Just When You Thought the Culture Wars Were Over...Tomorrow, the Deluge 

It seems that only a few months ago we were reading about "the end of the culture wars." An apparent draw had been called on the politics of abortion rights. Without actually retiring any platform planks, the Republican Party leadership signaled a "speak softly" strategy on the hot-button social issues that had spooked centrists and turned away soccer moms in 1992 and 1996. Gay acceptance was steadily advancing in the polls, and four years into "Will and Grace," public opinion actually appeared to be within striking distance of majority support for gay marriage.

All that has changed now. The signs are ominous, and you don't have to be a "Carnac the Magnificent" (Johnny Carson's fictional soothsayer on the old "Tonight Show") to prognosticate what's likely to happen in 2004 and beyond. I'm banking on proven records and existing trends, which suggest the repetition of familiar patterns. Deeply ingrained in American culture, Puritanism manifests itself even in movements against it. Every advance toward gender equality and sexual freedom triggers an inevitable backlash.

Here's an inventory of dark clouds on the cultural and political horizon:

GAY MARRIAGE WILL BE A MAJOR ISSUE IN THE 2004 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

How this will come to pass requires a bit of stage setting:

In the wake of the Supreme Court's sweeping decision in Lawrence v. Texas, which not only struck down sodomy laws but also expressed the sentiment that gay lives are worthy of respect and legal protection, public opinion polls showed a steep drop in support for gay rights. Polls registered a similar slump after the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that the state has no compelling interest in denying gays and lesbians the right to marry.

It's hard to know what to make of these precipitous poll results. In part, they reflect the shallowness of some respondents' previously stated enthusiasm for laws barring job discrimination. They also indicate weak public support for progressive policies on civil unions and gay marriage. ("What? Do you mean there's a real chance something significant might actually happen on these questions? This isn't just hypothetical? I'd better reconsider my responses.") In part, too, they signal a growing sense of class and ethnic resentment against a movement whose poster children have largely been white, educated, and upper middle-class. The drop in poll numbers is especially pronounced among minority and lower-income respondents. The entry of "metrosexuals," straight men with the supposed consumer habits of urban gay men, onto the cultural scene (via Bravo's "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and news articles almost everywhere) has likely done much to reinforce a stereotype of gay men as affluent, privileged, consumerist, and vain.

The Gathering Storm

The political center, perhaps, was not really as stable or as tolerant as it had appeared when less was at stake. Whatever one makes of the polls, one thing is certain: Nothing since Roe v. Wade has rallied the Christian right more effectively than the fall of the sodomy laws and the prospect of gay marriage. Christian soldiers are marching back into the culture wars with a vengeance, as rightwing talk radio rouses the faithful and evangelical fundamentalist networks turn up the volume on school prayer, government-sponsored displays of the Ten Commandments, and other issues involving the separation of church and state.

In the days immediately following Lawrence v. Texas, the Republican leadership read the polls and quickly dusted off some of Patrick Buchanan's and Trent Lott's old Kulturkampf speeches about how liberals, feminists, gays, civil libertarians, and all the usual suspects were laying siege to a vulnerable institution: the heterosexual nuclear family. Senate Majority leader Bill Frist floated a trial balloon, calling for a constitutional amendment that would define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. This amendment would also strike down any and all existing benefits for same-sex couples, including domestic partnership and civil union arrangements. President George W. Bush has publicly toyed with support for a constitutional ban on gay marriage and marked the October 2003 anniversary of Matthew Shepherd's murder by proclaiming "Marriage Protection Week."

Richard Goldstein (Village Voice), Andrew Sullivan (The Advocate), Doug Ireland (The Nation), and others have sounded loud alarms. The proposed constitutional amendment represents the biggest assault on gay civil rights ever mounted. Its language not only forestalls any future rights for gays and lesbians; it would also undo virtually every legal gain of the past.

"Family Values," 2004

What next? Mired in an increasingly unpopular war of occupation in Iraq, faced with a lackluster economic recovery at home, anxious to throw some red meat to the Party base, and eager to mobilize a margin of untapped lower-income religious votes (which could also improve Republican numbers among socially-conservative black and Latino voters), Bush will make the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage a centerpiece of his 2004 reelection campaign. The overarching psychological theme will be "protection:" against terrorism, and of marriage. The election strategy might very well work, especially if accompanied by some sentimental, vaguely multicultural images of the "American Family" and some carefully-pitched political grandstanding on "partial-birth abortion," an issue that will also be in the news for a long time to come.

Don't count on Democrats to wage a principled fight on this one. Democratic Presidential hopefuls will view the issue as an unwelcome distraction from the populist economic themes they hope to foreground in 2004. Some candidates might even pull a Clinton on this question, and opportunistically support a constitutional amendment in order to neutralize the issue.

Should the proposed constitutional amendment be adopted, it would change the legal and political landscape for decades to come. So what are its chances? A number of gay writers and spokespersons for some lesbigay organizations give the amendment little chance of passing. Urging calm, they point out that it is notoriously difficult to pass a constitutional amendment. But representatives of the Christian right believe that the more exposure the issue gets, the more public opinion will swing to their side. A watered-down version of the present measure's language, one leaving civil union and domestic partnership laws intact, might buy additional support for the amendment.

In fact, the large majorities by which the Defense of Marriage Act passed Congress in 1996 suggest that social conservatives might already be within reach of the necessary two-thirds majority for passing a constitutional amendment in both chambers of Congress. Thirty-seven states have passed their own DOMAs (and in some cases, "super-DOMAs," bills whose language is stronger than the original model act). Once passed in Congress, the constitutional amendment would require passage by thirty-eight states to become law. Thus, after sweeping the country like a firestorm, the political fight could come down to one crucial, closely contested state.

All the signs suggest a long, hard struggle.

JUNK SCIENCE WILL CONTINUE TO DOMINATE PUBLIC SPHERE DISCUSSIONS OF SEX

But first, a little perspective on where matters now stand:

After decades of research, laboratories still generate contradictory findings and inconclusive results on sexual differences in brain structures like the corpus callosum. (The corpus callosum, a mass of neural tissue connecting the brain's two hemispheres, has figured prominently in speculations about the "biological basis" for gender differences in temperament and ability, as Anne Fausto-Sterling discusses in Sexing the Brain.) The "gay gene," which rose so meteorically in the early 1990s, crashed and burned in restudies by the close of the century. Evidence of genes "for" all manner of complex behavioral traits, including "risk-taking," has likewise proved elusive. Having unabashedly hyped "genomania" for much of the 1990s, leading scientists working with the Human Genome Project have subsequently renounced all the key components of genetic reductionism, including the idea that genes predict significant social traits.

Why, then, is "bioreductivism," specifically, the explanation of gender roles, sexual identities, and social behavior in terms of evolutionary, genetic, or neuro-hormonal causes, still given space in science journals? Why do studies with tiny samples and results that lie close to the margin of error ("junk science") still get serious airings in venues like the New York Times, Time, and Newsweek?

Because it's not about science; it's about ideology.

Bioreductivism patrols nervous borders. It ratifies certain commonsensical notions, e.g., the idea that men and women, gay and straight, are really, essentially, and radically different from each other. The resulting junk science soothes jangled nerves, but it also dumbs-down every discussion of social issues in the public sphere. In the middle of the maelstrom, pseudo-science whispers reassuring fables to the general public: fables about what it means to be a real man, a natural woman, a normal person. It urges the public to forget what the best literature and art have always taught: that inside each of us lurks something male and female, something gay and straight, something emphatic and ambiguous. In serving up a crimped view of human nature, bioreductivism naturalizes heterosexuality, the nuclear family, capitalist economics, and business as usual. It forestalls any serious talk about alternatives to the status quo.

Advocates of lesbian and gay rights, as well as feminists, have sometimes invoked junk science to support worthy causes. The notion that women are evolutionarily predisposed to be nurturing, cooperative, pacific creatures resonates with the central claims of cultural feminism. The idea that homosexuality is an innate, biological condition might seem tempting, especially as a counter to the religious right's understanding of homosexuality as a sinful choice. But bioreductivism is overwhelmingly conservative, sexist, and "heteronormative," on balance, it naturalizes conventional gender norms and sexual mores.

Alas, I'm not very optimistic that scientists will ever stop mistaking culture for nature, that journalists will cease to be mesmerized by nonsense, or that mainstream advocates of lesbian and gay rights will ever develop a consistent language unapologetically committed, on principle, to the nobility of whatever lives, loves, and identities people choose. That would require a level of public discourse consistent with Canadian or European social democratic standards, not with the low standards that currently prevail on the American scene.

IN ADDITION TO THE MICHAEL JACKSON SPECTACLE NOW UNFOLDING, THERE WILL BE AT LEAST ONE MAJOR SEX SCANDAL INVOLVING EITHER A POLITICIAN OR A CELEBRITY IN EXTENDED LEGAL PROCEEDINGS

Okay, this one seems almost self-evident. America loves a show trial, and the mass media have become ever more adept at serving them up: from the grisly and horrific details of the O.J. Simpson murder trial (which was about sex, race, and violence), to the extended ordeal of "Monicagate" (in which talking heads sometimes attempted to portray a workplace dalliance as an instance of sexual harassment, even child abuse), to the Kobe Bryant rape trial (which brings us back to sex, race, and violence). So my prediction here is like saying that junk science will dominate mass media discussions of gender roles, sexual orientation, and family policy. It's a given.

The American mass media do not always inform. They often tell fables, express American prejudices, exploit emotional responses, and distract the public's attention from issues like the state of race relations, the rise of a new oligarchy, electoral theft, and the radical recklessness of a rightwing administration's openly imperial ambitions.

MILLIONS WILL DIE OF AIDS IN AFRICA, AND A SECOND, DRUG-RESISTANT HIV/AIDS EPIDEMIC WILL GAIN GROUND IN THE U.S.

The basic facts are well known. And sex researchers have long urged a series of steps that might begin to reverse the course of the epidemic. But what couldn't happen under the Clinton administration, adequate funding for effective prevention and treatment programs in the underdeveloped world; government support for needle-exchange programs in American cities; explicit sex and HIV/AIDS-prevention education in the schools, certainly won't be happening under Bush. What we will continue to get is what we got from Clinton, only more so, and on all local and transnational fronts: abstinence-only indoctrination, and pieties about the benefits of monogamy.

SEX PANICS WILL MOVE OUT OF THE RECTORIES AND INTO THE CLASSROOM

There can be no doubt that Catholic Church officials covered up very serious cases of sex abuse over many years. But the pedophile priest scandal has also become a major legal industry, with trial lawyers waging a long-term, high-stakes campaign to extract large settlements from the Catholic Church's deep pockets. The ensuing money chase has created ripe conditions for abuse of the legal system in the name of combating child sexual abuse. This has triggered what appear to be a series of false or frivolous claims: some based on the discredited "repressed memory" syndrome, others based on incidents no rational person would regard as sexual, yet others based on implausible definitions of harm. (One man's claim against a priest consisted of the following: Many years earlier, during a meeting with the young boy and his mother, the priest had made two or three playful grabs in the air in the direction of the boy's genitals; he then spanked the boy a couple of times on his buttocks.)

According to a recent report by Daniel Lyons in Forbes, which recounts how one Los Angeles lawyer's website provided a "secure victim form" that allowed visitors to "click their way to a confidential complaint," this ongoing panic is already spilling over into other venues, notably public schools. Gay men who work with children face a real and growing risk of false accusation; when accused, they face higher legal hurdles and lower burdens of proof than do heterosexuals, with all the penalties that apply. Several defense attorneys I've queried as part of my ongoing research on the subject tell me that, under present conditions, they now routinely advise gay clients to plea bargain rather than to contest false charges, a far safer course than facing prejudiced judgments, punitive sentencing, and long, costly appeals from prison.

Like yin to yang, gay visibility and greater public tolerance of homosexuality have been shadowed by an occult backlash: by images of imperiled innocents, by moral panics over child sexual abuse, and by social anxieties around the sexuality of adolescents. These panics promote a misguided nostalgia for nuclear families, as they are imagined to have once existed, and for mothers who stayed home and closely oversaw the rearing of small children. They foster a patently false picture of childhood and adolescence as pure, chaste, and sexless. They serve as a distraction from far more substantial perils facing children, notably, poverty and neglect. Highly publicized media stories about statistically marginal occurrences, such as stranger abductions and pedophile priests, also obscure certain well-documented truths: Children are nowhere at higher risk of physical, emotional, or sexual abuse than in their own homes (where the overwhelming bulk of child sexual abuse is performed by heterosexual men on girls).

There is no evidence that children who live under our ever-more-panicky culture of child protection are in any sense "safer" from the sorts of injuries that really endanger them. Surely, the 1996 Welfare Reform package stands as one the largest concerted acts of child abuse perpetrated in American history. A string of recent news items on abusive family and foster parent care situations suggests that Child Protection agencies are slow to respond to reports of neglect and abuse where heterosexual, Christian couples are involved, said couples just don't fit the imaginary profile.

Panic in America

What is desperately needed at this fraught juncture is a sober, clear-headed understanding of the cultural coordinates of the present. We did not arrive at our current predicament overnight. The Satanic ritual abuse witch-hunts of the 1980s have been discredited, but they left indelible marks on American sexual culture, spawning entire subfields of junk science (e.g., the psychoanalysis of "repressed memories") and an ever expanding culture of "child protection." These crises have also extended both official bureaucracies (Child Protection Services) and quasi-official ones ("victim's rights advocates"), whose interests, naturally, include ever-wider and ever-more-inclusive panics.

Although the role of the homophobic and anti-feminist right is easily discernible in these events, the Left has scarcely been an innocent bystander. The Left, too, has contributed to the general atmosphere of gloom and terror around childhood. Since the 1970s, anti-sex variants of feminism have made common cause with social conservatives by blurring the distinction between consensual and non-consensual sex acts, and by defining a broad range of ambiguous or innocuous practices as abuse. Others have developed esoteric theories of sex as trauma, thus indirectly contributing to a growing field of faux-expertise on abuse and abusers.

The results have been dismal. The Child Pornography Protection Act, which was signed into law by Bill Clinton and whose reintroduction is backed by George W. Bush (after it was ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court), defined child pornography in terms so broad that it applied to depictions in which the subjects were clothed, were not doing anything sexual, and were not even actual children. Sex Offender Registries, mandated by federal law and upheld by the Supreme Court, represent a major breach of civil liberties. They prescribe forms of punishment and surveillance, in addition to those applied by judges and juries, thus creating a new class of criminals whose sentences can never be fully served.

According to Justice Department figures, recidivism rates are actually lower among sex offenders than in the general population of people convicted of crimes. But (as Laura Mansnerus reports in the New York Times), in many states, adults (and sometimes minors) in sex offender cases are being subjected to long, perhaps lifelong, periods of psychiatric preventive detention after serving their full sentences: because they insisted, even after being convicted, that they had committed no crime, or because of a psychologist's vague surmise that the convicted person was "manipulative," "egocentric," "unrepentant," and so on (hence, in the prevailing psychobabble, apt to be a repeat offender). In Free For All, Wendy Kaminer discusses how aggressive prosecutors, egged on by "victim's rights advocates" and inspired in part by University speech codes, have probed new legal fronts, including prosecuting a case of "virtual rape" in which there was no physical contact, only a phone conversation, between the "rapist" and his victim.

Making Monsters

No one could doubt that child sexual abuse exists, or that it is deeply painful for children and their loved ones. It is not that child sexual abuse does not occur, but that it has become a national obsession, a defining feature of the cultural moment. Talking about it, in ways that magnify or distort its occurrence, has become a way of not talking about child health, welfare, and safety in comprehenseive terms. Sensational reportage, stoked by aggressive prosecutors, trial lawyers, self-appointed "victim's advocates," and assorted "experts," has fostered a pervasive culture of fear: a panicky, accusatory, and claustrophobic culture that is wary of strangers and terrified of ominous Others.

