the cosmic grander scale that we should aim at. let the most intelligent species survive. well, i'm afraid that's all time we have for tonight. thank you army, for coming to speak with our audience tonight about your work and for your presentation. and thank you as well to our audience f welcome to the conservative women's network. i'm michelle easton, president of the clare boothe center for conservative women. and thanks to c-span booktv for covering this excellent author and important new book. and thanks to all of you for coming today. this year marks the clare boothe lew center's 30th anniversary of preparing and promoting conservative women leaders.

our primary focus is on college age and some high school girls and you see the photos on the wall teaching them to be better leaders for the country in the years ahead and inspiring them in policy and work ethic. with women like those we sponsor at this event, this loose program, the conservative women's network is one of our favorites. it began over 23 years ago for the purpose of promoting the best conservative of women leaders and their interest tremendously important messages. also cw and brings together women from virginia, maryland and d.c., sometimes further to get to know and network with like minded women and to learn from conservative women leaders. conservative women leaders like today's speaker, mary ever said. ten years ago, in 2013, mary wrote a wonderful book titled adam and eve after the pill paradox voices of the sexual

revolution. this year, 2023. mary's book was republished updated and titled adam and eve after the pill revisited. her book is so excellent in explaining the legacy of the sexual revolution, revealing the toll that the sexual revolution has taken on so much of western society. for example, she points out that sort of lowering the rates of abortion out of wedlock birth divorce and fatherlessness as was promised. it accelerated all of them. and there's so much more in this book. other outstanding books by mary include primal scream how the sexual revolution created identity politics and how the west really lost god. a new theory of secularization and also the loser letters a comic tale of life, death and

atheism. and that novel, the 2010 novel the loser letters about a young woman's strict, struggling with addiction in rehab was adapted for stage and premiered at catholic university in the fall 2017. and mary's writing. she's such a fine writer. they've appeared many, many places. the wall street journal, policy review, national review. first things time to name just a few. she's a senior research fellow at the faith and resource institute and holds a chair at the catholic information center in washington, d.c. and during the reagan administration, she served as a speechwriter to secretary of state george shultz for two years, and she founded the kirkpatrick society. i'm in that the literary organization which mentors hundreds of writers. mary graduated magna cum laude from cornell university with two majors, philosophy and government. she has four children, the grown

right? pretty much. and she's married to another celebrated author, nicholas eberstadt. now, following today's talk and a little bit of time for questions, i hope you'll join us for lunch next door. and mary's book is available for purchase, and she has graciously agreed to sign them for you, if you like. so please join me now in welcoming mary ever step. thank you, michele, for that wonderful introduction and thank you, lindsay and all who have made it possible to be here today. our last time together several years ago was one of my all time favorite book events, and it made me look forward to our gathering today. so i'd like to start with some of the back story to this new book, adam and eve after the pill revisited. in my mind, this new book closes a body of work that began over

ten years ago with its predecessor, adam and eve. after the pill. now, in saying that this project is closed, i don't mean that the last word has been had on it. far from it. in a most welcome development, new voices are emerging, including from non-religious orbits that are also newly skeptical. all of the post 1960s status quo. i mean, instead that an idea that i started developing over a decade ago has now with this new book received the more or less systematic treatment first envisioned for it. the elevator version of that idea is simple. for six decades, a secularizing western society has been telling itself a false happy story about the outcome of the sexual revolution. to counter that false reading, we've needed an account of its fallout that was closer to the

truth that account, i thought, should have two parts. one, examining post-revolutionary reality among individuals and the other examining its effects on the wider world. now, this unexpected adventure really began with the oddest spark. a reading of the papal encyclical humanae vitae issued in 1968, reiterating traditional christian teaching about marriage and sex. it's hard to get across just how transformative that first reading was for me as a researcher who had studied and written about various aspects of american society over the years. i knew from various forms of evidence popular as well as expert, that the predictions in that encyclical were not just predictions. they had actually all come true. and i get into this more both in the first book and the second.

