While eXtreme evangelicals have been poring over Christian porn for married straights, they’ve waged one hell of a war on sex for the rest of us and it’s taken a vicious toll. So says Dagmar Herzog, author of a new book Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics. Interviewed on GRITtv, Herzog, who teaches at the Graduate Center at New York University, says she wrote her book for her young students — particularly the girls. From the confident happy young people who sat in class twenty years ago, she’s watched them shrink into nervous Nellies around sex and body-image. And she does mean shrink.

Ever since the dawn of "sexual liberation" the Right’s been fighting against what they perceived as "non-traditional" (can we say, "uncontrolled?") sex, and now the sex cops are firmly back — in our courts, our Congress, and sadly, in our own heads. Herzog, who grew up with strict parents in the pre- lib South — lays out an interesting case, tracking the Right’s targets — from inter-racial dating to abortion to LGBTQ life. At every stage, they plugged into pre-existing angst about gender and desire and being good — not to mention good enough — and with the latter, they hit the jackpot. Now they’re not just selling us sex as wicked but sex as bad for our mental — and physical — health.

The eXtreme Religionists did the fighting for the Conservative Right, says Herzog. She dates the start of the most recent phase interestingly, with the tussle over federal tax-exempt status for Bob Jones University, a place where in the early Reagan years, blacks and whites were not allowed to date. How did we get from there to here? She lays it out. The toll is very real —- consider the homicidal impact of the Bush regime’s anti-condom campaign. And the hypocrisy is rank: while they damn sex for the rest of us, Christian sex manuals — and "Christian" vibrators and ticklers — proliferate. This stuff will raise eyebrows — at least.

Laura asks: does sex-shaming link to a sense of shame about other desires — for a fairer, more peaceful and verdant world, perhaps? Find out…