If conservatives want to win the culture war, we need to stop funding our enemies. Republicans are finally realizing this — well, some Republicans are, about some of their enemies.
For example, the Indiana Legislature passed a 2024 budget that bans state funding for the notorious Kinsey Institute. That radical bastion of the sexual revolution has long been hosted at Indiana University, becoming an official part of the university in 2016. IU and the Kinsey Institute are now planning for their separate futures, albeit in a desultory way.
Neither seems to want to accept that it’s over, so they have set up a working group that will host “a series of public listening sessions aimed at better understanding specific and diverse concerns related to the State’s funding restrictions and the university’s protection of the Kinsey Institute.” The general vibe is of an institution that is shocked that conservatives actually turned off the cash spigot to an organization that hates them and everything they believe.
After all, though conservatives have long complained about government funding for this sort of thing, they have rarely done anything about it. Now some are, and the Kinsey Institute is a particularly apt target. Conservatives loathe it not only for its predictably leftist views on sex and the sexes, but because of its notorious founder and namesake. Alfred Kinsey’s goal was to break down sexual norms and restraints; he achieved this by collecting data to show that they were already being widely broken.
Kinsey was an
