Chapter Ten_

FIGHTING DIABOLICAL FIRES:

Abortion, Euthanasia, Sodomy, Cloning and Pornography

The life of the nation is secure only while
the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.
Frederick Douglass, 1885

Numbered are the days of true liberty if the response to forces that promote cultural decadence is simply to sing the praises of freedom. The freedom to feed diabolical fires till they conflagrate society is no more affirmed by prudent constitutional principles than an arsonist's freedom in the Capitol Building.[1]

Postmodernists claim that religious minded Christians, Jews and Muslims interfere with the democratic process by urging politicians to oppose, for example, homosexual marriage. In the case of the Vatican, argues Fr. Frank Pavone, the Pope is really giving democracy a helping hand. As Pope John Paul II wrote in The Gospel of Life (#70), "‘[T]he value of democracy stands or falls with the values which it embodies and promotes.’" They are indeed friends of the Republic who resist forces hell-bent on destroying the real value in democracy.

Congressman Henry Hyde of Illinois has expressed the same truth: “To have a virtuous kingdom it is enough perhaps to have a virtuous king, but you cannot have a successful democracy without a virtuous people.”[2] Hyde’s truism harkens back to the maxim of John Adams, quoted in an earlier chapter but worth reemphasizing: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[3]

Democracy is related to Jefferson’s most valuable freedom, the “right of self-government,”[4] for as Fr. Frank Pavone warns, no people is fit for self-government who cannot tell the difference between what is right and wrong, between what is helpful to us and what can destroy us. “What we need is virtuous democracy – a self-governing people free to strive for and do what is right.”[5]

Postmodernist dogma rejects the very notion, however, that some principles are intrinsically wrong or innately evil. Instead the “dictatorship of relativism” expects all evaluations to accord with one’s personal or collective situation in time and location. Here alone we find ample justification for a counterrevolution. The elevation of situation ethics to the level of a governing paradigm constitutes, ipso facto, a compelling reason to overthrow the postmodernist regime. For situation ethics works against morality in the populace, and democracy works badly without a body politic that is moral.

Postmodernists were not the first to launch high level attacks against the ethical fiber of an entire nation. Witness the moral sabotage by British trade barons who mass-produced opium for sale to the teeming masses of China. The Chinese population then became more and more addicted. Witness the subsequent Opium War (1839-42) in which Britain fought to put down patriotic resistance to the degradation of China. Anything to maintain lucrative trading markets for English entrepreneurs!

Likewise in America, if there is a profitable commerce in sin, then suppress any sign of contradiction. Witness the concerted campaign to push the Ten Commandments out of public life. Downplay the Decalogue! Yes, they demean or play down anything that discredits the multi-billion dollar industries in sex and abortion – driven in part by unscrupulous profiteers, backed by libertine lawyers. And, of course, money is the bottom line. Profit trumps the fact that their products and services corrupt the hearts, molest the minds, and corrode the souls of young and old, both domestically and globally via America’s influence as the world’s cultural superpower.

Sinfulness in the entertainment industry is not only getting filthier and more pervasive,[6] it is also playing a leading role in the ongoing postmodernist revolution.

For generations, pornography has been catering under-the-counter garbage to the prurient. But in recent years, a marked change has occurred, one which looks to the Marquis de Sade for inspiration. For Sade, pornography was not garbage but the voice of liberation, the declaration of humanistic independence from God and all law. The new pornography thus differs from the old: it is now a crusade for a new freedom and an all-out war against God and His law.… The old garbage has become 'garbahzh,' pretentious garbage masquerading as the new enlightenment and the new freedom.[7]

Liberty vs. License

Never can fast be the same as slow,

Nor is an ebb tide at all like flow.

Though both of these pairs come from motion,

Although each might share common ocean.

Freedom likewise has opposing poles,

One dreadful with bergs and many shoals.

Liberty, though, is hopeful and clear,

And, under God, gives our souls good cheer.

Oh some freedoms unleashed can accursed be,

As when levies demolished admit the sea;

Saltwater, brine, kill what we grow,

Katrina unchecked brought death and woe.

The boundless freedoms can jail bars become,

Like radio audio through background hum,

Melodies or conversations caged by din,

Like someone lovely trapped in whisky and gin.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s address on freedoms four,[8]

Skipped ignoble freedoms we do well to deplore;

For they coexist harshly with versions we revere.

Liberty’s parodies, fear; noble freedoms hold dear.

The constellation law aims to promote genuine liberty by choking off its antithesis. The arch-amendment will preside over a five-pronged counteroffensive [9] against the postmodernist cultural revolution. Sections ten and eleven address the sexual revolution as manifested in abortion, sodomy and pornography. In addition, euthanasia and cloning would be banned. A regime able and willing to subdue these hydras would of necessity be pro-life, pro-traditional family, and partial to the sanctity of conjugal sex.

Among the consequences of such a cultural counterrevolution would be to advance the quality and appeal of democracy. Adversaries of freedom point accusingly to the licentiousness, which oftentimes accompanies democratization. Just as with Gresham’s law of economics – bad money drives out the good – so with freedom: the parodies of liberty drive out the genuine commodity. This tension between liberty and license touches a chord even among ardent friends of freedom, like the Pope who worked jointly with President Ronald Reagan to bring about the fall of “the evil empire” in Eastern-Europe and Russia.[10] Less than two years after that wonderful victory for freedom, John-Paul II traveled to the newly emerging democracies of the former USSR to warn of the "enormous contradictions" and risks of democracy when it is insufficiently rooted in ethical responsibility.[11]

License they mean when they cry liberty; for
who loves that must first be wise and good.

John Milton, On the Detraction II

If we are going to spread American-style democracy we had better make our country a better model for foreign countries to emulate. As outlined by economist, Robert Reich, the imperative is to restore a “new, updated democratic capitalism,” i.e. “fashion a democratic capitalism more suited to our nobler aspirations for the twenty-first century,” rather than the amoral supercapitalism that gives America a bad reputation overseas.[11a] In November, 2003, President George W. Bush attempted to put a lasting imprint on American foreign policy. In a speech on spreading liberty to the Middle East, not only for liberty’s own sake, but also to secure our own safety against terrorism, the President declared that a democratic Iraq could be the linchpin of “the next stage of the world democratic movement.” He conjectured that the growing number of democratic nations in the world – from 40 to 120 in a generation – was not unrelated to the fact that “the world's most influential nation was itself a democracy.”[12]

In noting the powerful influence of the United States in the world, politically, militarily and culturally, Bush recognized a plain fact – America influences the form that democracy takes overseas. I’m sorry, Mr. President, but that is precisely what makes the USA the problem! America’s morals, or rather her debased version thereof, is one aspect of American imperialism to which Bush did not refer. A few months later, however, news broke about the sadomasochistic treatment of Iraq prisoners by U.S. troops, giving scandal to the world and generating intensified resistance on the part of the Iraqis.

In the future, however, should the United States defeat the postmodernist revolution, and prove that democracy and debauchery are not kith and kin — that to fight effectively against internal decadence is indeed possible in a democracy (or in our case a republic) — then Americans will have converted a disturbing liability into a selling point throughout the world, including the Middle East.

Otherwise, religious peoples will look to Americanization as a byword for what is crass and ungodly about democratization. They will tend to despise American-style democracy as yet another sordid U.S. export – unless, here at home, we convert to a form of democracy more worthy to present elsewhere. Beware lest believers overseas discover that the egg America proffers is really a scorpion, whereupon our attempts to spread vulgar versions of democracy will create enemies abroad, not friends. It is we and our children who will have to suffer after the spectacle of a sham republic exporting degenerate democracy brings a legacy of loathing for America down upon our heads.

Reversing cultural decline will greatly facilitate the process of redeeming American democracy and rendering it worthwhile to spread abroad. Prerequisite to a social/cultural reversal in America is a secular/religious combination – like the aquiline alliance described in chapter two. Is such a coalition possible in the 21st century? I think haut-culture in the West provides a hopeful indicator, insofar as world-class symphonies include sacred music in their repertoires, a secular endorsement of religious beauty. While living in Austria in the mid-1980’s, I remember a diverse concert audience (predominantly secular, I would guess) marking the anniversary of Mozart’s death. On that cold December evening hundreds of us stood shoulder to shoulder, packed into Salzburg’s St. Peter’s abbey, for a performance of Mozart’s Requiem Mass.

Even in the popular culture, during Christmas season, hymns like Silent Night or Away in a Manger regale shoppers in supermarkets and department stores. Such pious hymns are enjoyed even by politically correct Americans who eschew religious greetings like "merry Christmas." Though they prefer the secular greeting, "happy holidays," many unbelievers are fair-minded enough to admit the merits of a work notwithstanding its religiosity.

