Jessie gasped. We clutched hands silently, knowing damage had been done. Maybe I should have used better judgment, but, man, my parents never had to think about jumping up and shielding my eyes when we watched Walter Cronkite. Why was the photo flashed? Was it news? Social commentary? Ratings lust? All of that, surely - even news of conservative sexual hypocrisy, of which there is no end.
Nothing personal, by the way. There is no reciprocity⦠only deadening. To take proper account of this, we need to change the debate about pornography and freedom of expression in this republic.
Only when our premises have changed enough to permit a new consensus about the problem might we imagine new policies or other solutions. Nor have we noticed that American conservatives generate not only repressions of eros but also, and perhaps inevitably, its destructive, reactive explosions. Such is the power of young contralto voices in sink-down sofas. After all, prime fare at present features TV confessional and reality shows whose participants and audiences shed civility for prurience and brutality.
That skews private as well as public forms of discourse. But who is doing this to us, really? One familiar answer these days comes from the former Lutheran activist-pastor Richard John Neuhaus, now a Roman Catholic priest and conservative public intellectual.
It was not done by the American people; it was done to them. Many Americans loved it. There have always been a lot of slobs. But is Neuhaus being fully honest here?
