Herzog (Sex after Fascism
) confronts how the religious right has controlled “the national conversation about sex,” dictating everything from social attitudes to legislation and HIV prevention funding. “[Their] aim is to infuse with shame all sexual expression and experience outside of heterosexual marriage,” she asserts, examining the writings of evangelical sex and marriage experts whose “brand of Christian porn” exalts married, monogamous sex while deploring homosexuality, pre- and extra-marital sex, pornography, masturbation and even idle fantasy. Herzog examines the global effects of the religious right's influence on domestic sexual policies, detailing the shift from sex education in schools and the proliferation of billion-dollar abstinence-only programs to the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, where an insistence on abstinence has been promoted abroad at the cost of billions of dollars in exchange for millions of lives that, she argues, might have been saved by at least an equal emphasis on condom use. This book is a disturbing, important and eloquent examination of one faith–cum–political movement's powerful—and pernicious—influence over human rights at home and abroad. (July)
