UNITED STATES — Steven Epstein is worried about the state of education in this country. Not just the basic readin’, ritin’ and rithmatic stuff, though. Epstein is especially concerned about sexual education and research, which he considers in grave peril thanks to threats from the extreme Right Wing.According to an interview with Epstein in American Sexuality Magazine concerning a startling paper he had written, the associate professor of sociology at University of California, San Diego contends that during the first few years of the new millennium, the Southern California Christian right group Traditional Values Coalition assembled a “hit list” of sex researchers. He claims that this was part of a conspiracy to whip up moral outrage at the public funding of such work within the United States. The list, once completed, is said to have made it to lawmakers, who then made sure that the National Institute of Health avoided investing in sexual research projects.
Epstein’s paper, “The New Attack on Sexuality Research: Moral Panic and the Politics of Knowledge,” originally appeared in Volume 3, Issue 1 of Sexuality Research and Social Policy: Journal of NSRC. It argued that the best way to approach controversial subjects such as sex research is to address them as both moral struggles centering on sexual norms and credibility struggles centering on how knowledge is produced.
This particular struggle includes the aforementioned “hit list,” which Epstein says included the names of dead and idle researchers, as well as those actively involved in their work, who had received public dollars for their research. By making the funding a political issue, Epstein insists that an atmosphere of fear spread throughout the sexual researcher community which caused professionals to worry about discussing, let alone investigating, sexual issues. Some continued to vie for government investment by creatively naming research projects to avoid words likely to invite scrutiny and provide fodder for those seeking to instill hysteria in the sexually sensitive. Epstein goes so far as to say that NIH program officers who were in the know about governmental scrutiny sometimes encouraged researchers to “not use certain words in the titles or the abstracts.”
As Epstein sees it, not only does this affect what subjects gets academic attention, but it also sends a strong message to those whose work has gone before, those beginning their scholastic research, and those still attending classes. “If people feel besieged,” he explains, “if people feel they have to disguise what they’re doing and pretend this has nothing to do with sexuality, if they can’t use words like ‘gay’ or ‘prostitute’ in their proposals, then it has a demonizing effect on the research community. Inevitably,” he warns, “there are some people who feel that it’s just not an area of research that they can sustain activity in; it’s too difficult.”