In light of a widespread willingness to applaud a lyric for its internal qualities, irrespective of the listeners' sectarian or anti-sectarian persuasions, we can take hope that a sacred / secular coalition will form and endure, notwithstanding that the constellation law is a civic response to the Biblical call, "sing to the Lord a new song." We are hopeful that many Americans who pay the Lord little or no allegiance will still appreciate the song and help the quintet of players – the quintuple coalition – stage it in the public domain.[13] If the alliance holds together, despite sacred / secular fault lines, then the movers and minions of the postmodernist regime may glean a new insight into the meaning of Requiem.

At present, unfortunately, the postmodernists have a formidable array of means to push their agenda. They have given a new twist to Robert Kennedy’s 1960 book title, The Enemy Within, which concerned racketeering in America. Now with an effectiveness worthy of the Frankfurt school,[14] they undermine the moral character of American culture. In the process they provide external enemies such as Osama bin Laden with plenty of ammunition in the propaganda war, and thus thousands of recruits willing to strike America, the “Great Satan.” In bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” (November 2002, part II) he recites a litany of “immorality and debauchery” in American culture.[15]

Alas, it is not that his charges of immorality are distortions or lies. On the contrary, it is precisely because some of his accusations have elements of truth, or in a few cases hit right on the mark, that bin Laden and his ilk are able to incite and inflame public opinion – especially in the Islamic world – to see the American way of life as loathsome, ignoble, and deserving of destruction.

Islam's clerics have had a field day convincing their congregations that "Desperate Housewives" and "Sex and the City" are true reflections of U.S. secret weapons to destroy Islam. Military might to impose depravity is how the Bush doctrine and its crusade for democracy are explained in countless mosques throughout the Middle East.

Arnaud de Borchgrave, editor, UPI and The Washington Times, 4/15/2005[16]

Great Seal of the U.S.

Great Seal of the U.S.

Annuit Coeptis =
He has favored our cause

For this public relations disaster we can rightly credit hard-working American citizens, who have busily conducted the Devil’s work, including (to name but a few) Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the late Justice Harry Blackmun, Congressman Barney Frank, and Playboy mogul, Hugh Heffner.

America’s P.R. problem is more than a Middle Eastern phenomenon. The American citizen body themselves are the picture of polarization, and many of the best elements in society are reassessing the meaning of their own patriotism. That millions of moral conservatives refuse to vote, preferring to distance themselves wherever possible from the postmodernist regime, is an alarming application of the Bible from within the body politic — “come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing.”[17]

And what about the risk of alienating America’s longtime Benefactor, acknowledged in the Great Seal of the United States? The old saying, “it stinks to high heaven,” might be rephrased in more refined theological terms to explain why God would withdraw protection from an apostate nation.

To deny indictments stemming from the country’s moral decline, or to condemn non-voters as politically unrealistic, or to rationalize moral depravity as a lamentable but inevitable byproduct of freedom – all that is just high-sounding spin. It will not silence enemies or deter jihadists who see postmodernist America as a latter-day Sodom & Gomorrah. What will really steal their thunder is this: overthrow the postmodernist regime and in the process clean up our act as a nation.

ABORTION, EUTHANASIA and CLONING

As distinguished from its coarsening cultural effect, the great political damage associated with abortion is the way our politburo of nine sullied the Constitution, the epic composition described by Gladstone as “the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given moment by the brain and purpose of man.” Writing in 1973 (Roe v. Wade) on behalf of seven of the nine U.S. Supreme Court members, Justice Harry Blackmun tainted our most cherished national document by incorporating an alien component, i.e. the “right” to kill one’s own offspring. And the malignancy was much more widespread than abortion:

Unborn child? Cruel choice rules!

Let kids pray? Banned in schools!

By the Constitution bent,

The agenda was sent.

God’s Ten Commandments despised,

Our Moral heritage revised,

Pornography regaled,

Sodomy hailed.

