Meet the spiritual forefather of conservatives’ War on Women

[xchrom]

http://www.salon.com/2014/04/13/meet_the_spiritual_forefather_of_conservatives_war_on_women/


Rush Limbaugh, Charles Keating, Jr., Mike Huckabee (Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite/Nick Ut/Reuters/Joe Skipper/Salon)

The late Charles Keating, who died last week at the age of 90, is remembered primarily for his role in the savings-and-loan crisis of the 1980s, as a symbol of the frauds and excesses of an unregulated financial sector — a debacle from which we seem to have learned very little. Yet, ironically, those of us interested in American sexual politics remember a very different side of Keating: the smut-fighting moral entrepreneur who called for more regulation — as long as it pertained to matters of obscenity, rather than investment.

Keating’s pioneering activity in junk-bond innovation has all but eclipsed what may, in fact, be his most lasting legacy. As founder and longtime leader of Citizens for Decent Literature (CDL), Keating pioneered a new form of sexual conservatism, modernizing it to meet the changing mores of the mid-20th century. Through CDL, Keating developed a legalistic, pseudo-empirical anti-porn movement that worked hard to show itself as not anti-sex, but rather anti-perversion. As such, Keating brilliantly framed CDL for a post-Kinsey America, leaving a lasting imprint on conservative sexual politics.

A young Catholic lawyer in socially conservative Cincinnati in the 1950s, Keating watched with alarm as the newsstands and paperback racks of the nation filled with pulp novels and Playboy imitators, and he assessed the American moral landscape with a clarity few at the time possessed. Even as the Cold War witnessed a dramatic sexual retrenchment that ranged from aggressively domestic ideals for women to state-sponsored violence and suppression toward queer “deviants,” anti-smut activism seemed to be at low ebb. “Censorship” was unpopular, viewed through a Cold War prism as a tactic of the totalitarian Soviet Union, not freedom-loving Americans — none less than President Dwight D. Eisenhower castigated “the book burners” in 1953. Meanwhile, old forms of moral activism had fallen into disrepute. Anti-smut activist Anthony Comstock, in whose name the 1873 federal obscenity law had been passed, was now viewed through a post-Freudian lens as a repressed Victorian, and Catholic cultural influence was on the wane, with the traditional boycott methods of the Legion of Decency under attack in the media and the Hollywood Production Code disintegrating rapidly.

Yet Keating uniquely recognized the opportunities afforded by the Supreme Court, whose 1957 Roth v. United States opinion determined that obscene materials were not protected by the First Amendment. Today we remember Roth for helping unleash the sexual revolution. Because Justice William Brennan restricted obscenity to only those works completely devoid of “socially redeeming value,” the case cleared the path for Henry Miller novels, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” and ultimately “Deep Throat.” But Keating recognized the conservative opportunity the Court afforded: Banning books could be framed as something other than censorship. If a sleazy book with a name like “Lust Agent” is obscene, it has no constitutional claim to free speech. Ipso facto, to suppress it is not to censor it.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

1. The spiritual forefathers of conservative sexism died tens of thousands of years ago.

Conservative ideas on sex and gender have tens of thousands of years - at least - of tradition behind them.

Not treating women as second class citizens - not to say property - is new-fangled idea that has only really cropped up in the last few centuries, once beating people to death with pointed sticks stopped being a valuable life skill.

[Cirque du So-What]

2. I had similar thoughts when I saw the title of this OP

although anthropologists are at odds over whether patriarchal concepts that relegated women to second-class status existed in pre-agricultural societies. There is little disagreement, however, that patriarchy gained the upper hand ca. 6000 B.C.E. Judeo-Christian tradition was especially important in enforcing this social structure - to the extent that women were excluded from the God-human covenant. We see vestiges of this discrimination lasting to the present day. Of course, Judeo-Christianity is hardly alone among patriarchal societies, as we see from the writings of Aristotle. Ancient Egypt may have had a shot at retaining some semblance of equality in their society, but that culture was ultimately replaced by Greek (i.e., Aristotelian) influences - later by Islamic (an outgrowth of Judeo-Christian tradition, after all).

Charles Keating represents a tradition of turning back the clock - of reasserting male dominance in society - and isn't turning back the clock the ultimate goal of any particular facet of conservatism? I am happy that the old bastard finally croaked, but I am glad in a way that he lived long enough to see the day when citizens can point-and-click their way to media that satisfies their sexual interests and curiosities without repercussion. In the unlikely event that Hell exists, I hope Satan reminds Keating on a regular basis that his tawdry, selfish life was ultimately all in vain.