The pedophile bogeyman, whose persona has absorbed and replaced other monsters in the American psyche, has come to resemble nothing so much as the Jew imagined by classical anti-Semitism: He is a dark, anonymous, misshapen figure who lurks in the playground's shadows and haunts the Internet, snatching babes and poisoning wells. One incoherent sentence from a news item in October 2003 reveals exactly how this fantastic business works, conjoining hysterical homophobic thinking with the magical power of accusation. When the Biloxi public school system installed cameras in each of its 500 classrooms, local parents expressed little fear about the implications of rearing children in a surveillance society. However, some parents were concerned that "pedophiles" might somehow hack into the closed circuit system to watch their children (fully clothed and engaged in routine classroom activities). As one father put it to NBC nightly news reporters: "I don't want no homos looking at my daughter."

Emotionally charged news stories about stranger abductions (statistically a very rare occurrence) and sensational reports of child-abuse accusations serve to magnify the public's sense of sexual danger; they have also, for years now, eroded both civil liberties and common sense. Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker's Satan's Silence, Philip Jenkins' Moral Panic, and James Kincaid's Erotic Innocence, Richard Ofshe and Ethan Watters's Making Monsters, and other books on the culture of child molestation speak to this phenomenon. As a result, "narratives of rescue" have come to figure ever more prominently in American culture, as Lauren Berlant describes in The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. These narratives have become so ubiquitous that even during the invasion of Iraq, U.S. soldiers who were handed over to American authorities were consistently described as having been "rescued" from Iraqi captors.

An increasingly risk-adverse nation comes to see itself in the image of newly crafted identities: an imperiled child, awaiting rescue; a survivor, in recovery from trauma; an innocent victim, who's finally resolved to act against an abuser. These dark fantasies, long at play in the national psyche, become especially dangerous in the context of the open-ended war on terror, which also posits that some threats are so dangerous that ordinary civil liberties, legal protections, and international laws should not apply.

Who, Dear Citizen, will rescue us from the rescuers?

Predictions beyond 2004:

After passing both chambers of Congress on the third try, the constitutional amendment to bar gay marriage will fail ratification by one critical state. But lesbigay victory celebrations will be subdued, and with good reason. The political battles around the question will produce unprecedented regional (North/South, urban/rural) polarization, will reverse longstanding trends toward gay acceptance, and will leave the gay rights movement spent, exhausted, and stalled for years to come.

Panicked by the great "pedophile schoolteacher" panics of 2004-2008, and facing a barrage of sensational revelations around "predatory professors," Congress will seek to draw a clear line and will pass federal legislation setting a national "age of consent" at 21. (Congress will cite its own 1984 precedent, when it set the legal drinking age at 21.)

Even as it ratifies and expands a "culture of child protection," the U.S. will continue its drift away from international human rights standards: A growing number of Southern and border states will join the ranks of those that have executed juvenile offenders in recent years. (According to Human Rights Watch, the U.S. is currently the only country in the world that continues to claim the legal authority to execute juveniles.)

Meanwhile, Fox TV will air the first interactive, reality-based courtroom drama. Viewers will be invited to log on to vote an online, Roman-circus-style "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" verdict.

In short: If present trends continue, there will be much talk about toleration, freedom, and liberation when other countries are invaded. This high-minded talk will be accompanied by religious scapegoating, majoritarian bullying of dissidents, an ever more expansive use of preventive detention for ever-broader classes of suspected terrorists and sex criminals, and, in general, a continuing decline of civil liberties at home.

* Roger Lancaster is Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Cultural Studies Ph.D. Program at George Mason University. He is author of the award-winning ethnography, Life is Hard: Machismo, Danger, and the Intimacy of Power in Nicaragua (California, 1992) and editor (with Micaela di Leonardo) of The Gender/Sexuality Reader (Routledge, 1997). His most recent book is The Trouble with Nature: Sex in Science and Popular Culture (California, 2003).