The injury inflicted on the U.S. Constitution is a political crime, to be distinguished from the ongoing genocidal crimes against the youngest component of humanity, i.e. the holocaust of unborn babies liquidated each year in the United States.[18] In other words the problem is dual in nature: First, the regime defiles the nation’s highest law, which takes on the sheen of sinfulness by serving as a cloak for evil. The Constitution is converted by the politburo of nine into the high born guarantor of the “right” to commit wicked and bloody acts against the most innocent and helpless among us. Second, with sinfulness set at liberty to operate on a massive scale, the unleashed holocaust barbarizes society, advancing the culture of death throughout the country. Whereupon, by virtue of our status as the world’s cultural superpower, the barbarity radiates around the globe.

The constellation law contains countermeasures against this double catastrophe: Section 10:1-2 attacks the first part directly at the federal level. Section 10:3-4 assails the second obliquely by delegating the solution to the states:

At the federal level the taint introduced into the U.S. Constitution will undergo expurgation, expunction and eradication – i.e. erasure. In Shakespeare’s words, “out, out damn spot” (Macbeth). By amending the Constitution we can blot out any judge-made quasi-amendment. To override the ostensible “right” to kill a baby in the womb, the reformed Constitution would read:

In 1776 the Declaration of Independence designated life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as inalienable rights that government dare not seek to destroy. The first of these rights, human life, is sacred from conception to natural death. Under this Constitution, therefore, abortion and active euthanasia are neither rights nor civil liberties, but criminal acts. Constellation law, (section 10:1)

Insertion of this language will cleanse the Constitution from its befoulment by association with abortion. In addition section 10:3-4 will end defilement of the Constitution by judges who elevated unnatural sexual proclivities, i.e. sodomy, to the level of a “full right” under the Constitution.

Another downside of the infiltration of abortion and sodomy into the Bill of Rights is that they give a bad name to civil liberties generally. Citizens begin to look askance at freedom itself. Now increasingly the connotation in the critical mind is freedom without responsibility, and liberty stretched to encompass leniency for vice. Elevating sin to the level of a civil right renders our claims as free citizens suspect. Entitlements long associated with the virtues assume shades of gray, and in some quarters fascism itself begins to look like the lesser of two evils. Among well meaning men, tolerance takes on the tint of licentiousness.

Suspicion of freedom plays into plots by ill willed politicians, like Herman Goering in Nazi Germany who declared brazenly that words like compassion and tolerance gave him a twitch in his trigger finger. Under the constellation law, however, the expulsion of abortion and sodomy from the Bill of Rights will preempt proto-fascists and remove arrows from their quivers.

Abortion is an affront like none other in the West today. It confronts people not just as an abstract “right,” or jurisprudential concept, but as the corporeal reality of an ongoing holocaust. On this level, where it will be toughest to break, we face a formidable redoubt – a tenacious resolve on the part of millions of Americans – against which we must look to decentralization as a strategy. The constellation law reads (emphasis added):

Penalization for these crimes within U.S. borders shall be according to the laws of the State or territory in which the abortion or euthanasia takes place; and as regards American citizens outside U.S. borders according to the laws of the country where the abortion or euthanasia occurs. But no state or territory of the United States may finance abortions or procurement thereof, from taxation or other public revenues. (section 10:2)

Like the title of Dostoevski’s famous book, Crime and Punishment, offenses against society have two aspects: [1] the state’s declaration that an action is criminal in nature; [2] the imposition of penalties.

Recognizing the thorny nature of enforcing a standard of righteousness more suitable to a Judeo-Christian culture like that which preceded the postmodernist revolution, the constellation law will decentralize the questions of punishment for the crimes of abortion and euthanasia, to be resolved in state political arenas. In states like my own (the state of Washington) where a state referendum failed to outlaw even so obvious an abomination as partial-birth abortion, the new policy would concede citizens the option of treating abortion like a traffic offense, some lesser slap on the wrist, or even imposing no penalty whatsoever.

The latter course – complete leniency – would, in this citizen’s opinion, be appropriate governmental policy when applied to the mother in cases of rape or incest. In any event the problem of the exceptional cases so often cited [rape, incest and the life and/or health of the mother] would be left to each state to decide at the enforcement level. How to resolve such prickly issues is best decided in a decentralized process, where the people have a greater voice.

This tactic of differentiating between crime and punishment is not unfamiliar to my fellow Washingtonians. Until 1990, the state statute requiring flag salute exercises in the public school classrooms was backed up by penalties:

Any person willfully refusing or neglecting to comply with this section shall be guilty of a misdemeanor...and if ...such person is an employee of a school district, such action shall be grounds for discharge from such employment.

