Dr. Jennifer Morse at Live Action’s Young Leaders Summit, March 2025
From hook-up culture to gender ideology, the Sexual Revolution has reshaped attitudes toward sex, family, and human dignity—leaving a trail of broken relationships and cultural decline. At the Live Action Young Leaders Summit, Dr. Jennifer Morse exposes the revolution’s dark history, its lasting consequences, and how we can reclaim truth and rebuild a culture that values life and family.
TRANSCRIPT:
Speaker 1
This our very first speaker of the day. Her name is Doctor Jennifer Morse. She’s the founder of the Ruth Institute, an international coalition defending the family and building a civilization of love. She has authored several books. She’s spoken worldwide. And if you guys were here at Live Action last year to hear her, you know you are in for a real treat. Would you please help me give a very, very warm welcome to Doctor Jennifer Morse?
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
I’m so excited. I’m so excited. I’ve been looking forward to this for so long. I’m so stoked for this group. I had a great time last year. Some of you were here last year, but most of you weren’t so welcome. I’m excited that you’re here, and the talk that I’m going to give you today is based on my book, The Sexual State, which explains the sexual revolution.
We are going to be giving you the opportunity to get a copy of these slides that I have. I put a lot of work into the slides. If you give me your email address, we will get that to you. As was mentioned, the Ruth Institute is an international interfaith coalition to defend the family and build a civilization of love.
At some point, we got fed up with these virtue signaling signs that you saw all over the place. Did anybody else see these signs in your community? We don’t have them in Louisiana. But anyway, we decided to come up with our own thing that virtue signals with actual virtues, right? So in this house, we believe kids need their mom and dad.
What do you say to that? How about it? How about it? The sexual revolution destroys lives. The sex of the body can’t change. And the most important one in big time is children are a blessing.
Is that why we’re here? Is that what we believe? Okay. And finally, of course, the human person is meant for love. This is what our faith teaches us. Every human person is meant for love. And secretly, you all know this is true. So, my overall theme is to compare the sexual revolution with the Christian culture, which you could call the Christian sexual culture, which created a set of rules, standards and guidelines and an overall culture that managed the sexual urge that channels the sexual desire into appropriate things with benefits for children and family and the whole society.
We have lost that culture. I’m not going to sugarcoat it. We have lost the Christian sexual culture. We lost it piecemeal. I don’t know how we’re going to get it back. I don’t think we can get it back piecemeal. We got nickeled and dimed to that, right? But we need to know what we are positively for if we’re ever going to get it back.
So that’s what we’ll do in the second half of the of the talk. We’ll talk about the Christian sexual culture and how to get it back. Okay. So as I mentioned, the analysis is in my book, The Sexual State, my poor little book. If this was just a catalog of crazy stuff, it would have been out of date the moment it was printed, because crazy stuff keeps coming at us.
But what it is, is a structure, and it gives you a way of analyzing it so that you’re not quite so overwhelmed by the whole thing. All right. So what’s happening to us? What’s happening with marriage, family and human sexuality? We seem to be bombarded from all sides about just one crazy thing after another. When I was young, it was hookup culture.
Now it’s transgenderism, drag queen story hours, cohabitation, and those old problems. None of them have gotten any better. None of them have gone away. And they’re just one thing after another. But all these things seem like they’re random. They’re all part of one giant thing, which is the sexual revolution. And we refer to this as the rotten fruit of one giant tree called the sexual revolution.
And you can see, this tree is not very lively. It’s dead. It’s got vultures on it. Right. Okay. So this is not like a great tree. The tree has three main branches. We call them the contraceptive ideology. And the things that are listed there can be understood as part of the contraceptive ideology. And then we have the divorce ideology.
Another batch of things that can all be understood as implications of or results of the divorce ideology. And then finally the gender ideology, which is the thing that’s on a lot of people’s minds all the time now. Now, the virtue of this set up is that there are only three big ideas you have to master.
So once you figure those big three things out, you’re not overwhelmed the next time some new crazy thing hits you, right? All right, so and here are the three big ideas the sexual revolution holds that a good and decent society should do everything possible to separate sex from babies. I call that the contraceptive ideology, the idea that we should separate sex from babies.
Secondly, the sex revolution teaches and holds that a good and decent society should do everything possible to separate both sex and babies from marriage. I refer to that as the divorce ideology. And then finally, the sexual revolution teaches that a good society should wipe out all differences between men and women. And that is what I call the gender ideology, such that male and female aren’t even categories in law or society.
