Let’s look at the victims

By Brandon Showalter, Opinion writer and social commentator Monday, April 28, 2025

Few things break the heart of a socially conservative Christian more than watching the breakdown of the family. And few things frustrate such a Christian more than seeing the main driver of that disintegration, the sexual revolution, continue to be valued as a social and political good.

Even as nonreligious voices are finally recognizing how the revolution has unleashed catastrophic destruction, Western societies have only just begun to reckon with decades of relational ruin. And what about the sexual revolution’s victims who are multiplying by the day? Ethics & Public Policy Center fellow Nathaneal Blake has given them a voice in his in-depth critique of the revolution while taking a long and sober look at the current landscape in his aptly titled, Victims of the Revolution: How Sexual Liberation Hurts Us All. 

With his characteristic eloquence, Blake describes how the supposedly “free” love and the sexual “liberation” of the 1960s has come at a tremendous, multi-generational cost, rupturing the lives of millions of people who are now miserable, plagued with sexually transmitted diseases, and unable to form healthy relationships and stable families. In the worst-case scenarios, due to the explosion of the transgender movement, people have ended up chemically sterile and physically castrated. It’s only fair to ask after all these chaotic decades: Just what kind of liberation even is this and whose freedom are we prioritizing here? 

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With this book and frequent commentary on these themes, he lands among the growing chorus of prophetic voices crying out in the wilderness. From Catholic thinker Mary Eberstadt’s Primal Screams to feminist Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Blake poignantly documents incontrovertible evidence showing the breadth of suffering and injustices brought about by the revolution that many would rather not see and that the elites running our institutions ignore or suppress. 

He is right to remind us that, as Perry pointed out in First Things in 2023, in the ancient pagan world, it was Christians who sparked a truly progressive “first sexual revolution.” That first revolution occurred in a social milieu in which horrific exploitation of women and children was not only commonplace but was considered “an acceptable consequence of the need for frequent male sexual release.” As Perry further observed: 

“Whereas the Romans regarded male chastity as profoundly unhealthy, Christians prized it and insisted on it. Early converts were disproportionately female because the Christian valorization of weakness offered obvious benefits to the weaker sex, who could — for the first time — demand sexual continence of men.”

Blake praises the work of Perry and others who have dared to criticize the social morass, but insists we must now ask: How, then, should we live? Answering that requires some unavoidable and tough conversations around several libertine leftist sacred cows: abortion, the gay rights movement, gender identity ideology, and, increasingly, social acceptance of “sex work” — a degrading euphemism for prostitution. 

Blake is unafraid to go there. 

Underlying all these revolutionary aims championed by those pushing sexual liberation at all cost is a distorted anthropology, a devaluing of the human body, the author explains at length. For millennia, Christians have maintained that the human person is made male and female in God’s image and that the physical structure of the body possesses teleological meaning, which is to say that we are created with an end purpose. That end purpose, the “telos” of the body, is inseparable from sexual ethics. Men and women are made for each other. Far from being esoteric themes unworthy of public discussion, those who warned of where the revolution would lead have proven prescient. 

Blake is no simplistic, placard-wielding fundie nor is he an uptight moral scold. Yet neither does he shy away from delineating the core concerns Christians and other social conservatives have been raising for years, only to be told that they are bigoted fuddy-duddy squares making the slippery slope fallacy as they wage a dreadful, alarmist culture war. Because, as it turns out, that slope was extremely slippery.

Take, for example, how abortion decouples sex from its procreative function under the promise of reproductive freedom. But this is an impossible pursuit, an inescapable reality. Sex does, after all, make babies. The sexual revolution requires the “repression of the natural consummation of human sexuality — the conception of new people,” Blake writes. He continues: 

“Consequently, sexual liberation is constantly at war against the nature of human embodiment and existence. A right to sexual autonomy is presumed to include a right to be free, by any means from the natural consequences of sex. Thus, sexual liberalism often regards conceiving and bearing a child as some sort of malevolent, alien imposition.” 

So corrosive is this revolution to the soul that supporters of abortion rights have gone, in a rather short amount of time, from Bill Clinton’s line that abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare,” (with “rare” indicating that each instance of it is at least worth lamenting) to shouting for it in celebratory tones, cheering for it at political conventions. Slippery, indeed. 

On gay rights, he observes how the PR campaign for same-sex marriage was massively successful in its portrayal of same-sex couples as basically the same as heterosexual unions. But they simply aren’t the same. And though some notable LGB-identified dissenters have arisen in recent years to oppose the worst of gender ideology, the social and medical horrors of which Blake also addresses, all the major gay rights groups have zealously championed the madness of transgenderism, both politically and philosophically. The author makes a compelling case as to why that is given the revolutionary anthropology — how we understand ourselves as human beings — that the movement promulgated.

In short, he argues the LGBT movement has effectively rendered “male” and “female” as essential only in matters of personal preference and as interchangeable for everything else. Predicated on a psychologized notion of self, the sex of the body is no longer intrinsically important. As human sexuality is stripped of any transcendent moral meaning, many Americans have been goaded into accepting everything the rainbow flag represents by way of the stereotypically liberal “live and let live” philosophy and attitude. 

Whether such “live and let live” Americans were aware of its implications or not, it’s hard to now deny how Pride has, among other things, mainstreamed some unmistakable darkness, namely, the sexualization of children. Today’s LGBT activists aren’t exactly subtle with their advocacy. Shocking anecdotes abound here, but perhaps the most jaw-dropping one Blake cites appeared in 2021 when The Washington Post ran an op-ed by a self-described “gender-vague” contributor along with the headline “Yes, Kink Belongs at Pride. And I Want My Kids To See It.”

King David inquires in Psalm 11:3: “When the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” 

One need not be religiously observant to understand that mainstream newspapers running opinion pieces arguing that children should be allowed to behold exhibitionist fetishes in public is a clear example of the foundations of society being actively destroyed. So what, then, can the righteous do? 

To be sure, asserting that historic Christian sexual ethics be reinvigorated is neither easy nor popular. It’s especially challenging in light of sexual abuse scandals and flagrant immorality in Christian churches that purport to uphold biblically rooted standards on matters of sexuality. The rank hypocrisy in far too many pulpits and pews is egregious and inexcusable.

But restoring those foundations starts with telling some hard truths, no matter how uncomfortable those truths may make us. A faithful remnant of people is out there whose courageous voices are worth hearing and heeding. Blake’s Victims of the Revolution should be counted among them.