Since 1990, however, state law omits the punishment provision. The revised code of Washington includes nothing about penalizing teachers or administrators who fail to implement the required patriotic flag exercise.[19] From their professional experience, classroom teachers know well enough that without consequences there is no discipline. So teachers averse to expressions of patriotism opt simply to ignore the law in Washington schools, there being no state imposed consequences. As a result we have government (public) schools in our state where students never salute the flag, or at best rarely, notwithstanding what the law happens to say.

If Washington state finds itself in a reformed Union governed by the constellation law, (and presupposing that by then the cultural landscape has changed none for the better in the Evergreen State) then the pro-abortion mentality will probably inspire the legislature in Olympia to enforce the abortion provisions of the arch-amendment in much the same way as it enforces the education code requiring flag salutes.

Pro-lifers in Washington state, or any state, will then have to take into account St. Augustine’s dictum, that if harlotry were eliminated the world would “convulse itself with lust.” Because the sins of the flesh can be eliminated only by liquidating the entire human race, the title of this chapter begins, advisedly, with “fighting diabolical fires” rather than extinguishing them. To press the metaphor somewhat, fire fighters prefer to cordon off forest fires with fire lines, rather than expend lives recklessly by charging directly into an inferno. Similarly with sins conflagrating the culture. Prudence requires some concessions in the political sphere to the reality of people’s condition in the present. Decentralization makes this possible on a case-by-case basis, i.e. state by state.[20]

Meanwhile, to my fellow pro-life activists in Washington State, let me say this: we can oppose abortion by continuing our longstanding efforts to change the minds and hearts of Washingtonians, and also to modify the votes of legislators in Olympia. To which ends the decontaminated U.S. Constitution will be a herald, trumpeting the sanctity of life in our state and every state, indeed throughout the world. The fight will rage on, but with prevailing constitutional law favorable to the solution, rather than (as now) reinforcing cultural decay and presiding over the problem.

In the mean time, the financing of abortion from public funds will end at once. Even in pro-abortion states like Washington, devout Christians chafing under the compulsion of anti-Christian tax laws will, after the reforms, carry a lighter and less irksome load on their consciences.

Furthermore, in those states most inclined to embrace the culture of death, the constellation amendment will intervene against euthanasia, or mercy killing. This will preempt usurpatious federal Courts, lest they extend the trail blazed by Oregon into a nationwide network that all 50 states are compelled to construct and maintain.

The postmodernist regime has launched a kind of pincers attack on the two ends of human life – at gestation and gerontology. To justify attacks on the two extremities of the life-span we are told that the high goals of furthering human progress, advancing civil liberties, and making dying more humane are all promoted by easing the termination of human life as it waxes in the womb, and as it wanes toward the tomb. In other words, abortionists and mercy killers would move the bookends of life inward.

The constellation law will reaffirm human life across the spectrum. Rather than toss out human life like so much useless protoplasm, the opposite and far better option is to hurl the culture of death into the garbage heap of history.

As for the ominous new issue of human cloning, it is unclear at this writing whether such a thing is physically possible.[21] From time immemorial it has been banned, as it were, by limitations in the power of science. That could change.

Acknowledging the danger, the UN General Assembly voted early in 2005 to support a worldwide ban on cloning and on research using embryonic tissues.[22] In the United States the best course of action is to play it safe. If aberrant science does manage to emulate Dr. Frankenstein, the constellation law will have empowered society to nip profiteering in the bud, rather than wait for an infrastructure in human cloning to develop. Let the cloning industry get established with lobbyists, a propaganda machine, and the wealth to pay for it all; and instead of a caged cub we will have to deal with a mature tiger on the prowl.

SODOMY

On the issue of special rights for sodomy, we are again – as with abortion – obliged to decontaminate the Constitution and rededicate it to God. The constellation amendment will purge the Constitution of that “full right to engage in their conduct” which the Supreme Court extended to sodomites in 2003 (Lawrence v. Texas).[23] Exercising their penchant for legislating from the bench, the Court rehabilitated the old crime of buggery by newly cloaking it in the folds of the US Constitution.[24] The postmodernist court has thus besmirched and befouled the highest law of the land, thereby committing a twofold crime: inserting sodomy (buggery) into the Bill of Rights, and stealing power that belongs to the people and their elected representatives.[26]

Counter-protesting the Judeo-Christian “Mayday for Marriage” rally, 2004, Safeco Field, Seattle.

