seek to honor the moral failings of Thomas Jefferson. No, it was the wisdom and noble efforts to create a more perfect union that Americans honor through their statues of the great men of American history. In their statues, Americans see an aspirational picture of themselves and the country that has been a beacon of light to millions.

In contrast, Kinsey’s depravity is not a moral blind spot that his fans overlook. His depravity is what they celebrate. Kinsey is like Harvey Milk in that regard. Both men are honored by leftists because of their depravity–not despite it.

Grovier continues:

Just how engrained that instinct is – to perceive an aspect of oneself in the image of another – is impossible to measure. Such an impulse may explain why it is so agonisingly difficult to tolerate the persistence of memorials that venerate past masters of pain. Theirs is a suffocating weight. The outrage that many feel about having to share the streets with such hulking ghosts of oppression is deep and crushingly real. 

A statue of Kinsey—the abusive father of the sexual revolution and, therefore, master of incalculable pain—is agonizingly difficult to tolerate. His statue is a suffocating weight. The hulking bronze ghost of Kinsey is a painful reminder of the suffering of the many victims—the slaughtered unborn, children without mothers or fathers, single parents, and children whose minds are being deceived and bodies mutilated—of Kinsey’s sexual revolution.

While repugnant, perhaps the bronze statue at the public Indiana University honoring Alfred Kinsey fits the repugnant contemporary era leftists have socially constructed in America where our public schools train up children in the ways sexually perverse leftists want them to go. At the same time, it is a grotesque reminder of the human suffering Kinsey has caused.

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It started with a tweet. (What doesn’t these days?) But before we go into the content of it, here’s how a few news outlets headlined it:

• November 20^th, Indianapolis Star: IU won’t fire professor for tweets provost called ‘racist, sexist and homophobic’
• November 21^st, Indianapolis Business Journal: IU says professor’s views are racist, sexist and homophobic—but it can’t fire him
• November 22^nd, Time: Indiana University Says It Can’t Fire Professor for ‘Bigoted’ Social Media Comments

Here’s what happened. On November 7^th, Indiana University Kelley School of Business Professor Eric Rasmusen tweeted an article from an alternative media webzine. The title of it, “Are Women Destroying Academia? Probably,” was, granted, provocative. Rasmusen, perhaps feeling a bit punchy, added an up-the-ante pull quote from it: “geniuses are overwhelmingly male because they combine outlier high IQ with moderately low Agreeableness and moderately low Conscientiousness.” And from there, the twitterverse was off to the reactionary races. No one, as far as I could tell, bothered to actually read the article.

So, in the interest of fact-finding, I did. It discussed different traits common to women and men and then raised the question of how those traits may or may not serve the purpose of academia. Women, it said, tend to be more empathy-driven, sensitive toward others, and concerned with getting along and not hurting people’s feelings. Meanwhile men, generally more socially inept and driven to solve problems, don’t care so much about giving offense.

And then it put forth its central contention. If the purpose of academia is the pursuit of truth – an effort which necessarily requires rigorous, unemotional examination of facts and arguments – then an overemphasis on empathy may compromise the mission of the academy. Or, putting it in the terminology of the pull quote, if a university’s governing ethos too heavily favors agreeableness, then genius breakthroughs of new insight – which usually come at the expense of breaking rules and offending the status quo – are less likely to happen.

Which Will Rule: Reason or Emotion?

Now, one may agree or disagree with that contention. Or one may take issue with some part or another of the argument. But to do either one would require reading the article, engaging with the points it makes, and calmly analyzing the argument as if there is some discernible truth worth pursuing. This is how engaging with ideas works, and people who think rationally come to reasoned conclusions this way – by weighing and cross-examining competing ideas.

But ironically (and devastatingly indicting for IU as an academic institution), the official statement from IU Provost Lauren Robel, only served to validate the article’s point. First, she restated the scathing ad hominems against Professor Rasmusen in her own words – without giving any evidence that she’d read the article or engaging with anything he said. And, in so doing, she utterly failed as an academic to parley in the realm of objective truth or the facts of a matter. Then, she reacted at length from a place of raw emotion. Rasmusen’s views are “stunningly ignorant” and outdated. She finds them “loathsome,” condemns them “in the strongest terms,” and [supports IU’s] colleagues and classmates in their perfectly reasonable anger and disgust.”

Kelley School of Business Dean Idie Kesner’s statement, reflected the same sentiments and emphasized her commitment to ensuring a “non-threatening,” “respectful, and inclusive environment” that is “supportive of diversity.” Neither woman engaged with the argument in the article or with anything specific that Professor Rasmusen actually said.

And so, what the dustup revealed was this. In the place dedicated to ideas, emotions were in charge. Whether you agree with Professor Rasmusen him or not, the whole episode validated the point of article he tweeted and showed him to be light years ahead of his accusers as an academic.

Contending for Reason

Several years ago, I picked up a simple two-question rubric for responding to false accusations from University of North Carolina-Wilmington professor Mike Adams. He applies it to an accusation of racism, but it’s applicable to any of the stock ad homenims now in vogue. As Adams explains it, it’s a way of responding to bad speech with better speech. You ask for a definition of the “sin” with which you have being accused. Then you invite the accuser to present evidence to support the charge based on the definition of the term. It’s a supremely reasonable tactic to have on hand.

Rasmusen’s accusers, for example, called him many things, but the only accusation remotely relatable to the kerfuffle at hand was the charge of sexism. Given the chance, then we might pose two simple questions to any would-be accusers:

• What is meant by sexist?, and
• What has Professor Rasmusen said or done that meets that definition?

Honestly what could be more reasonable (and potentially peaceable) than inviting your accuser to state her case by defining her terms and presenting evidence? This is not a sport for the emotionally weak, though, so be wise and compassionate in the way you go about it. People have varying capacities for reason, but that is precisely why rational questions should be posed. These two questions serve both as a diagnostic of that capacity and as an invitation to grow it.

**For a helpful exercise in growing your own capacity, read the article, then click here and work your way through Professor Rasmusen’s point-by-point response to Robel’s statement.

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