The College Fix

Higher ed has promoted ‘cultural relativism’ and ‘pseudoscience,’ social commentator says

Universities are discouraging marriage through their promotion of “intersectionality” and “ideologically driven pseudoscience,” according to the author of a new book about marriage and democracy.

“Sex and the Citizen: How the Assault on Marriage is Destroying Democracy” is a new book out this week by Washington Examiner commentary editor Conn Carroll. He spoke to The College Fix about his book via email.

Carroll said “the biggest role higher education has played in the decline of marriage is the creation, legitimization, and dissemination of ideologically driven pseudoscience that promotes cultural relativism and undermines Christian sexual norms.”

“As is detailed in the book, this really begins with the father of cultural relativism, Franz Boas, and his student Margaret Mead,” Carroll said. “Boas taught his students that there was no such thing as a progression from primitive to civilized culture. All cultures were equal in Boas’s eyes, with no culture being the moral better of another.”

Boas was a cultural anthropologist, according to a Columbia University profile.

His student Mead claimed Samoans “did not follow Christian sexual norms, and allowed young girls to sleep with as many men as they wanted.”

It “was a best-seller and earned her praise from late night talk shows, Congress, and even President Jimmy Carter. Problem is, as even her greatest defenders now admit, none of it was true,” Carroll said. The book is called “Coming of Age in Samoa.”

Modern research has found that premarital sex is closely associated with a higher rate of divorce.

“Years later, an Indiana University professor conducted over five thousand interviews for his book, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, finding that homosexuality and infidelity were far more common than previously thought,” Carroll said. He said Alfred Kinsey’s work “was celebrated in popular culture, and he has been cited in Model Penal Codes and even Supreme Court decisions.”

But his work “turned out to be ideological fiction that has never been replicated.”

“Not only did Kinsey draw non-representative samples from college campuses and prisons, but he pushed his researchers to engage in homosexuality and infidelity themselves, even filming them performing sexual acts in his home,” Carroll said.

Indiana Governor Eric Holcomb signed a bill last year that barred taxpayer funds from being used to support the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction at Indiana University.

“It is the work of Mead and Kinsey and thousands of anthropologists and social scientists like them that laid the groundwork for the Supreme Court to undermine the key legal frameworks that had made marriage the foundation of American family law since its founding,” according to Carroll.

Carroll also argued that intersectionality is contributing to the rejection of marriage by many young people.

He said:

First coined by Columbia Law School professor Kimberle Crenshaw, “intersectionality” was a term used to help describe the interaction of race and gender in the context of discrimination. It was not enough to look at just gender discrimination, since firms could just hire white women, or race, since firms could hire black men, because these two practices would leave black women without any recourse. “

The law, Crenshaw argued, had to look at how race and gender interacted to create a hierarchy of oppression with black women at the top as the most oppressed, and white men at the bottom as the guilty oppressors. Since its inception, religion, disability, physical appearance, and importantly for marriage, sexuality, have all been added to the mix.

“So straight, Christian white men would now be the most evil oppressors on Crenshaw’s intersectionality oppression scale, with a black, queer, atheist woman at the saintly top,” he said.

Earlier this year, Crenshaw called the resignation of Harvard president Claudine Gay “a victory for the far right, for crowing racists, and for the new McCarthyism aimed at ideologically cleansing Higher Ed.”

MORE: Colleges should promote marriage, integrate kids on campus

Carroll said white women can move up “the victimhood scale” by “identifying as queer.” He referenced polling showing that “young white women” are “most likely to identify as bisexual.”

According to a 2022 report, almost 40 percent of students at liberal arts colleges identify as LGBTQ. At some women’s colleges, that number was even higher.

“Now sexual identity, especially for young women, can be very fluid. Many of these women will end up straight up again eventually,” he said. “But in the meantime not only are they missing out on opportunities to meet and date young men their age, they are also being taught to view straight white men as the enemy. And no one wants to marry the enemy.”

Carroll told The Fix: “Far too much of the rhetoric both on campus and in politics pits men against women as if we were two coherent groups competing against each other. We’re not. If anything, our biggest competition comes from people within our own gender.”

“For all the biological differences there are between men and women, and there are a lot, ultimately we both value the same thing in potential mates: someone who is willing to put in the work and be patient enough to build a loving committed relationship together,” he said.

“If you focus on that, on finding someone who wants to build something special and unique with you, you will find a partner, regardless of the growing partisan political gaps on college campuses.”

Editor’s note: The reporter is a former College Fix fellow for the Washington Examiner and worked under Carroll.

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IMAGES: Bombardier Books; The Washington Examiner/YouTube

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