As part of our counterrevolution, the constellation amendment, section five, bolsters the Constitution against judicial usurpation (theft of power) generally. Section ten is more specific: it inoculates Constitutional jurisprudence against the contagion of sexual perversion. Contagious is the key element here, since the people who are, as one activist put it, “going to hell, and proud,” should not be empowered to take the country down with them.

The traditional family is the first and fundamental unit of civilized society. It consists of a male husband, a female wife, and any children that the married couple conceives or adopts. Such a family has natural prerogatives. (constellation law, section 10:3)

For sodomy, however, no special right or liberty proceeds from this Constitution. Nor do nature, or the dictates of political wisdom, or the imperative of defending marriage afford favor to sodomitic activity. For the purposes of this section sodomy is defined as a sexually active relationship, practicing and ongoing, between same-sex partners. (10:4)

Note that the term practicing governs the issue, as distinguished from orientation. The phrase “sexual orientation” is commonly used in the debate over this contentious topic, much to the confusion of the issue. For orientation is affiliated with temptation, and no Christian, Jewish or Islamic believer can rightly suppose that salvation turns on whether or not one gets tempted. Among the ways God tries, tests and strengthens us is by tribulation. Temptation is one form of tribulation in this world by which every human being is subjected to trial.[27] Theologians down through the ages have seen great merit in a person’s determination to resist temptation, but they identify no sin whatsoever in the temptation or the orientation itself – unless one is negligent in avoiding the occasions of sin, and thus invites the onset of temptation.

The ordeal of orientation along homosexual or lesbian lines is certainly no cause for legislating against victims of such temptation. But neither does yielding to such temptation by sodomizing someone else warrant equivalency legislation for marriage — like that pioneered in North America by Canada, or by state "laws" in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Vermont, or by the California Supreme Court’s nullification of a popularly enacted traditional marriage law – an act of judicial usurpation itself overturned by the people via Proposition 8 (November, 2008). To roll out the red carpet in the form of so called “gay-friendly” laws and government policy is to grant tacit public approval to “intrinsically disordered” conduct. Such conduct is “in no case to be approved of,"[28] according to America’s largest religious denomination – also the largest and oldest form of Christianity in the world.[29]

The argument over sodomy in the United States has, like abortion and euthanasia, seen a bitter quarrel. For the most part the national brawl has favored militant paganism, because the war has been waged in the context of civil liberties. Postmodernists have tried to confine the issue to civil rights, and have pretty much succeeded in keeping religious teaching on the immorality of homosexual practices off the table. Secularists either ignore or seek to discredit the many clear condemnations of sodomy, like the moral guidance of the Bible, and the heterosexual orientation of mainstream Western culture down through history.

In short, postmodernist revolutionaries have achieved a breakthrough with their blitzkrieg on the traditional family.[30] We have, therefore, no honorable choice but to take counterrevolutionary action. Section 10:3-4 restores the negative bent on buggery that governed society until the onslaught against Judeo-Christian faith and morals began in earnest about 1963. Section 10:5 follows up with enforcement.

No laws, federal, State or local, may finance or otherwise countenance unions that are sodomitic. In particular, adoption of children by same-sex partners engaged in sodomy is hereby forbidden. Sodomy is moral disorder, and sexually disordered morals magnify the risk of child abuse, thus imperiling the innocence of youth and the future of society.

At the moment of the arch-amendment’s ratification, public funding in support of what Montesquieu called “the sin against nature,” will become unconstitutional, as will special laws countenancing such practices. We should not, however, be so hard line as to impose reciprocity, or require states or localities to reverse particular arrangements made earlier under laws enacted prior to ratification.

In the case of human cloning, for example (if perverted science ever produces such a being), immigration would be forbidden from the day the constellation law goes into force. But section 10:7 would not mandate the deportation of such a person previously admitted legally to a state or locality. Likewise with same-sex marriage. Such unions already sealed under state or local laws would not be annulled legally, “unless and until rendered retroactive by the jurisdiction which originally enacted the law.”

