![\"150824Hymowitz\"](\"http:\/\/www.littlerascalsdaycarecase.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/01\/150824Hymowitz.jpg\")
Aug. 24, 2015<\/p>\nAug. 24, 2015<\/p>\n
\u201c(Richard) Beck is generally restrained in his narrative, letting the details pile up to a well-deserved indictment of the many players in the \u2018moral panic.\u2019 But in explaining how these fever dreams managed to seize the national imagination, he does a little witch-hunting of his own. The frenzy, he tells us, was a backlash by family-values conservatives to the social changes around them. It was a period of \u2018an intense reactionary antifeminism.\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an inexcusably partial interpretation. From Beck\u2019s own evidence, feminists themselves were vital players in the hysteria.\u00a0Gloria Steinem<\/a>\u00a0donated money to the McMartin investigation, and Ms. Magazine ran a 1993 cover article \u2018BELIEVE IT! Cult Ritual Abuse Exists,\u2019 even though, by that time, the general public had grown increasingly skeptical of the idea.<\/p>\n \u201cIn part because of her aggressive pursuit of child abusers \u2013 and conviction of a number of people later exonerated \u2013 a relatively unknown Dade County state attorney named Janet Reno was picked by President Clinton to become the nation\u2019s first female attorney general. According to Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, the authors of \u2018Satan\u2019s Silence<\/a>,\u2019 (Kee) MacFarlane<\/a>\u00a0had been a lobbyist for NOW before she set about terrifying the children of Manhattan Beach.<\/p>\n \u201cWith his partisan recounting of the child abuse panic of the 1980s, Beck turns what could have been a careful history about one facet of the nation\u2019s exhausting culture wars into one more illustration of them.\u201d<\/p>\n