Will They Finally Pull Plug on Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute?

Written by Robert Knight

Years after the founder of Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute was exposed as a fraud and sexual predator, some Hoosier State legislators are moving to defund the sex think tank.

On Wednesday, the Republican-dominated House voted 53-34 for an amendment to the state budget bill barring money for the institute. All Democrats voted against it, naturally, joined by seven kinky Republicans.

HB 1001 got final approval 66-29 on Thursday and was sent over to the Senate. Meanwhile, an Indiana state Senate committee approved a bill prohibiting health care providers from subjecting minors to puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones or surgical sterilization — what liberals oxymoronically call “gender-affirming care.”

First-term GOP state Rep. Lorissa Sweet sponsored the House measure. The Indianapolis Star, a formerly conservative paper, snarked that she had “raised long-held but largely debunked allegations about the work of Alfred Kinsey to explain her objection to its work.”

The late Judith A. Reisman demolished Kinsey’s “science” in several extensively documented books, beginning with “Kinsey, Sex and Fraud” in 1990, co-authored by Edward W. Eichel. She also wrote “‘Soft Porn’ Plays Hardball” (1991), “Kinsey: Crimes and Consequences” (1998) and “Sexual Sabotage” (2010).

Among other things, she found that Kinsey demanded that his male staff have sex with each other and their colleagues’ spouses while being filmed. He bribed prison inmates with cigarettes and soft drinks to tell him lurid tales that he insisted were representative of average Americans.

A research study that Reisman compiled in 1983 for the Department of Justice revealed a shocking amount of child-oriented imagery in Playboy, Penthouse and Hustler magazines. The porn industry hired a Washington PR firm to smear Attorney General Edwin Meese’s Commission on Pornography and Reisman in particular after the 7-Eleven convenience store chain stopped carrying Playboy and Penthouse. For more, see “The Power House” (1992) by Susan B. Trento. Reisman was also denounced by the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center as a “conspiracy theorist.”

A courageous scholar and professor at Liberty University who died in April 2021, two days before what would have been her 86th birthday, Reisman stirred controversy wherever she went. Former Kinsey aide James H. Jones, who wrote a voluminous biography of Kinsey in 1997, claimed that she never conclusively proved that Kinsey himself was a pedophile.

At the very least, Kinsey had no moral problem with pedophilia, judging by the stark evidence in his own book. The “Early Sexual Growth and Activity” chapter in “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male” includes several graph charts tracking systematic sexual abuse of boys as young as 2 months old. Table 34 (page 180) records that one 4-year-old experienced 26 “orgasms” in a 24-hour period. A 10-year-old boy was alleged to have had 14 orgasms in 24 hours.

Kinsey wrote on page 161 that the boys experienced “heavy breathing, groaning, sobbing, or more violent cries, sometimes with an abundance of tears.” They “fight away from the partner and may make violent attempts to avoid climax, although they derive definite pleasure from the situation.”

Go ahead. “Debunk” that.

Founded in 1947 by Kinsey, a zoologist, the Kinsey Institute exploded into notoriety upon publication in 1948 of “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,” followed by “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” in 1953.

It’s no exaggeration to say that these books swiftly became the “scientific” foundation of the sexual revolution. Without even looking at Kinsey’s data, gleaned from an alleged 18,000 interviews, the media bought his entire radical agenda — and still do. Hugh Hefner cited it in early editions of Playboy as proof that his nudie magazine was scientifically justified and had artistic merit.

The Kinsey “studies” became grist for a cultural and legal revolution, unleashing pornography, no-fault divorce, abortion on demand, LGBTQ activism, and relaxation of sexual offense laws, including penalties for child molesters. Kinsey’s “nothing is really normal” approach to sexuality was popularized by Dear Abby, Ann Landers and other advice columnists. In 2004, Liam Neeson starred in a sympathetic biopic entitled “Kinsey.”

The fallout is all around us: Millions of new sexually transmitted infections annually, more than 60 million abortions since 1973, a multibillion-dollar obscenity industry, broken families, wounded children and an increasingly totalitarian LGBTQ movement that brooks no dissent.

Jones wrote that Kinsey “was determined to use science to strip human sexuality of its guilt and repression. He wanted to undermine traditional morality.”

A cursory look at our culture, replete with drag queen story hours and other LGBTQ activism aimed at children, should remove any doubt as to how much of Kinsey’s goal has been achieved.

The winners have been predatory males, the abortion and porn industries, sexual anarchists and bigger government to pick up the pieces. The losers are women, children and a society whose foundational, Judeo-Christian values have been under constant assault.

In Indiana, lawmakers tried unsuccessfully in 2010 to defund the Kinsey Institute. This time around, a final decision is likely to be made when they vote on the state budget in April.

Meanwhile, Hoosier legislators had better brace for all the love they’ll receive from the “tolerance” people.

Robert Knight is a former Los Angeles Times news editor and writer and was a Media Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. This column was originally published by The Washington Times.

He has been published by the Wall Street Journal, National Review, the Christian Post, AmericanThinker.com, DailyCaller.com, Townhall.com, OneNewsNow.com and many others.  He has co-authored three books and written 10, including “Liberty on the Brink: How the Left Plans to Steal Your Vote” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) and “The Coming Communist Wave: What Happens If the Left Captures All Three Branches of Government” (D. James Kennedy Ministries, 2020) . 

You can follow him on Twitter at @RobertKnight17, and his website is roberthknight.com.