Before moving on to section eleven, we need to reflect on tough love: As concerns fellow citizens who have fallen into a shameful perversity,[31] we do them no favor when the highest law of the land positively reinforces the very condition that ensnares them. As pointed out by the head of Family Research Institute, Paul Cameron, Ph.D.,

Homosexuals are sexually troubled people engaging in dangerous activities. Because we care about them and those tempted to join them, it is important that we neither encourage nor legitimize such a destructive lifestyle.[32]

Tough love is not hatred for gays and lesbians, as the postmodernist propaganda machine would have you believe. As Rev. Brian Fischer put it recently:

God does not hate homosexuals; Christians believe that he sent his only Son to die for them. We as Christians do not hate homosexuals. We love them, and love them enough to say that there is a better way to express sexual intimacy than by distorting God’s design.[33]

Neither, however, is it genuine love to force children into sodomitic living arrangements –– the postmodernist adoption policy affirmed in Canada, South Africa, Sweden, Spain, Denmark, The Netherlands, Iceland, and the UK. Also practiced by some government adoption agencies in the U.S.A., such a policy exhibits de facto malevolence for the hapless minor. In 2008, a statewide referendum brought Arkansas into line with Florida, Nebraska, Utah and Mississippi where state law banned gay adoption.[33a]

Merely to protest the moral reality of the illicit living arrangement into which the adopted child could be immersed may in itself fall under the category of so called “hate-speech,” given the nature of today’s politically correct climate backed by hate-crimes legislation. However, human legislation is no law at all, but rather oppression, if it contradicts divine law:

“Ye that love the Lord, hate evil”

(Psalm 97:10; cf. Romans 12:9).

It is best that we understand such Biblical hatred according to what St. Thomas Aquinas terms right reason.[34] “Love the sinner; hate the sin,” is an abiding principle of the moral code that stands preeminent down through the ages. We should not despise sodomites. But right-minded people ought to detest sodomy, notwithstanding fashionable ethics that spring forth from a culture in the throes of decadence.

Defenders of postmodernist culture try to portray any restriction on sexual activity as theocratic. The notion that by forbidding same-sex marriage and civil unions, for example, we are establishing a theocracy is, of course, preposterous. Until July 1, 2000, when Vermont legalized civil unions, none of the 50 United States or its territories possessed such a system. Are we to believe that prior to that date – including 7½ years of Bill Clinton’s administration – Americans lived in a theocracy?

It does not take a theocracy to set an immoral system aright. Once ratified, the constellation amendment will do so by eradicating the accretions whereby postmodernists have contorted the Constitution to lend political legitimacy to sin. In restoring the integrity of the Constitution, the United States will lift up an example of righteousness from which foreign nations will hopefully profit.

In conclusion, affirmation and tolerance can drive a double-edged dagger to the heart of fellow human beings whose moral peril calls instead for forewarning and admonishment. Under the constellation amendment, the law will cease to extend a comfort zone for either sodomy or abortion. Section 10:1-2 will extend tough love into the minds and hearts of pregnant mothers, with whom sadly the ultimate child abuse begins. Section 10: 3-4 will offer equivalent tough love to hedonists who have crossed the line into sexual perversion, or who seek governmental help to adopt children into their lifestyle.

Both sections ten and eleven aim generally to restore sobriety on civil rights, lest an inebriated sense of tolerance and drunken celebration of diversity carry the whole country down into irreversible decadence. As a formal culmination of the American Revolution, the great concluding sentence of the US Constitution christens the document as follows: “done in Convention … in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth.” By contrast, the French revolution not only secularized the dating system but de-Christianized the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. The Jacobins encouraged harlots to contaminate the sacred edifice, so that after the restoration of its Catholic character the venerable structure was liturgically cleansed and rededicated. Analogously sections 10-12 of the constellation law, together with the invocation, will decontaminate and rededicate to God that sacred legal edifice, the U.S. Constitution.

PORNOGRAPHY
(section eleven)

Introduction

Sexually Obsessed

Their life’s pilot resides in the loins;

Heart, brain, soul, subordinate to the crotch;

Trumping all desire to think, weigh, watch,

Or discern and do what wisdom enjoins.

