Edward Feser's article in the March issue of City Journal exposes the flaws in Kinsey's science, a task more necessary because of Hollywood's recent depictions of him.
Notoriously, he derived his “sexual histories” largely from persons on the fringes of society—prison inmates and the denizens of gay bars, the latter being in the 1940s and fifties much farther outside the mainstream of American life than they are now.One of my previous commenters says the judge was confused: the Revised Curriculum provides these references for teacher use only. However, even if that is true one has to wonder about the quality of this curriculum. The references it cites were entirely one-sided and includes appeals to junk science such as Kinsey's.
Then there’s Kinsey’s strange fascination with pedophiles, with the horrific data on the frequency of orgasms in infants and children he derived from interviewing child molesters blandly recorded in his volumes alongside the more ordinary perversions. One particularly monstrous pedophile, a man who had sexual relations with various of his family members and molested hundreds of children, kept regular contact with Kinsey and his associates. They assured him that they wouldn’t turn him in to the authorities, despite the fact that he continued to molest children throughout the time of their correspondence. Kinsey justified such aiding and abetting of criminality in the name of “science,” of course.
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All of this would be bad enough if Kinsey’s work merely sought to convey some unusual facts and figures. But of course, Kinsey took that work, and his admirers still take it, to have far greater significance. In their view, it amounts to nothing less than a refutation of traditional sexual morality. Kinsey had shown—or so he claimed—that adulterers, homosexuals, and pederasts were as common as rain. How could anyone ever again regard such behavior as abnormal?
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