Beverly Harrison said, "If greater genital expression were really the solution to our social miseries, we would expect ours to be the happiest society around."
What would make us a happier society? Rod Dreher said that sexual liberation can go too far: "Liberals believe that what consenting adults do in bed with their bodies is immune from moral judgment. Social conservatives recognize the falsity of this view, understanding that immoderation in sexual matters corrupts individual character and can have deleterious social consequences." Mary Daly, on the other side, suggested that sexual liberation in itself does not go far enough: "The lifting of taboos on genital sexuality does nothing to liberate from sex roles."
Pssst: Rod Dreher is homophobic and transphobic. Mary Daly was transphobic.
"More recently, Rod Dreher fled the “collapsing imperium,” as he once put it, to seek refuge in Victor Orbán’s Hungary. Dreher was a long-time columnist and still is editor at The American Conservative. He is a prominent figure on the reactionary religious Right. Dreher has always been staunchly anti-liberal; since 2020, he has radicalized to a new level – and is now constantly raging against the 'moral horror' of 'trans totalitarianism,' in particular. He is the biggest fan aspiring European autocrats have among American reactionaries. Find someone in your life who admires you half as much as Rod Dreher admires Viktor Orbán. In 2022, Dreher moved to Budapest and keeps sending his dispatches from a place called “Hungary” that exists solely in the reactionary imagination, a kind of white Christian patriarchal wonderland, where men still get to be real men, where the 'woke' hordes and 'globalist' enemies are still being kept in check by 'the people.'"
— Domination or Dissolution, Rule or Ruin: The Right is fantasizing about secession, “national divorce,” and civil war – because they will not, under any circumstance, accept pluralism. Thomas Zimmer, Democracy Americana (Substack), Feb 7, 2024
"The best example of this rather bizarre [pro-Orbán] fixation might be Rod Dreher, a very prominent figure in the reactionary intellectual scene. Dreher, a long-time columnist and still editor at the rightwing magazine The American Conservative has been an interesting bellwether for that particular sphere of far-right thinkers: He has always been begrudgingly pro-Trump, because he is so enthusiastically anti-liberal. Dreher was properly reactionary even during the first Trump presidency. But since 2020, he has radicalized to a new level – and is now constantly raging against the “moral horror” of “trans totalitarianism,” in particular.
* * *
In 2021, he received a fellowship from the Danube Institute in Budapest – a rightwing think tank funded by the Orbán government. The next year, Dreher left the United States and moved to Hungary’s capital full-time. He had long dreamed about “fleeing the collapsing imperium,” as he dramatically put it (although one suspects that his wife leaving him might have also had something to do with his plans to relocate). From Hungary, Dreher has acted as a full-on propagandist for Orbánism: “We are living, right now, through an ongoing societal catastrophe with gender confusion and transgenderism,” Dreher claims. “Viktor Orbán wants to save his nation from this ideological toxin and does not hesitate to use the power of the state to do so, even if it might violate the spirit of liberalism.” Orbán, Dreher believed, offered the best chance to “stem this horrible global tide of wokeness,” as he put it."
Why Hungary Matters: Six big-picture conclusions from Orbán’s smashing defeat – and what it all means for the transnational struggle against rightwing authoritarianism, Thomas Zimmer, Democracy Americana (Steady), April 13, 2026
I wrote about his "trans totalitarianism" essay here.
Criminal Charges Pressed Against Budapest Mayor After Hundreds of Thousands Defy Pride Ban: “Despite threats or punishment, I will continue to fight. Freedom and love cannot be banned.” s. baum, Erin in the Morning, Jan 29, 2026
Conversion therapy:
Alan Watts, in his day, reflected that these sorts of answers are opposite poles of the same question, and the question may not always be the right one to ask. That is: Since sex is not entirely good nor entirely evil in itself, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to whether and how it should be permitted.
"But if puritanism and cultivated licentiousness are not fundamental deviations from nature, they are simply the opposite poles of one and the same attitude — that, right or wrong, sexual pleasure is the great delight....When sexuality is set apart as a specially good or specially evil compartment of life, it no longer works in full relation to everything else. In other words, it loses universality. It becomes a part doing duty for the whole — the idolatry of a creature worshipped in place of God, and an idolatry committed as much by the ascetic as the libertine."
People take sex differentiation most seriously when they have sex, wrote John Stoltenberg, "as if their identities or lives depended on it. For males, generally, it tends to be their identities; for females, often, it is more a matter of their lives." Elizabeth Abbot wrote that many sex therapists "say (or they mean), in Carolyn Gage's bitter words, 'We just want to help you get to the place where you will want to fuck,' instead of the words that would begin to heal a woman's chronic pain: 'You don't have to fuck. You never have to fuck.'"
Sources
Beverly Harrison, quoted by Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990. p 206.
Rod Dreher, "Porky Populism," The American Conservative, Aug 6, 2012 (archive 2022)
Alan Watts, Nature, Man, and Woman, p 156-7
Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973. p 176.
John Stoltenberg. Refusing to Be a Man: Essays on Sex and Justice. New York: Meridian, 1989. p 28.
Elizabeth Abbot. A History of Celibacy. Da Capo Press, 2001 (originally 1999). p 414.