This is what they think is a good thing. So at the root of the whole tree is one giant idea, one big idea that unites all of them. Whether you’re looking at contraceptive ideology, the divorce ideology, or the gender ideology, the underlying idea is you can do anything you want sexually and nothing bad will happen. Hear the serpent in the garden?
You can do anything you want, and nothing bad will happen. Not to you, not to the people around you. It’ll be fine. Okay. Now you need to understand this because it is an implied promise. This is the promise that they’re making to you. And it is intrinsically seductive. Why everybody wants to believe it. Right. In the face of massive evidence against it, people still want to believe it.
And so you need to understand that you must intentionally resist the sexual revolution, or it will sweep you away. It will sweep you away unless you are intentional about it. And I’m sure you’ve all seen individuals and organizations and institutions that have gone down the tubes because they tried to go along to get along. And that doesn’t work. You can’t go along to get along.
And when you’re debating somebody one on one, y’all listen up. This is what you’re asking them to give up. They don’t want to give it up. But if you understand in your mind that that’s what’s at stake, I think it’ll help you in your discussions with them. So these three big ideas of the contraceptive ideology, the divorce ideology and the gender ideology, I’m going to say a little bit more about each one as we proceed through the contraceptive ideology, says we ought to separate sex from babies.
And this is at the heart of a lot of the things that y’all in the pro-life movement are concerned with, right? And you know that there are organizations that try to make abortion unthinkable. And this is a noble goal. You’ve probably heard that slogan, we’re here to make abortion unthinkable, and I support that. Obviously, I support that.
That’s really important and noble and so on and so forth. But here’s the thing. If you live according to the contraceptive ideology, if you go around thinking that sex doesn’t make babies and that’s the mark of a good society, you’re going to do a lot of stupid stuff, just to put it bluntly. Okay? And sooner or later you will be thinking about abortion.
It will happen. Okay. And so that’s what I think personally is important to go after the whole ideology, not just 1 or 2 things that turn out to be the fruit of that ideology. So that’s why we spend some time on. And by the way, all of these ideologies, we have a ton more material at the Ruth Institute that you can go into each one in more depth.
I want to talk now about the divorce ideology. The divorce ideology holds that a good and decent society should do everything possible to separate both sex and babies from marriage. Behind that idea is another idea, which is that kids don’t really need their parents. It will be fine. The kids are resilient. You can switch out your sex partners, your marriage partners.
You can do whatever you want. It’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it. Right? Okay, so when the Ruth Institute talks about the divorce ideology, we mean more than simply divorce itself. We mean any adult plan that separates kids from one or both of their parents. So anything other than an unavoidable tragedy, which does sometimes happen, right? They are unavoidable.
It’ll happen. Any adult plan that separates kids from one or both parents. Somebody dies. Somebody who’s mentally ill. I’m fed up with your father is not an unavoidable tragedy. You follow me. So the adult plans can include unmarried parenthood. It can include third party reproduction using purchased gametes like sperm, eggs, etc. and of course, divorce itself are all included in the Ruth Institute’s understanding of the divorce ideology.
So on this chart, I’m going to show you the results of many years worth of research that has been done about the impact of divorce on children. Before I say anything about this, I want to say I’m aware that in a room this size, most of you have been affected by divorce in some way. Many of you have been affected in some way or another.
When I put up a chart like this, I’m a social science person, okay? I’m not a content creator. I’m not an artsy person. You know, I like graphs and charts and numbers and stuff like that. A graph makes my heart beat fast. I’m that type of a person, okay? But when we have something like this, we say these are risk factors.
We do not mean every child of divorce experiences every one of these things. That’s what we don’t mean. We do mean that if divorce takes place in your family, pretty much regardless of the circumstances under which it takes place, your child is at higher risk for each one of these things. And of course, every family is going to look a little bit different in terms of how that actually plays out.
But you can see there’s a wide variety of things on this chart, including social things, personal things like having sleep problems and, early sexual activity. They have less parental supervision. They get sick, they fall behind in school. They have educational problems, psychological problems. All of these things are risk factors. And in case you don’t believe me, we have one resource here compiled by a sociologist friend of mine, doctor Pat Fagan, who compiled literally a year’s worth of studies on this subject.
And what he has is a report which goes on in the vein that I just described for 40 closely typed pages with 330 footnotes. I assure you, this is not a cherry picked fluky result. This is reality. Okay, divorce is hard on children. Divorce has been more thoroughly studied than a lot of the other subjects, because divorce is something that’s been around the longest.
