Yes, You Can Fool the Children of the (Sexual) Revolution

Mary Eberstadt offers hope.  Excerpts:

...In the end, consolation also comes from this fact: The intellectual divide over the Cold War and the divide today over the sexual revolution another feature in common. In both cases, many on both sides suspected that history had already decided the matter. This was true even of some of the leading anticommunist intellectuals of the day. Jean François Revel opened his 1984 book, chillingly entitled How Democracies Perish, with the equally chilling sentence: “Democracy may, after all, turn out to have been a historical accident, a brief parenthesis that is closing before our eyes.” Similarly, Whittaker Chambers famously opens his magisterial autobiography, Witness, with a letter to his children warning darkly of a world “sick unto death,” and he told his wife when he chose to defect from communism, “You know, we are leaving the winning world for the losing world.” Chambers was wrong about that, of course—even as he was singularly and fearlessly right about so much else.


In place of the historical materialism of those days, which seemed so towering and implacable at the time, Americans today face a different putative verdict of history: the idea that the sexual revolution is similarly a juggernaut never to be halted or reversed. History, however, doesn't absolve everyone so easily after all. As it also shows, the empirical truth will out eventually—even when those who will be threatened by it seem unshakable in their denial of the facts, and even when those in possession of those same facts suspect personally that the historical gig is up.

That's why it's so important to get the facts right, even—or make that especially—when outnumbered by thousands to one. When people look back on this or any other momentous debate decades from now, one of the first things they will want to know is whose corner reason and empiricism and logic were in. That would be the corner of those willing to believe the truth—secured by the research of the scholars whose work testifies to it, whether it is welcomed by the rest of the world or not.