ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (BP)–Production of a feature film chronicling the life of controversial sex researcher Alfred Kinsey is set to begin in March, according to reports from Variety magazine and USA Today.
A leading cultural conservative has issued an open challenge to the film’s lead actor, however, to step back from his role as Kinsey, referring to the production as “a wholly un-historic propaganda film to refurbish a scientific fraud, determined to transmit his own pedophilic preferences onto the generations.”
Screenwriter Bill Condon, acclaimed for his Oscar-winning screenplay for “Gods and Monsters,” penned the screenplay for this film detailing Kinsey’s life. The film, which will also be directed by Condon, includes such distributors as United Artists and Myriad Pictures, and executive producers from Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope, says Variety.
Set to play Kinsey is noted actor Liam Neeson, who is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Oskar Schindler in the Oscar-winning film, “Schindler’s List.”
Kinsey, a controversial Indiana University sex researcher from the first half of the twentieth century, is often credited with initiating the loosening of sexual mores that resulted in such phenomena as easy access to pornography, the normalization of homosexuality, and an increase in extramarital affairs. According to a Nov. 22 USA Today article on the new Kinsey film, “There probably would be no Playboy or Dr. Ruth without his liberating effects.”
Judith Reisman author of “Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences,” worries that the film may glorify Kinsey and the negative effects he left on American culture.
This concern drove Reisman to write an open letter dated Nov. 16 and addressed to Neeson in which she said of Kinsey, “This is not quite the image to choose for the rest of your-I hope-long and noble career.”
Reisman said of the production, “I think it’s being created to give the impression that Dr. Kinsey was just ahead of his time. That he was bi/homosexual will be defended as a choice that he made and that he was driven underground by an oppressive, repressive society. It will be created to support the pansexual revolution we are in the midst of and to return us to the dark.”
Reisman’s concern about Condon’s upcoming film arises particularly from her understanding that the screenplay is based upon an inaccurate biography of Kinsey written by Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy entitled, “Sex: The Measure of All Things, The Life of Alfred C. Kinsey.” According to Reisman, the Gathorne-Hardy biography was underwritten by the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University — an institution whose very survival depends upon the public perceiving Dr. Kinsey in a positive light.
“The Kinsey Institute today would be destroyed if the public really knew who Kinsey was and what he stood for,” says Reisman.
Despite the concern of Reisman and other cultural conservatives though, the film’s creators remain optimistic about the project.
“Kinsey is an incredibly complex character,” Condon said in the Oct. 29 edition of Variety. “A scientist who spent 20 years as a biologist and had one brilliant but simple idea which is still radical today — that no one person’s sexuality is the same as another’s and that we are all tortured by what is sexually normal.”
Condon told USA Today that Kinsey’s knack for getting people to speak openly about their sexual practices particularly interests him. Condon says Kinsey had a trick for getting people to speak frankly. “He never asked if they did anything. He would just assume they did. My fantasy trailer would open with someone asking, ‘When did you first have sex with animals?'”
Reisman, who will serve this summer as Distinguished Visiting Faculty at Pepperdine University, has often pointed to the detrimental effects Kinsey left on American society. “There’s not a human being in the United States of America and in most of the Western world whose life has not been affected negatively by Dr. Alfred Kinsey, even if they do not know who he is,” she said. “He has changed all our lives without any question.”
Reisman said in a Baptist Press article from 1997, “It was Kinsey’s junk ‘science’ that so-called experts cited to reduce criminal penalties for rape and other sex crimes, to parole violent sex criminals, including murderers, to legalize mailing obscene materials through the mail, to legalize sodomy and to award child custody to criminal parents.
“We have let the Kinseyites violate our children’s innocence and we are reaping the whirlwind,” said Reisman.
“When the movies at your neighborhood theater feature total nudity, when your granddaughter tells you she learned about condoms in school today and when your clergyperson announces your denomination is rethinking its stand on homosexual acts, you are seeing the cold, dead hands of Professor Kinsey at work,” she concluded in the 1997 article.
More recently, Reisman has received attention for her efforts to dissuade Neeson from participating in an inaccurate portrayal of Kinsey. “Neeson and his people perhaps don’t realize that what they are doing is promoting one of the most egregious abusers of children that we have seen in the history of science,” Reisman told Baptist Press.
In her open letter to Neeson, Reisman wrote, “I write to you regarding your forthcoming role as Dr. Alfred Kinsey, a man increasingly understood to have been the most infamous child molester in scientific history, dubbed by the Weekly Standard, ‘The Father of Pedophile Chic’ and embraced by The North American Man Boy Love Association as creating the ‘data’ that support ‘the struggle we fight today.’
“As the current film is outlined, you will be seen as defending the sexual torture of infants and children for ‘science.’ An honest film on Kinsey’s iniquity would be very welcome to the child protection and anti pedophile movements and wholly unwelcome to the Kinsey Institute or Indiana University.”
In response to the upcoming movie on Dr. Kinsey, Reisman believes that it is appropriate for citizens to educate themselves on who Dr. Alfred Kinsey really was so that they will not be misled by inaccurate portrayals. She says that accurate material may be found in her book, “Kinsey: Crimes & Consequences” and on her website, www.drjudithreisman.org. Additionally, Reisman urged Christians to “certainly not support such a film by any means at all.
“It’s appropriate for any decent American citizens, including Christian citizens, to make their concerns known,” said Reisman.
She concluded, “For a man who has, more than any other human being, destroyed the legal protections for women, children, and the family in this country to be elevated to royal status by the film industry is a threat to everyone but is a special threat to the safety of our children.”
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(BP) photo posted in the BP Photo Library at http://www.bpnews.net. Photo title: JUDITH REISMAN.