Unmarried parenthood has also been studied quite extensively. Third party reproduction. Nobody’s even asking yet. The impact of being separated from your dad because your mom bought sperm out of a catalog. What does that do to the child’s mentality? You know what we don’t know. We don’t even know yet. We’ve conducted this big experiment without having a clue what’s going on.
But in any case, what I want to focus on is why? Why do we see these very sad results? The truth is, kids are not as resilient as we hoped. They’re not as resilient as we thought. And some of you may have heard the following dialog because this is what is told to parents when a family is having trouble, parents are often told, here’s what you say to the kids.
You say, Mommy and Daddy don’t love each other anymore. We still love you, but we don’t love each other anymore. And things aren’t really going to change that much. But you’re not going to live here in the same house, and so on and so forth. So from the child’s perspective, I want to analyze this from the child’s perspective. The child knows perfectly well, sort of.
I mean, what does a five year old know? But they sort of know that dad is half of who I am. Mom is half of who I am. You love me, but you don’t love my other half. How does that even work? Right? And we’re asking a little kid to figure that out on their own. And of course, they can’t figure it out because it isn’t true.
Basically, it’s not true. All right. And so then what happens? The subsequent remarriage, the subsequent re partnering is where even more difficulties happen. My friend Jennifer, who used to work for the Ruth Institute, she was herself a child of divorce. And she’s the person who informed me, who educated me really about this whole topic. Her parents divorced when she was three years old, and she has precisely two photographs of herself with both parents.
She has two pictures of herself with both parents. Her mother remarried, her father remarried, her mother had another child. And this often happens. And so Jennifer’s going back and forth between these two houses every week. And at her mom’s house, she sees that her half sister doesn’t have to go back and forth every week. She sees that her half sister has something that she doesn’t have.
She looks on the wall and there’s family photos, both sides of the family for her half sister, but not for her. No pictures of her dad’s side of the family at mom’s house. No pictures of her mom’s side of the family at her dad’s house. But the half siblings all have that. Okay, so you’ve introduced a weekly or every other week reminder that you have some, that they have something you don’t have.
Okay, so that, in my opinion, is one of the sources of the pain that the child of divorce experiences and why the experience is so traumatic, why it doesn’t go away, why it compounds over time. And when people get to be your age. Often I’m going to mention this when people get to be your age, often the fears escalate, right?
Because you’re afraid, can I make it work? This is not a small thing, y’all. Okay? And I’m just going to mention that in the Bible in Matthew 19 and Mark ten. Jesus was very clear on this point that is, he doesn’t say, no divorce. You have to stay with the mean, cruel bastard who beat you up.
No, he does not say that. That is not in the Bible. What he does say is if you take another partner that is adultery, do not take another partner. That’s what he says. And that you see, that would short circuit all these other problems I’m talking about, right? If the mom and dad just were separated but not engaged, not partnering.
Okay. Now another aspect of this is to show that divorce is the gift that keeps on giving. You could say the lifelong impact of divorce. My friend Amanda, a professional woman in my town. She came to me one day in tears. I said, Amanda, what’s wrong? Her parents divorced when she was five years old. She says to me, Jenny, my father’s dying, and my step mother will not allow me and my sisters to go be with him.
That’s divorce. That’s the lifelong impact of divorce and remarriage right there. Now, obviously not every case is like that. But there’s nothing in the logic of no-fault divorce that prevents it. It’s quite possible. I want you to know today, I don’t care how often this happens. This is the core. This is one of the worst parts of the sexual revolution, in my opinion.
It disrupts the relation between children and their parents. I don’t care how often it happens. I will never accept this as normal. I don’t care how common it is. I don’t care if it’s statistically normal. I will never accept this as normal.
[Cheering.]
Thank you, thank you.
Okay, now let’s turn to the gender ideology. This is the thing that’s on everybody’s mind and driving people slightly crazy and so on. And it’s in the news all over the place. The gender ideology is a complex of things. The thing called feminism could be part of it. The thing called I call it gay pride. It could be part of it.
And of course, now transgenderism. I put all of these things in quotation marks because they are all ideological words that don’t have precise meanings. And therefore you have to be really careful when you use them. But I think you all know what I’m talking about when I pop them up there. Okay, so have you noticed the self contradictions?
That feeling just comes spinning out of the gender ideology? Okay, feminism says gender stereotypes bad, bad bad. Transgenderism says a man can be a woman if he puts pink fingernail polish on and puts on a dress.
What? What?
Okay, another pair of self contradictions. Gay pride says people are born gay. Change is impossible. Even trying to change is harmful. And don’t even try. Don’t even think about it. On the other hand, transgenderism says people are born trans. Sounds like the same thing, but.
