The Left and Sexual Repression
reprinted from FE #270, March, 1976

The role of religion within authority’s Holy Trinity--the compulsive family, religion, and the State--with its blatant anti-sexual ideology and its historic record of service to totalitarianism, is easily understood as an institution of repression, and most revolutionaries quickly reject overt religious mysticism of all varieties.

What is at first surprising is that identical or even more reactionary pronouncements about sex leap from the mouths of those same leftists who claim to speak for liberation and revolution. However, an analysis that looks beyond the rhetoric designed for public consumption by both the Church and the Left quickly understands the hidden purpose of their repressive sexual views: the reproduction of patriarchal, authoritarian society.

Throughout the so-called “socialist” world, the sexual ideology of the leader and the state plays the same role that Christianity plays in the West: sexuality is discouraged in youth, homosexuals are persecuted, and authoritarian families are exalted.

Also, the very content of the pronouncements by the Vatican and the “left” on sex share a similarity beyond the fact that both are repressive, anti-sexual statements. Both carry with.; them a fall from grace by the offending individual.

Individuals find it generally hard to buck the weight ‘of such condemnation. To do so means to become a: pariah, a rebel, and suffer all of the consequences such a decision implies. In normal times, when a society is functioning relatively smoothly, few opt to take such a road; it is just too perilous, both physically and psychologically. And it is precisely this fear, this timidity that has allowed every society its ability to continue functioning even though the vast majority of its members have no real, sensuous, human reason to reproduce it.