Sex and violence were the dominant issues in the recent election. A majority of Americans voted against sex and in favor of violence.

Exit polls found that morality was the most important issue for Bush voters, and in America, morality means sex. Eleven states voted against gay marriage in measures that were largely symbolic, since gay marriage is already illegal in those states. Because those measures were symbolic, it was the symbol, not the reality, of gay marriage that people were voting against. For 1500 years, Western culture has been ashamed of sexual pleasure, and every era creates scapegoats onto which people can project their sexual shame. In past eras the scapegoats have included masturbators, prostitutes, racial or ethnic minorities, or pornographers; today the designated scapegoats are homosexuals and women with unwanted pregnancies. Gay marriage would remove the shame from gay sex, and a large majority of Americans find that intolerable — they need scapegoats for their shame.

A large majority of Bush voters approved of the war in Iraq, which has so far killed 100,000 innocent civilians, according to a scientific estimate published in The Lancet a week before the election. That’s roughly 33 times more violence and terror than America experienced on 9/11, when we were attacked — by Saudis, not Iraqis.

Nearly 90% of Kerry voters opposed the war in Iraq, which they viewed as unjustified, fraudulent, and immoral. After the election, astonished Kerry voters across the country could be heard asking each other how the Bush voters could claim morality as their top concern while accepting such outrageous lies and violence. But the apparent irrationality of the Bush voters has an emotional logic. It’s the logic of child abuse and denial.

Child abuse, whether it’s physical, sexual, or emotional, damages a person’s sense of reality. To survive abuse, children learn to distrust their own feelings, perceptions, and judgments, and to trust the reality imposed by authority figures. When a child is beaten, molested, or humiliated, the child feels bad, but the adult perpetrator usually claims that the abuse is justified or even good — "it’s your fault," "you deserved it," or "there’s nothing wrong with it." The child, who depends on the adult for survival, has no choice but to accept this "reality."

Conversely, when a child masturbates, expresses interest in other people’s bodies, or engages in erotic play with other children, the child feels good. But in many American homes, parents tell their children that sexual actions and feelings are bad. These children suffer humiliation and punishment for activities that are a normal and necessary part of social and psychological development. When sexual curiosity is squelched, intellectual curiosity often goes with it. "Curiosity killed the cat," and the child wants to live.

Being told that pain is good and pleasure is bad leaves abused children confused and easily suggestible. They feel incapable of discovering for themselves what is good or bad; they just accept what authority figures tell them. The idea that their parents might be incompetent or, on occasion, malicious, is too frightening for most children to even consider, so they blame themselves for the abuse they suffer. If their basic needs such as physical safety, emotional security, love, affection, and self-expression are not satisfied, they believe it’s because they don’t deserve to have their needs satisfied.

It should come as no surprise, then, that researchers have found adults who were abused as children to be more likely to support authoritarian religious and political movements. One of the basic tenets of psychohistory — a field of research that uses psychoanalysis to understand history and societies — is that people collectively act out their craziness in politics and religion so that they don’t have to go crazy individually. Etiquette discourages discussions of politics and religion in social settings for precisely this reason — in order to avoid the craziness that these discussions can easily provoke.

Many Americans believe the Bush administration’s lies about WMDs and an Iraq-Al Qaeda connection, not because they’re stupid, but because abuse has programmed them to believe strong authority figures. When abuse victims identify with the aggressor, might really does make right, and weakness is a sign of moral failure, not the human condition. That may be why lower- and middle-class Republicans vote against their own economic interests; they may believe they don’t deserve any help from government, especially if they can’t make it on their own. The rich, on the other hand, deserve government help, because their power demonstrates their worthiness.

For abuse victims in denial, the suffering of the innocent is not an evil but simply a fact of life. It may even be seen as part of the moral order — after all, in mainstream Christian theology, God punishes the innocent descendents of Adam of Eve for Original Sin, then sends his own innocent son to be tortured and murdered to atone for everyone else’s sins. God, in this theology, acts like an abusive father, and believers must suppress their pain and obey arbitrary orders (especially regarding sex) in order to become worthy of his love and mercy. Rebelling against the abusive father (human or divine) and asserting one’s own rights could result in death for the child or hell for the believer.

The widespread acceptance of this bizarre theology demonstrates how common child abuse is — people would not find it plausible if it did not replicate their personal experience. Denial of their own abuse and identification with the aggressor encourages people to support abusive religious and political movements and organizations. And denying one’s own suffering makes it easy to ignore the suffering of people on the other side of the world. Violence is good and moral as long as it’s perpetrated by a strong authority figure. Sex must be punished, and it’s always preferable to punish a scapegoat.