sources abound, especially in the social sciences, to prove it. what struck me most forcefully here was that ancient moral teaching was being vindicated inadvertently but roundly by secular sources. it was not theology that was demonstrating the downside of separating recreation and procreation, though no doubt theology can. instead, it was scholarship about subjects like broken homes, rising rates of mental illness, interrupted relations between the sexes and lots of other interrelate. in fact, this body of work understood in full, has gone to show, in effect, that ancient teaching, however unwanted or ignored it may be, had gotten something right that perception that a ha moment went on to

result in the tdaeve books and their contrarian readings of the sexual revolution. the first one examined what might be called the microscope fall out of humanity's embrace of contraception. the effects on individual men, women and children. now i'd like to share that some of the first books on fall out came as a surprise. in particular, the emotional reaction among some readers after all. neither of these books is a work of self-help. they're both based on social science. they're both analytical, and they make no sentimental appeals. and although, like most authors, i have tried to avoid boring readers into narcolepsy, i did not. and do not believe that the prose in the first book accounted for this emotion or

reaction. and yet it was forceful as the volume made the rounds first in english and then spanish, polish and other languages. evidence of its unexpected impact continued to accumulate in email and in the rounds of life, often following a book. talk. individual, as in the audience would linger and confide that reading. adam and eve after the pill had changed the way they saw the world. sometimes even the way they lived. men and women alike told with tears or wrote in pain. their hard stories of blight, of families and children, and lost to the revolution's troika. divorce. pornography. abortion. let me offer a few snapshots in response to one chapter in the first book, a man who had lived on the streets, prostitutes and

himself started posting extraordinary commentaries online about how post-revolutionary permissiveness had nearly destroyed him. another time, after a talk delivered in texas, a woman approached to confide that the book's analysis had somehow convinced her to have more children, and she brought a friend with her as proof. and they showed me photographs of these kids. following a speech in ohio in a different year, a young woman came forward from the crowd to tell me that she had traveled some distance to be there just to give one message that a chapter in that book had made her understand the pain she had suffered as a child of sexual abuse and that she had become a christian. and after reckoning with it. what to make of these unbidden, raw testimonies was puzzling. this out during the years after

the first adam and eve book, three conclusions suggested themselves. the first was that these kinds of stories and experiences amounted to an affirmation of the book's thesis. the post 1960s disorder, or was indeed generating casualties of all kinds, and their suffering was not being noticed, let alone validated or addressed by a secularizing culture steeped in denial. second, it was clear that some readers were galvanized by something else. the idea that the sexual revolution was open for questioning at all. after all, ever since the 1960s, liberation lists have anchored their successes as to the supposed inevitability of history. adam and eve, after the pills suggestion that these changes might not be permanent, that they might be subject like any

other social phenomena, to revision and scrutiny seemed to some readers a step forward and a third conclusion also materialize. like rosen, krantz and guildenstern and hamlet, that first adam and eve book had wandered unknowingly into a wider drama. the book's contrary and case implicitly raised a big question if the secular consensus could whitewash the human damage out there in the name of progress, what other critical fallout might it be missing? so this leads us to the book at hand. adam and eve after the pill revisited is a new installment. it's a follow on to the original and a new argument based on a decade worth of related research and writing. its logic is united to the first book by the same claim the desire to understand through

empiricism, the fruits of the seeds planted in the 1960s. so. so. the new book widens the aperture to talk about the murkier cosmic fallout from the revolution. it dissects the effects of the revolution on society, politics and church. just needless to add, the foreword by the late great cardinal pell with whom i discussed some of these arguments is the honor of a lifetime. let's look at one area covered in the book the revolution's effects on society. the first thing to understand is this thanks to the compounding factors of six decades, people today live very differently from the way our ancestors did. very differently from people across the planet, across history. this is simple arithmetic.

families are smaller. families are broken. many people no longer have siblings of the same sex or the opposite sex or siblings at all. abortion continues. more and more kids are growing up without a father. in some. these are all acts of sabotage action. i call them acts of human subtraction. post-revolutionary men and women have subtracted potential trusted souls out of our lives on a scale never seen before. inadvertently, but really, this means a diminished pool of loved ones to count on. it means fewer people to trust and learn from. it means that rudimentary social learning is harder to come by. the differences between men and women, the meaning of marriage,

the sanctity of motherhood and fatherhood. more and more people lack the vocabulary for these foundational concepts. post-revolution. the route to fulfillment and joy has become more elusive. it has to be rediscovered or reinvented by people who have been deprived again of rudimentary social learning by subtraction. so consider just some of the empirical evidence illustrating our social disintegration. we are surrounded by data showing that something about post-revolutionary life is inflicting widespread damage. psychol allergists cite an unprecedented mental health crisis among the young and this was true for many years before the pandemic. also at record levels, psychotropic medications for adults, licit and illicit across

the united states this year. drug overdoses are higher than they have ever been. and for the first time in recorded history, life expectancy is declining. meanwhile, atomized, broken children take to the streets, sometimes in gangs, sometimes as solitary murderers, as proving that loneliness fuels evil. deaths of despair, a phrase that did not even exist ten years ago, has entered the vernacular. and everybody knows what it means. my point is that this tragic recital all points to causality. the sexual revolution is not the only social force contributing to today's dysfunction, but as both books argue, it is the single most important cause of social decay.

that is not yet understood as such. the hope behind both these books is to change that misperception and to correct the record for the benefit of people present and to come. consider briefly a second area discussed in the book how post-revolutionary trends are affecting our politics. the book argues that as the primal communities of family and religious faith have become more dysfunctional, more and more people have transferred their loyalties and attachments to other groups, in particular to groups based on identity politics or a common bonds of ethnicity, race, erotic leanings, lgbtq, etc. . in other words, post revolutionary change is at the root of identity politics. these groups operate as substitute families and substitute religious communities

for people who don't know the real thing as they used to. as proof, consider the timeline. the very phrase identity politics is relatively new. it first appeared in 1977 in a manifesto published by a feminist group called the combahee river collective. and in that document, they use the phrase identity politics and tie it to victimization. they make several declarations as that started a new course for american politics. they declared that they were giving up on making common cause with men. they said that the conventional family and conventional community were out of bounds. they said, in effect, that the only people they could trust were people just like them. victims who shared the same oppression. there's a straight line from that manifesto in 1977 to black lives matter today.

that movement also stands against the conventional family. it also declares that peaceful coexistence with the wider community is somehow unwanted or impossible. the political wing of what is called the lgbtq community is just as absolute ust and just as hostile to traditional ideas of tolerance. it is also just as insistent on dividing the known political universe into two simple groups. allies and enemies. the point here is that this whole phenomenon of identity politics, the signature politics of our day, is born out of lost. it is born out of the subtraction of people mentioned earlier. identity politics says that the most important thing about an individual is not his or her relation to family or to god. it is instead that person's

status as a victim. these groups command and receive absolute loyalty from their members. the kind of unthinking, primal loyalty formerly associated with family. now, i mentioned the third area covered in the book, which is the effects of the sexual revolution on christianity itself. as the book shows in detail, how the church is today are being torn apart because of this very question can christianity jettison an ancient teachings about marriage or sex without falling into decrepitude? or can it not? christians are often accused of being obsessed with sex, but this was and is a bogus charge. it is difference over sex that tears the churches apart today, not different interpreted versions of the beatitudes or the saints or angels dancing on

pins. no. this is all about the sexual revolution. all of the splits that we see in the churches amount to just that. once again, the question before us is, can christianity any kind of christianity that turns its back on 2000 years of moral teaching succeed? or can it not? i believe the evidence of the collapse of the mainline churches about which there is a whole chapter in this new book, speaks for itself. but readers should assess the evidence and judge for themselves. this brings us to one final point to consider. we are all witnesses here and now. to a great irony. it encompasses not only the christians of america, but those of the entire western world. after all, western christianity

spends most of its time these days in a defensive crouch, squabbling internally. and yet, all the while, evidence from outside the churches continues to point towards something that many people inside the churches seem not to know. christie entity practically alone among all institutions now has been harboring profound truths for 2000 years. most notably in this case, the truth that living by that big, bad, difficult old rulebook is actually better for human beings. then discarding it to repeat this irony is extraordinary. even as the calls for capitulation to the revolution grow louder. trans forming and deforming discussions within our churches, the evidence thrown out by the world itself continues to point

in the opposite direction. in some, both adam and eve books make a contrarian argument post-revolutionary reality is quite other than what the dominant culture says it is. it is gratifying to know, as i mentioned at the outset, that today more voices have joined that side of the argument. include secular voices as the new book notes in its footnotes. but regardless of public approval, both books were driven by humanitarian conviction. the sexual revolution and continues to claim many victims. to honor their witness is not some kind of reaction. ordinary indulgence as boosters of the revolution would say. it's instead an attempt to give voice to the previously voiceless. and there needs to be more of it. it's my modest hope that the facts assembled in both books

will persuade believers and unbelievers alike, and above all, give new heart to the wounded and those who tend them. thank you very much. that's great. i know everybody wants to read the whole book now. great summary. we'll do a few questions. we have a microphone. here's our first question. caitlin has the mic. if you just give your name and affiliation if you have one. thank you. katie gorka. thank you so much for a great talk. so you trace the movement back to the sixties, but i'm curious if you think it goes back further and you look at all at the marxist roots of this, or do you think there are marxist roots to this? i wouldn't quite go there. i would distinguish two stages of the sexual revolution and obviously sexual mores were changing before the widespread

adoption of the birth control pill and related devices in the early 1960s. for example, the first big argument over sex was held by the anglican communion within the anglican communion in 1930, and there are annual conference at lambeth when it was decided for the first time in the history of christianity, to make certain exceptions for artificial contraception. this is a historical point that's not well understood because there was unanimity within christendom about this question from the beginning until 1930 and the anglican communion think communion decided that in certain circumstance, as in marriage, in consultation with a pastor, etc., etc., there were several steps that had to be observed that contraception could be okayed. now, as it turned out, that line did not hold and in very short order there were no more exceptions and there was no more talk of married people, etc.. but i draw attention to that,

both because it was pivotal within the history of christianity and because that year, 1930 suggest that there was a rethinking about sex going on well before the birth control pill in 1963. mary susan yoshihara, president of the american council on women, peace and security and i loved your first book, can't read to read your second book. my question has to do with foreign policy. the united states has been promoting this revolution abroad in the postwar area and mostly since the sixties. we continue to do so now, not just in u.s. idea and state, but also now in the defense department. what do you see the relationship and how do you see this helping or hurting american foreign policy? have you thought about it and or maybe the reverse might be true that some of our partners, by pushing back, might have some

reverse effect on american policy. how do you think? that's a great question and one that i have thought about somewhat. i think it is obnoxious and unsustainable for americans, whether inside the government or parties as part of ngos to go around the world telling people who are almost always browner and blacker people that they should make fewer of themselves and that the solution to their country's problems is to make fewer of themselves. i find the lack of empathy in that message extra ordinary. how many of us would like to be told that the solution to our problems is to make fewer of ourselves? we've been told that by from when i was a teenager over population responsibility. there have fewer children.

again, i think there's a moral hazard here that has gone unaddressed by practically everyone. but i know, for example, from friends in africa who are part of a university there, that when they receive aid from the united states, whether governmental or nongovernmental, it often has strings attached to it. and one example that i was given was especially striking. a university professor told me that when computers were sent to a sixth grade class as a gift from unknown sources, unknown to me in the united states, the computers all came with a pamphlet about sexuality, i.e. pushing the standard version that we see in the newspapers every day. the dominant version trying to trickle this stuff down to sixth graders in africa. again, moral hazard. can somebody address this.

i was going to say, sounds like dawkins. yeah. pope is about eugenics. just marilyn. the idea that he this misunderstood. yeah. how do you propose those or what do you propose that we as individuals can do to have some effect on what's happening. and go through our schools? do we try? what evidence do you see as the most productive. all of the above. so one analogy that came to mind continuously in the writing of these books was that of tobacco smoking. and i say that not to knock smokers. i say that because there's a

striking analogy here. decades and decades ago, smoking was so prevalent. i can actually remember when you could smoke in a hospital room. i remember seeing this as a child, not of oxygen. tanks were present, but you could smoke in a hospital room and and everywhere else. and we know the world is very different that way try lighting up in here right now and see what happens. so what changed? what changed? wasn't nicotine, which was and is an social perception and what arrived was a new consent was based on decades and decades of research about the harms to some people of tobacco smoking. and it took a long time for this research to penetrate. i remember very well the resistance to it the first time that california banned smoking inside restaurants, for example. and yet, over time, what

happened was a social transformation because of information, not because of religious revival, not for any other reason than the fact that information about harm eventually trickled down and made a difference in individual lives. i think something like that will happen in the case of the sexual revolution. i don't know how many of us will be alive to see it, because i think the revisionism is really just starting. but we are seeing things we didn't see even ten years ago. for example. it's no longer just religious people who talk about the harms of pornography perfectly secular therapists who deal with this addiction talk about it, and celebrities who were themselves addicts have come out and talked about this. this is a very encouraging development and another example of how evidence about harm eventually does make a

difference. when you lose the last cure. you talk informally. were there any other questions? oh, go ahead. oh, thanks. i think i remember well, i do know one thing. i'm very concerned about is the suicide rate of our children. and i don't know if it's so much ever they're being warned in school. you are responsible for global warming. they're being warned in school to to the revision is something history. i don't know how that ties in into your sexual ramble. it just seems to me there is a lot going on there.

