As I have pointed out previously, Sigmund Freud theorized that sexual morality was repressive, indeed harmful. Freud, like many other Enlightenment thinkers, argued that sexual morality was an artificial social construct and not a universal truth. Freud added that this artificially imposed restraint produced guilt which in turn was responsible for various pathologies or mental illnesses.

Margaret Sanger, another sexual "revolutionary" pushed Freud's theory even further by suggesting that such repression of the sex drive would result in diminished intellectual capacity. Sanger, if you don't know, was the founder of the American Birth Control League in 1921 which went on to become Planned Parenthood.

Following Freud and Sanger came the late Alfred Kinsey, the notorious research scientist and founder of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University in the 1940s. Kinsey sought to demonstrate that there were no public consequences to private sexual behavior. Kinsey collected thousands of sexual histories ultimately publishing the results of his surveys in his now infamous reports on male and female sexuality in 1948 and 1953 respectively. Kinsey's reports seemed to reveal a nation rife with sexual deviancy and immoral behavior and yet there were none of the negative public consequences promised by the moralists. This was a powerful refutation of religious values that began to erode society's commitment to the historic sexual ethic in which sex was strictly limited to marriage.

However, it was later discovered that Kinsey's "data" had been manipulated to support the Freudian theory. Kinsey's subjects did not represent the mainstream of America but were in fact drawn from the social underbelly. Convicted sex criminals, prostitutes, and sexual deviants were chosen by Kinsey, their sex histories were collected and then presented to the unquestioning public as being representative of the "average" American. In doing so, Kinsey was able to challenge the public perception of the 1950s that sexually moral behavior was in fact the norm. It naturally followed that if Kinsey's results were true and there were no widespread social consequences, which at the time there weren't, then the social commitment to private moral behavior was simply unnecessary and people were "free" to behave sexually in any manner they chose.

This entire contrivance would lay the foundation for the sexual revolution which would burst into American culture in the 1960s. In the four decades following this radical experiment along with a rejection of God's moral authority; America has experienced unprecedented and devastating public consequences. The US now leads the industrialized world in sexually transmitted disease; the US has the highest teen pregnancy rates in the world and illegitimate birth rates have gone from roughly 5 percent to more than 30 percent. Sexual deviancy has been normalized further undermining public morality. Family dissolution and divorce rates have skyrocketed producing countless public consequences from poverty to record prison populations. So, contrary to Freud, Sanger, Kinsey and all those "would be" sexual revolutionaries there are, in fact, public consequences to private moral behavior.