You gotta change. If you’re born trans, you got to change your body. You got to change your whole body in order to fit in with your true self. It’s a little bit contradictory. Okay. All right. Now, before I go any further than this, I want to say that in a room this size, there are surely people who are struggling with same sex attraction or gender identity confusion.
There surely are just because it’s all over the place.
I want you to know today that the claim that people are born gay has no foundation in science whatsoever. Transgenderism has no foundation in science whatsoever. It’s shocking how bad the evidence is. Honestly, it’s shocking the changes they’ve made. I want you to know today that how you feel today, whatever confusion you have, whatever struggles you have, that is not the final word about who you are.
I just want you to know that today. People change all the time. All the time. Thank you. Thank you kids, thank you so much. And we have a lot of resources at the Ruth Institute. I’ve been doing a whole series of interviews with people who have made the journey away from an LGBT identity in some way or another, and these are amazing people.
Okay. And so if there are any parents here who are dealing with this, you want to see it too. And you kids, you want to see it as well. And if you aren’t struggling yourself, I want to say probably you have friends who are struggling. I want you to know today that you can be a tremendous blessing to your friends, your friendship, your chaste, honorable Christian friendship can be a huge blessing to people.
I hear that time and again in my stories and my interviews that I’m hearing, so we can talk about that in Q&A later. There’s a lot that that could be said, but I just want to put that out there. Okay, so here’s another self-contradiction flowing out of the gender ideology. Feminism claims that marriage is an outdated, oppressive institution that is harmful to women.
Don’t do it, girls. And then the gay pride people say marriage is necessary for same sex couples. What is going on here? Okay, so I will tell you what is going on. How does all this self-contradictory mass fit together? It fits together because what they all have in common is that the human body is unimportant, and we can transcend it if we want to. We can if the sex of the body interferes with an important social or moral goal, we must transcend the body.
Okay, that’s what feminism was trying to do when it tried to wipe out all gender roles is what they were doing. So feminism says the sex of the body interferes with the equality between men and women.
Yay, equality!
The heck with the body, right? Transgenderism says that the sex of the body interferes with individual personal autonomy. Gay pride says that the sex of the body shouldn’t place any limitations on our choices of sex partner. They are all saying that we are uncomfy with the sexual nature of our body. The fact that we’re male and female, we’re uncomfortable with that.
The believers in this ideology basically believe we don’t have to take the body and its limitations seriously. This is raw material. We can do with it what we want. And what they really mean to say is we are angry about the body. We are angry about the limits of the body. That’s what’s behind it. And that’s why it has this kind of crazy feel to it.
And this is because what they’re promoting isn’t true. That’s why they keep spinning out more and more self contradictions. So that’s not going to stop. They’ll come up with something new. I mean that’s just the way this works okay. So all of these contradictions arise for this one reason that the opening premise is incorrect. The sex of the body is, in fact, very important.
And what’s at stake in the whole of the sexual revolution is human nature itself. Karl Marx wanted to recreate the new Soviet man. Lenin, his followers, they wanted to recreate a new kind of person who didn’t care about private property, didn’t care about their stuff. You know, they had to remake human nature in order to make communism work.
Well, guess what, y’all? The sexual revolution is demanding that we remake human nature. It’s very important that we resist that effort because it can’t be done. Okay. The problem with the sexual revolution is that every single one of its things turns out to be not right. Separate sex from babies. Incorrect. This cannot be done. Sex actually makes babies.
We have that in California? Okay, good. All right. Separating both sex and babies from marriage. Incorrect. Kids actually need their parents. Okay. Wipe out all the differences between men and women. Incorrect.
Right. The body is significant. The sex of the body is significant. So the sexual revolution, we can say clearly is irrational. It is impossible and it cannot stand on its own. And this is in a way the most important thing, but it can’t stand on its own. It needs to be propped up continually. And so therefore it requires a lot of force from the government, and it requires a tremendous amount of propaganda.
In other words, it needs the power of the state. And it is so totalitarian an ideology that no Christian should have anything to do with it. You cannot play with this. You have to actively resist it once you see it. Okay, for the true revolutionary, the issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution and the purpose of the revolution is power.
That’s what it’s all about. If they can make you say Bruce Jenner is a woman, they can make you say anything, okay? And so once you start looking around and you see this, you will see that the sexual state is everywhere. Transgenderism is completely state driven. Right. And we’re seeing this now with the other stuff about USAID and all the money that it was spending promoting sexual revolutionary ideology all over the place.
