    16

    16

    enor

    mous erections.   The outraged mothers actually succeeded in

    getting some of the textbook illustrations changed on the basis of their

    "discovery."

    But where, in reality, did the pictures of the naked men and

    women lie?  Not in the printed pages, but in the minds of the women

    peering through the microscopes.  Like Marigold Linton, the

    psychologist who "forgot" the events in her own life that humiliated

    her, the microscope-wielding religionists threw a mental sheet over

    their sexual impulses, hiding them from view.  Then they conceived an

    enemy--the secular humanist--roiling with forbidden sexuality and

    working in devious ways to insert sex into their innocent children's

    lives.  The only way to prevent this intrusion was to be eternally

    vigilant, perpetually on the lookout for the humanists' sexual invasion.

    By searching for the humanist danger, the clubwomen of Orange

    County managed to keep their thoughts focused on sex.  But this

    sexual obsession, they could now tell themselves, was not their fault.  It

    was the fault of their sex-crazed enemy, without whom sexuality

    would never have crossed their minds.

     Of such rejected pieces of ourselves are our devils made.

    The perceptual flimflam practiced by the Orange County women

    contributed mightily to a war between two subcultures.  The concept of

    a secular humanist enemy undermining American youth is currently

    being preached by television and radio evangelists on the national

    Christian Broadcasting Network, on the nation's 221 Fundamentalist

    TV stations, and on 1,370 Fundamentalist radio stations22. It has been

    aggressively promoted by figures like Jimmy Swaggart, Pat Robertson

    and the Reverend Donald Wildmon, who between them have had

    annual access to hundreds of millions of dollars worth of media time.

    And it is being bolstered by a series of multi-million dollar mailing

    campaigns whose sophistication makes the Readers Digest

    Sweepstakes look amateurish by comparison.23.

    The prophets of religious rigidity have made full use of the

    psychological ploy with which we project our own worst tendencies

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