A 1967 publicity photo of John Carradine.
Jesse Walker has completed and published a new paper that I wrote about earlier, "Birchers, Discordians, and Sex Education: The Libertarians in the Anaheim Sex-Ed Wars." It's available here.
The abstract captures why the paper is of interest to readers of this blog: "Anaheim, California, was one of the first battlegrounds in the wars over sex education that started erupting in the 1960s. Radical libertarians found themselves playing notable parts on both sides of the conflict. This paper examines the roles of R.C. Hoiles on the anti-sex-education side of the debate and of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea on the pro-sex-education side; it also describes how another radical libertarian, Ralph Raico, essentially synthesized the Hoiles and Wilson/Shea positions. These rival approaches reflect conflicting ideas about liberty that can also be found outside the libertarian movement, sometimes in ways that confound conventional models of the political right and left."
Jesse's paper, published in the UC Berkeley Journal of Right-Wing Studies, has an amusing opening paragraph:
"Long before a certain sort of conservative took to casually calling his foes 'groomers,' the Malibu-based record label American United released The Child Seducers. On the disc, narrator John Carradine opined on everything from Rosemary’s Baby to 'the flaming pornography of the nudity cults,' but his chief target was sex education. 'The schools of America are sex saturated,' Carradine warned, just three years before the always-game-for-a-paycheck actor appeared in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex."
It's a fun paper; expect references to Illuminatus!, discussion of Wilson and Shea, etc.
Disclosure: I am named in the Acknowledgements and my Robert Shea book is cited.