heroes have been destroyed. now, we're being told george washington's a bad person. everything is bad. there have been and also the crt that's being taught in school. what do they have to look forward to? yeah, it's a great if very sad question. first of all, we all realize by now, i think that the internet in effect, is throwing gasoline on the fire. i'm describing here. and the more kids can be kept away from its darker corners, the better. i think it's very encouraging that a number of states now make kids lock up their phones when they get to school. i wish every state would do this. i wish every school would be mindful that the sons and daughters of the pioneer of silicon valley do not send their kids to schools where they can have screens. there made to write longhand and so should everybody. but again, the internet is a big here, as your opening sentence

suicide and about that, i can only say that it points again to what i was talking about in the opening about the number of acts of humans subtraction and what they have done to people. you know, we've had a spate of these terrible shootings lately. one of these shooters left a simple note. he said, i have no family. i have no friends. that's where this is coming from. it couldn't have been clearer. so if there is a way of getting some good out of evil, maybe people should meditate on that note of his. thank you. i'm rebecca long county republican women's club. i'm just curious if you have any thoughts regarding who might

lead a future movement to push back on this, do you think? are we men or women? and what do you see right now as somebody to think, you know, where's the women standing up against or denigrate just simply being woman? people can't even define that now. so what do you think about that? well, it's encouraging that during the past three years, three books i'm aware of, written by women, secular women, one in france, one in germany, one in england have gotten a wide reception, and they were all critical of the same thing, sexual revolution stuff. so in that sense, i think especially since the metoo movement, women in particular, have been more opening to asking these questions. why is it so hard to find a good boyfriend and will ever get married and other questions that weren't quite as hard to face before. so that's all to the good, you

know. the danger there is that sometimes when women are arguing among themselves, that gets dismissed as some kind of, if, you know, internal catfight. so it would be good to have some of the guys stand up and take a lead here, too, inside and outside the churches and the synagogues, etc. . but they turn on the doors next door. i know. and we probably have shut up. maybe the last question i'll ask is about college. you know, that's the primary focus of the center for conservative women. and we talk about subject a fair amount right here. this picture on the wall is cleta mitchell talking to college girls at one of our summer seminars. and the name of her speech is it's better to be respected than liked is a great speech and a lot of it is geared more toward the professionals and social. but it's a really good speech.

the girls are college now tell us babble and just graduate here from arizona that the two things that most colleges tell them is use contraception and make sure you get tested regularly. these are the only two words of wisdom or advice. college girls and boys get at college and they're not getting a lot of other guidance. some of the girls are smart enough. they're in they're in religious groups. they're have groups of friends. but it's so incredibly hard. i know you raised you raised daughters and we and we talk about it a lot. but i wonder if maybe just finish talking about that segment. the terrible damage to hear and see young women, too many young women when they're in higher education. yeah, i mean, higher education can treat them like animals. i mean, the view of human nature by extension of those kinds messages about just make sure your contraception and get yourself tested is a very

flattened view of human nature. and it's demeaning. and against that, we do have ennobling versions of human nature and ennobling ideas of what men and women are for. i think we all need to do a better job of getting those out there and that message goes especially to the churches, but about how hard it is to be a young woman on campus today. i am encouraged by the existence of groups that are new on campus, some of them religious, some of them not. the love and fidelity network. the focus fellowship of catholic university students is in over a hundred campuses, something called two mystics circles run by dominican friars is now on every ivy league campus and many others. these, again, ten years ago, these things didn't exist and they proved that there's an understanding out there of the great need in this wasteland.

unfortunately, that is the secular university today and sometimes the religious universities, too. so again, signs of hope. thank so much. thank you. what an excellent discussion. thank you so much. i want to give you our limited edition coffee mug with mrs. lucia's famous. courage is the ladder on which all other virtues mount. you're certainly a courageous lady. thank you. it's my favorite color, by the way. oh, good. it's the color of kings. and i want to give a copy of my book how to raise a conservative daughter. you probably could've written this. it covers a lot of areas with. certainly the area that you've just discussed. i give it to you with our thanks and our gratitude for all you've done and all you'll continue to do in the future. thank you. thank you, michelle. and