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16
enor
mous erections. The outraged mothers actually succeeded in
getting some of the textbook illustrations changed on the basis of their
"discovery."
But where, in reality, did the pictures of the naked men and
women lie? Not in the printed pages, but in the minds of the women
peering through the microscopes. Like Marigold Linton, the
psychologist who "forgot" the events in her own life that humiliated
her, the microscope-wielding religionists threw a mental sheet over
their sexual impulses, hiding them from view. Then they conceived an
enemy--the secular humanist--roiling with forbidden sexuality and
working in devious ways to insert sex into their innocent children's
lives. The only way to prevent this intrusion was to be eternally
vigilant, perpetually on the lookout for the humanists' sexual invasion.
By searching for the humanist danger, the clubwomen of Orange
County managed to keep their thoughts focused on sex. But this
sexual obsession, they could now tell themselves, was not their fault. It
was the fault of their sex-crazed enemy, without whom sexuality
would never have crossed their minds.
Of such rejected pieces of ourselves are our devils made.
The perceptual flimflam practiced by the Orange County women
contributed mightily to a war between two subcultures. The concept of
a secular humanist enemy undermining American youth is currently
being preached by television and radio evangelists on the national
Christian Broadcasting Network, on the nation's 221 Fundamentalist
TV stations, and on 1,370 Fundamentalist radio stations22. It has been
aggressively promoted by figures like Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson
and the Reverend Donald Wildmon, who between them have had
annual access to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of media time.
And it is being bolstered by a series of multi-million dollar mailing
campaigns whose sophistication makes the Readers Digest
Sweepstakes look amateurish by comparison.23.
The prophets of religious rigidity have made full use of the
psychological ploy with which we project our own worst tendencies
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