Extraordinary social and moral shifts have taken place in Western societies. Sex is no longer the exclusive province of husband and wife set within monogamous married family life. The world is awash in sex: advertising, books, magazines, movies, sex clubs, internet pornography, etc. Parents, traditionally responsible for guiding their children's moral and social development, have been effectively side-lined by commercial and governmental interests. This volume pursues a detailed study of how changes in social life dating from the sexual revolution of the 1960s have affected the family. Cherry shows that attempts to redefine the family away from the marital union of husband and wife come with real costs: social, emotional, psychological, and financial. He argues that while political campaigns have fuelled attempts to undermine the traditional family, to pretend it possesses no basic biological, social, or moral reality, such ideologically driven undertakings are injurious to society. Acting as if there are no consequential differences between traditional marriage and other sexual lifestyles ignores significant data demonstrating the importance of the traditional biological family to the well-being of men and women, and the successful raising of children. The family possesses a biological and moral being that is foundational; an essential building block of society. Cherry argues that the family is the most incontrovertible field of conflict in the culture wars; others might conclude that it is the decisive battleground.

Extraordinary social and moral shifts have taken place in Western societies. Sex is no longer the exclusive province of husband and wife set within monogamous married family life. The world is awash in sex: advertising, books, magazines, movies, sex clubs, internet pornography, etc. Parents, traditionally responsible for guiding their children's moral and social development, have been effectively side-lined by commercial and governmental interests.This volume pursues a detailed study of how changes in social life dating from the sexual revolution of the 1960s have affected the family. Cherry shows that attempts to redefine the family away from the marital union of husband and wife come with real costs: social, emotional, psychological, and financial. He argues that while political campaigns have fuelled attempts to undermine the traditional family, to pretend it possesses no basic biological, social, or moral reality, such ideologically driven undertakings are injurious to society.Acting as if there are no consequential differences between traditional marriage and other sexual lifestyles ignores significant data demonstrating the importance of the traditional biological family to the well-being of men and women, and the successful raising of children. The family possesses a biological and moral being that is foundational; an essential building block of society. Cherry argues that the family is the most incontrovertible field of conflict in the culture wars; others might conclude that it is the decisive battleground.

The schoolhouse has long been a crucible in the construction and contestation of the political concept of "family values." Through Spanish-bilingual and sex education, moderates and conservatives in California came to define the family as a politicized and racialized site in the late 1960s and 1970s. Sex education became a vital arena in the culture wars as cultural conservatives imagined the family as imperiled by morally lax progressives and liberals who advocated for these programs attempted to manage the onslaught of sexual explicitness in broader culture. Many moderates, however, doubted the propriety of addressing such sensitive issues outside the home. Bilingual education, meanwhile, was condemned as a symbol of wasteful federal spending on ethically questionable curricula and an intrusion on local prerogative. Spanish-language bilingual-bicultural programs may seem less relevant to the politics of family, but many Latino parents and students attempted to assert their authority, against great resistance, in impassioned demands to incorporate their cultural and linguistic heritage into the classroom. Both types of educational programs, in their successful implementation and in the reaction they inspired, highlight the rightward turn and enduring progressivism in postwar American political culture. In Classroom Wars, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela charts how a state and a citizenry deeply committed to public education as an engine of civic and moral education navigated the massive changes brought about by the 1960s, including the sexual revolution, school desegregation, and a dramatic increase in Latino immigration. She traces the mounting tensions over educational progressivism, cultural and moral decay, and fiscal improvidence, using sources ranging from policy documents to student newspapers, from course evaluations to oral histories. Petrzela reveals how a growing number of Americans fused values about family, personal, and civic morality, which galvanized a powerful politics that engaged many Californians and, ultimately, many Americans. In doing so, they blurred the distinction between public and private and inspired some of the fiercest classroom wars in American history. Taking readers from the cultures of Orange County mega-churches to Berkeley coffeehouses, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela's history of these classroom controversies sheds light on the bitterness of the battles over diversity we continue to wage today and their influence on schools and society nationwide.

Boldly stated and passionately supported, this argument against religious influence on the American government and legal system analyzes the impact that religion has on culture in the United States. The book makes the claim that many laws based on religious beliefs, specifically theology promoted in the Middle Ages, are misattributed as long-standing social values and that changing the theology itself threatens the religious institution supporting it--igniting a cultural war engulfed in fear and resulting in political dysfunction. It reveals that from sexuality to family planning to the tax system, religious doctrines direct American life without accounting for difference. Castle provides strategies for overcoming the imposition of religious views and demonstrates the value in standing up for a secular nation where morality is not tied to one particular religious group. This revised and expanded edition provides additional information on the origins and activities of the religious right, and its assault on women's, reproductive, and LGBT rights. It analyzes the Trump Administration's threat to those rights, and it provides case studies of the havoc religious rightists have wrought in states they control, focusing on Mike Pence's Indiana and Sam Brownback's Kansas.

A riveting account of how Christian fundamentalists, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Catholics have joined forces in a battle against their progressive counterparts for control of American secular culture.

The past fifty years are conventionally understood to have witnessed an uninterrupted expansion of sexual rights and liberties in the United States. This state-of-the-art collection tells a different story: while progress has been made in marriage equality, reproductive rights, access to birth control, and other areas, government and civil society are waging a war on stigmatized sex by means of law, surveillance, and social control. The contributors document the history and operation of sex offender registries and the criminalization of HIV, as well as highly punitive measures against sex work that do more to harm women than to combat human trafficking. They reveal that sex crimes are punished more harshly than other crimes, while new legal and administrative regulations drastically restrict who is permitted to have sex. By examining how the ever-intensifying war on sex affects both privileged and marginalized communities, the essays collected here show why sexual liberation is indispensable to social justice and human rights. Contributors. Alexis Agathocleous, Elizabeth Bernstein, J. Wallace Borchert, Mary Anne Case, Owen Daniel-McCarter, Scott De Orio, David M. Halperin, Amber Hollibaugh, Trevor Hoppe, Hans Tao-Ming Huang, Regina Kunzel, Roger N. Lancaster, Judith Levine, Laura Mansnerus, Erica R. Meiners, R. Noll, Melissa Petro, Carol Queen, Penelope Saunders, Sean Strub, Maurice Tomlinson, Gregory Tomso

If a hungry little traveler shows up at your house, you might want to give him a cookie. If you give him a cookie, he's going to ask for a glass of milk. He'll want to look in a mirror to make sure he doesn't have a milk mustache, and then he'll ask for a pair of scissors to give himself a trim.... The consequences of giving a cookie to this energetic mouse run the young host ragged, but young readers will come away smiling at the antics that tumble like dominoes through the pages of this delightful picture book.