It didn’t come up from the masses. Right. It was all being funneled from the top down. So now, in the last few minutes that we have together, I’m going to defend Christian culture, Christian sexual culture, so that you have very clearly in your mind what it is that we are positively in favor of. So what you are talking about, you want to have that picture in the back of your mind.
We ask at the Ruth Institute what is owed to children. And we have two answers. Children are entitled to know their identity. Every child, every person, has the right to know their cultural heritage and their genetic identity. Every person, without exception, even if your dad dies, right, you get to know who he is. Secondly, every child is entitled to a relationship with both of their parents, their natural mother and father, except for an unavoidable tragedy.
And I’ve already mentioned the unavoidable tragedy kind of situation. So what can we do to secure these rights for children? How would we go about doing that? Well, it’d probably be good if we made a cooperation plan between the mother and the father. If the child is going to be in relationship with both of them, it would be good if they got along, and were willing to be in the same room and could talk to each other and that they actually knew who they were.
They weren’t just a number out of a catalog, for example. Okay. So this is the best chance for kids. So the lifelong cooperation plan that is proposed by traditional Christian sexual ethics is get married before having sex. Radical, right?
Only have sex with the person you’re married to. What? What? Stay married. Unless somebody does something really awful. We’ve covered that already with the divorce ideology. Be nice to your spouse.
Okay, guys, that was always part of the Christian package.
Right? Yeah. We have male headship. That doesn’t mean you get to boss everybody around, right? Right. Okay. Be nice to your spouse. No petty criticism of your spouse. Bear patiently with your spouse’s faults. That’s all part of the Christian package, right. And then finally, and I think very importantly, be satisfied with the children God gives you. Be satisfied with the timing.
Be satisfied with the number. Be satisfied with the condition of the children that God gives you right. Be satisfied.
[Clapping.]
Be satisfied, be satisfied.
And you get traditional Christian marriage.
[Clapping.]
You start with the kids. Start with the kids. Ask, what do we do for the kids? What will secure their rights and their needs? They’re hardwired in born needs. What will secure that? You reason outward and you rule out one thing after another, and you come up with one thing after another. You know, you end up with traditional Christian sexual morality, Christian marriage.
This is our cathedral in little old Lake Charles. Very beautiful cathedral, don’t you think? Yeah. And as you can see, everyone, for those of you who are Catholic, you can see this is a traditional Latin Mass.
[Cheering.]
For those of you all who are not Catholic, ask your buddies at the break what this is all about here, okay? Because it’s kind of a it’s a joy.
[Join us.]
Yeah. Join us. Okay. So the social result. You know, a lot of times when people think about this stuff, they only think about themselves. They think about what would it mean to me if I could only, if I have to be celibate or if I have to abstain, or if I can’t have sex with the person that I’m really attracted to because I’m not married. They think about themselves. But for a moment I think we should think about the social result, the overall result of traditional Christian sexual culture.
The overall social result for every child, a mother and a father. for every child, a mother and a father.
No matter how rich and influential and powerful their parents may be, no matter how poor and seemingly insignificant their parents may be. For every child, a mother and a father. In good times and bad times, for every child, a mother and a father, black or white, native born or immigrants like this little family, this little native born family around the dining room table, and this Italian family at Ellis Island in 1910.
For every child, a mother and a father. For every man, one and only one wife. The rich guys don’t get to hog all the women, which is what happens in polygamous societies. And I’m just going to let it sit there. You guys can work out for yourselves what that turns into right? For every man, one and only, one wife.
For every woman, one and only one husband, no matter how beautiful she may be, no matter how glamorous she may be, one and only one husband. The overall social result for every child, a mother and a father. For every man, one wife; for every woman, one husband. This is authentic reproductive equality, authentic reproductive equality. Everybody’s reproducing on the same terms, right?
And arguably being a connection with your mom and dad is more important than all the other things we keep trying to equalize. Your mom and your dad are more important than your money or your health care. Honestly. Right? And so this guarantees that this works towards equality, authentic equality, authentic social justice, justice for everyone. It is traditional Christian sexual morality that secures this kind of equality and justice for everyone.
We come from a variety of Christian traditions here, but all of us agree that at the heart of the universe is a deep and abiding love. Every person who has ever been conceived exists because God loves that person and wants them to exist. And God wants us to be part of his loving plan. But our procreation coming about as a result of the love of the mother and the father, this is what traditional Christian sexual morality teaches.
And I am not ashamed to say that this is what I believe. Thank you very much.
