This article was originally published October 31, 2018, at National Catholic Register, by Sue Ellen Browder.

About six years ago, Alice started to be unhappy with her marriage and began seeking happiness and self-fulfillment in worldly pleasures. She joined a coed gym, made new friends (many of whom were divorced), and began dressing and acting like a 20-year-old college coed. As conflict raged within her, she sought to escape from the marriage vows she made to John and Christ 30 years earlier. She talked to their parish priest, whom she claimed did not “get her.” Alice returned to their former priest, who helped her trump up grounds for an annulment. The excuse? She’d had “poor dating experience” in high school, so when she got married at age 20, she was too “immature” for consent.

Today, John calls himself an emotional “basket case.” Reluctantly divorced and still deeply in love with Alice, he says, “I’m about a quarter of the man at work I used to be. Some days I close the door to my office, just sit there and cry.”

Donor-conceived, adopted and now a grown woman, Jessica* refuses to speak to either of her two “moms” (the surrogate who bore her or her adoptive mother). At 17, upon learning her surrogate mother was paid $10,000 for her womb-rental “services,” she was devastated. Fighting to change laws that treat babies as commodities, Jessica bitterly declares, “When the only reason you’re in this world is a big fat paycheck, it’s degrading.”

Six-year-old Elise* lives with her grandmother and hates Christmas. When her mother comes to visit with her new baby and new boyfriend, Elise furiously thinks, “Why does that stupid baby get to live with her mom and dad while I don’t? I hate all this ‘Baby’s First Christmas.’ Where’s my dad? Why doesn’t my mom love me?”

For a week after family holidays, the lonely little 6-year-old throws temper tantrums and wets the bed every night.

What do John, Jessica and Elise all share in common?

According to Jennifer Roback Morse, author of The Sexual State, they — along with millions of others — are victims of the sexual revolution, which splits sex from children and marriage.

The bottom line of the sexual-revolution ideology, Morse explains, is this: I need sex and am entitled to any and all kinds of pleasure I desire — no matter how many other people I hurt or traumatize in the process.

Morse is president of the Ruth Institute, a nonprofit she founded to unmask and refute the lies the sexual revolution has spawned over the past 50 years. In The Sexual State, she exposes the dirty little secret sexual nihilists want to keep hidden: The sexual revolution didn’t simply pop up out of thin air.

On the contrary, the revolution was willed and planned by powerful, well-heeled “elites,” she notes, who used the state to redefine the meaning and purpose of human sexuality and are determined to impose their iron wills on the rest of us — hence the book’s provocative subtitle: How Elite Ideologies Are Destroying Lives and Why the Church Was Right All Along.(Morse is referring to the traditional teachings of the Church being right. She’s not defending prelates who desecrate the priesthood by abusing their positions to gratify their own private lusts.)

The good news: Since this willed destruction of procreative sex, marriage and the family has gone against the desires of so many people, Morse believes it can be reversed.

Three Interlocking Ideologies

The sexual revolution, Morse explains, consists not of just one false ideology, but three: the “Contraceptive Ideology” (which splits sex from babies), the “Divorce Ideology” (which splits sex from childbearing in marriage and deprives children of their parents) and the “Gender Ideology” (which splits men and women from their biological identities and claims “men and women are completely interchangeable”).

Her book devotes a section to each of these ideological fantasies and exposes the subtle propaganda continually used to hard-sell them to the public.

“The modern sexual revolutionaries insist that love, sex and reproduction be separated from each other for the sake of making men and women equal,” Morse writes. “But this pursuit of ‘equality’ places men and women at odds with each other. Men exploit women for sex, seeing them as objects that give pleasure. Women exploit men for reproduction, treating them as a combination of wallet and sperm bank.” Meanwhile, some same-sex-attracted people imagine they’ve escaped all this male-female exploitation by avoiding heterosexual relations altogether. Due to the sex scandals within the Church, the notion that homosexual behavior is somehow “less exploitive” than heterosexuality has now been exposed for the dark lie that it is.

Making Victims Visible

Sex-abuse victims, however, aren’t the only ones being silenced. In her book, Morse reveals that many other victims, like John, Jessica and Elise, have also been long silenced and unjustly ignored. We don’t know these victims of the sexual revolution even exist unless they’re willing to come forward and tell their stories — and we’re willing to listen.

What’s more, Morse argues, the continued expansion of the “Sexual State” depends upon keeping its victims socially invisible. If you’ve been emotionally shattered by the hook-up culture, abortion, contraception, divorce or gender ideology, you’re socially invisible. And progressive elites (many of them in government and the elite media) need to keep you invisible and silenced to further their agendas.

Morse maintains we can change the dominant cultural narrative by giving sexual-revolution victims the visibility they deserve. The Sexual State ends with a 15-point manifesto of actions we can take as individuals and a nation to heal the pain the sexual revolution has caused.

In the end, despite the sexual chaos around us, Morse offers a message of hope. When enough people open their hearts to sexual-revolution victims like John, Jessica and Elise and see the truth, that’s when the real revolution will begin.

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Sue Ellen Browder is the author of Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement.