My first freelance post for the Minnesota Independent, GOP’s Gruenhagen calls for destruction of ‘filthy’ Kinsey research, relates an episode of Gruenhagenia that occurred Wednesday while the Public Safety and Crime Prevention Policy and Finance committee heard testimony about a hotline for victims of sex trafficking.

Glenn Gruenhagen (Onion County-R) lectured a group of nonprofit employees, trafficking victims and nuns about the perverted ways of Alfred Kinsey. Go read the post at MNIndy.

Kinsey died in August 1956, before Gruenhagen and this crabby old blogger were born. I'm detecting a pattern here in the conservative representative's reverence for the past as a place to locate impossible arguments--just yesterday, Bluestem noted how he claimed that MPCA regulations would have compromised American effort in World War II.

Wednesday, neither the quiet patience of the nuns, nor the sexologist's long-ago demise, stopped the freshman Republican legislator from "beseeching" his audience to destroy research that he felt unleashed a fearsome adversary:

. . . there is nothing more destructive — or, one of the most destructive things to a society . . . when the male sex drive is released in an uncontrolled and undisciplined way. . .

Having watched the BBC stream news this morning about the earthquake in Japan, I find myself disagreeing, although it's possible that some might link the shifting of the earth's plates to the male sex drive.

All joking about Gruenhagen's moral panic aside, the issue of human trafficking is a serious one--and one that unites a broad spectrum of faith, feminist and human rights groups. A good place to start learning about human trafficking in Minnesota--and efforts to assist its victims--is the Civil Society, the group that presented to the Public Safety committee just before Gruenhagen raised the spectre of Kinsey.

A long consideration of the politics of attacks on Kinsey (and a good debunking of Reisman) is found here.