With the psychology of abuse running rampant, America is desperate for the core value of liberalism, which George Lakoff in "Moral Politics" describes as the nurturing parent model — helping those who need help. The Democratic Party can revive itself by defining itself as the party that actually helps (not just cares about) children. Prevention of child abuse should be made the party’s number one goal, and the welfare of children should be the organizing principle of the party platform. Not just education but every issue — economic, social, environmental, foreign policy — should be approached in terms of how it affects children.

If the Democratic party followed this path, the coherence of liberal moral and political values would quickly become evident, and the Republican lock on the "moral values" vote would be broken. This approach could also help the Democrats overcome their legacy of balkanized interest group politics — after all, children belong to every social and demographic group. Most importantly, a constant focus on children’s welfare and abuse prevention could help break the social trance of denial that cast its hypnotic spell on this year’s election.

A harder thing that liberals need to learn is how to argue about religion with conservatives and win. Winning is impossible unless liberals are willing to give up religious correctness — the political correctness of the soul. Religious correctness, like political correctness, holds that ideological purity is more important than real-world results. The most common manifestation of religious correctness is the rule that we must always respect people’s religious beliefs.

Respecting religious beliefs became one of the norms of middle-class respectability as Europe was emerging from centuries of religious warfare. It made sense at the time, but I would argue that today this rule is impeding the necessary open discussion of religious issues and their social consequences. Respecting religion does not necessarily mean respecting beliefs. Belief is only one of the tools of religion. Those who equate religion with belief have forgotten what religion means.

The Latin word "religio" means "reconnection," a tight bonding. Religion means a deep connection with other people, the universe, one’s own truest self, and God, if your religion takes a theistic form. Connectedness, not belief, is the hallmark of authentic religion. Without a sense of connection between people, civil society is impossible; that’s why religion is rightly considered one of the pillars of society. Similarly, corrupt religion is one of the pillars of an unjust society. Those who are concerned about the well-being of society have to be willing to criticize religion when it becomes dishonest, corrupt, or abusive.

Liberals can reclaim the high ground of religious discourse by emphasizing religious facts and results rather than beliefs. After all, Jesus taught us to judge people’s religion by its results: "By their fruits you shall know them." That should be the cardinal rule for liberals when discussing religion. We should honor religion that actually heals, empowers, and liberates people, and not allow ourselves to be intimidated by religious correctness.

The vote on gay marriage illustrates what happens when the relevant religious facts are not widely discussed. The first important fact is that the distinction between secular and religious marriage is firmly rooted in the Christian tradition. For the first four centuries of Christianity, marriage was strictly a secular affair. Blessings for marriages and for same-sex unions, with nearly identical prayers and rituals, arose at about the same time in the fifth century. The blessing of marriages become popular first in Eastern Christianity, but did not become mandatory in the West until the eleventh century, when marriage was officially declared a sacrament. The blessing of same-sex unions never achieved the sacramental status of marriage, but it was included in the official Greek and Slavic rituals of the Catholic Church and was openly practiced until a few centuries ago, when it was driven underground. These facts have been well documented by historians and are not a matter of belief. The facts alone would not have persuaded everyone to support gay marriage, but they might have prevented the landslide against it.

Focusing on facts and results would undermine conservatives’ claim to be the guardians of sexual morality. One commentator pointed out that liberal Massachusetts has one of the lowest divorce rates in the country, while the conservative deep South has the highest rate of teenage pregnancies. The Janus Report, a national survey of sexual behavior, found that conservatives had the highest rate of adultery.

The statistics on sexual abuse reveal dramatic differences in the results of liberal and conservative morality. More than 100 reports in the scientific and professional literature, involving more than 35,000 subjects, indicate that rapists, child molesters, incestuous parents, and sexually motivated murderers are typically conservative in their sexual and social values and are sometimes more religious than average — suggesting that in many cases traditional sexual morality is a contributing factor in sexual abuse rather than a deterrent. (Summaries of these reports are posted on my website, www.hules.us.) At the First International Conference on the Treatment of Sex Offenders in 1989, there was broad agreement that Western societies with repressive sexual attitudes and traditional male/female roles are more likely to have high rates of all forms of sex crimes. Facts like these, not beliefs, should be the basis for public discussions of sexual morality.

I have argued in this essay that the pro-violence, anti-sex results of this election reveal deep scars in the psyches of many Americans, emotional scars resulting from the trauma of child abuse. I think child abuse poses the greatest threat to democracy because it impairs people’s ability to rationally assess what is good or bad for themselves and for society. Preventing child abuse is the only way democracy can defend itself against homegrown tyranny. This issue needs to be at the top of everyone’s agenda.

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