Josh Hawley is 38 years old and blaming Missouri’s problems on the ‘sexual revolution’

I went to the same high school as Missouri Attorney General Josh Hawley. He was a few years older than me. (I don’t remember him.) We attended an all-boys Jesuit high school in Kansas City. I can’t speak to what goes on there now, but in the late 1990s, it was — for a religious school in the midwest, at least — a reasonably enlightened place. We were not being fed a diet of Fox News talking points. Jesuits like to see themselves as deep thinkers, so there was a lot of room for different perspectives. (That was my experience. LGBT students, and students of color, certainly experienced less freedom of thought.)

One opinion I never heard from even the crankiest, saddest-bastard conservative teachers is that the sexual revolution was to blame for society’s ills. That is something Mr. Burns says. Even at a conservative-ish all-boys school, everyone would have laughed at an idea so preposterous. 

But that is what Josh Hawley, who is 38 years old, has somehow come to believe, or at least say he believes. 

We know now because the Star has obtained an audio recording of Hawley addressing a crowd of pastors in Kansas City last month. Speaking at a “Pastors and Pews” event, which was convened by the Missouri Renewal Project, Hawley said: 

“We have a human trafficking crisis in our state and in this city and in our country because people are willing to purchase women, young women, and treat them like commodities. There is a market for it. Why is there? Because our culture has completely lost its way. The sexual revolution has led to exploitation of women on a scale that we would never have imagined, never have imagined.” 

He went on:

“You know what I’m talking about, the 1960s, 1970s, it became commonplace in our culture among our cultural elites, Hollywood, and the media, to talk about, to denigrate the biblical truth about husband and wife, man and woman.”

Hawley’s deeply strange position fails to account for why human trafficking occurs in literally every country in the world. Nor does it acknowledge the inextricable link between human trafficking and late capitalism. Perhaps that’s a topic for another day. 

Of course, Hawley’s likely primary opponent in Missouri’s upcoming U.S. Senate race, Courtland Sykes, has done him one better. He’s just a regular guy who doesn’t think it’s too much to ask that his wife have his dinner ready for him the second he walks in the door after a hard day of work. 

The Pitch is willing to sponsor a Studs-like event where women compete for the affection of these Senate candidates. Todd Akin could host. Please get in touch if interested.