Sexuality, Medicine, and the Religious Right

AHA Session 220
Saturday, January 9, 2027: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Napoleon Ballroom C1 (Sheraton New Orleans, 3rd Floor)
Chairs:
Lauren Barbato, Temple University
William Stell, Princeton University
Papers:
Sexual Disorders of Gender: Childhood Gender Nonconformity, Medicine, and the Religious Right
Sophia DeLeonibus, Yale University
“The Most Dangerous Voice”: Paul Cameron, Anti-Gay Science, and Christian Conservatism, 1980–96
Kay Rollins, Yale University
Comment:
William Stell, Princeton University

Session Abstract

This panel rethinks the emergence of the Religious Right’s “family values” by turning to the history of science and medicine from the 1970s through the 1990s. We ask how scientific and medical research reshaped religious and political conservatives’ understandings of sex, sexuality, reproduction, childhood, and family life at the same moment that the Religious Right began to consolidate as a powerful voting bloc. Rather than reducing them to pseudoscientists or ideologues, our papers reinterpret conservative Catholic and Evangelical medical practitioners as active readers, interpreters, and producers of scientific and medical knowledge. We foreground the importance of institutions like the National Federation of Catholic Physicians’ Guilds, the Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, and the Traditional Values Coalition, which shaped conservative political discourses through claiming medical and scientific expertise.

Our papers explore how the Religious Right’s leading players established scientific credibility and expertise as legitimate counters to abortion and assisted reproductive technologies, sexual liberation, and the AIDs epidemic. Lauren Barbato traces the historical evolution of the National Federation of Catholic Physicians’ Guilds into a powerful medical lobby post-1970, arguing that the medicalization of Catholic anti-abortion ethics provided the legal and strategic blueprint for conservative campaigns against reproductive technologies like mifepristone and IVF. Sophia DeLeonibus examines how Christian psychologists and psychiatrists turned to sexological research about childhood gender development to propose new arguments about homosexuality’s nonbiological origins in the years after the American Psychological Association’s 1973 decision to depathologize homosexuality. Finally, Kay Rollins explores the relationship between science, politics, and homophobia in the 1980s by tracking how Nebraska psychologist Paul Cameron’s anti-gay research provided a credible basis for conservative AIDS policy.

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