In his book, Supercapitalism (2007) economist, Robert Reich, addresses the link between physical pollution and moral pollution. Under unregulated supercapitalism, Reich observes, the process of giving competitive deals to consumers “may depend on filling the air with gunk, filling the airwaves with sex and violence, or filling our stomachs with junk food.”[34a]

The most intimate of human relations is the last sphere in which society can afford to let the profit motive run rampant.[35]

A fundamental message of pornography and violence is disdain,
the consideration of others as objects rather than as persons.
Thus, pornography and violence can eat away at tenderness and
compassion and can foster insensitivity and even brutality.[36]

Author, editor and television host, Patrick Madrid,[37] wrote a perceptive piece in Catholic Exchange after the Abu Ghuraib prison abuse scandal of 2004 in Iraq.[38] Entitled, “Coming Home to Roost,” the article applies the old ‘monkey see, monkey do’ principle to our unruly troops, the young Americans who invaded Iraq and brought with them the pornography saturated culture whence they came. Mr. Madrid refutes the alibi that sadomasochistic U.S. soldiers were merely a few bad apples.

…The multi-billion dollar porn industry is finding and forming eager consumers at every level. Its many tentacles slither across our culture, snaking their way into our homes through our computers, televisions, radios, and DVD players.

Which leads me to my thesis about the "bad apples" among our troops in Iraq. Of course it's only a small minority of Americans there who are acting out these macabre sexual impositions against their Iraqi captives, but it seems to me that it's a significant minority. They reflect the moral state of the nation. They are America. And though we recoil in shock and embarrassment when confronted with their stupid and shameful antics with the prisoners, we shouldn't be surprised by their behavior. They learned it here, stateside, on the Internet, in the movies, at their neighborhood video store, in their living rooms….

Los Angeles Times commentator, Benjamin Schwartz, observed in 1999 that “those who call themselves conservative fail to recognize that the free market they embrace destroys the ‘community’ and ‘family values’ they espouse.” As for liberals, wrote Schwartz, “the left in America seems not to realize that the unlimited autonomy of individual desire and the ‘personal liberation’ that it celebrates goes hand in hand with the very economic system it finds so disquieting.”[39]

In 1989 a Vatican commission looked at the problem of pornography and reported the following effects:

Even so-called 'soft-core' pornography can have a progressively desensitizing effect, gradually rendering individuals morally numb and personally insensitive to the rights and dignity of others.

Exposure to pornography can also be – like exposure to narcotics – habit-forming and can lead individuals to seek increasingly 'hard core' and perverse material. The likelihood of anti-social behavior can grow as this process continues....

Indeed, pornography can militate against the family character of true human sexual expression. The more sexual activity is considered as a continuing frenzied search for personal gratification rather than as an expression of enduring love in marriage, the more pornography can be considered as a factor contributing to the undermining of wholesome family life.[40]

The significance of social revolution is comparable to, or may exceed in national importance, the historic changes that take place in the political and economic sectors. In the social sphere retrogressions and advances involve what the historian Macaulay called "the changes of manners and morals, the transition of communities...from knowledge to ignorance, from ferocity to humanity."[41]

We admit with all sincerity that our first duty is within our own household; that we must not merely talk, but act, in favor of cleanliness and decency and righteousness, in all political, social, and civic matters. No prosperity and no glory can save a nation that is rotten at heart. We must ever keep the core of our national being sound, and see to it that not only our citizens in private life, but, above all, our statesmen in public life, practice the old commonplace virtues which from time immemorial have lain at the root of all true national wellbeing. Teddy Roosevelt, 1901[42]

It should be obvious to observant Americans that powerful processes are reshaping society and the character of its culture. Our prosperity and happiness will never hinge on resisting inexorable historic shifts, or on keeping culture in a frozen state of status quo, but rather on guiding changes in a positive direction. To repeat a maxim that is trite but timely, "not all change is progress."

The apocalyptic cultural changes that have hit us with a vengeance during the postmodernist era were driven or at least spurred by campus activists who gave abject submission to their glands and called it sexual liberation. Columnist, Mona Charen, writes of the 60's revolutionaries that they "ushered in a coarse and vulgar age in which we lost the capacity to control pornography."[43] In other words the postmodernist revolution launched a blitz against American culture in 1963, and this shock and awe campaign included heavy barrages of pornography.

A great deal of what we cherish in this country is attributable to the American Revolution – a classic case of change that was reasonable and moderate in purpose. By contrast, the French Revolution was in some respects a tragedy for the host country as well as for Europe. The more moderate forces in France held the upper hand outside Paris, yet they failed to prevent Parisian based radicals, the Jacobins, from grasping the political controls in the capitol city, and launching the Reign of Terror against the Girondists, revolutionaries who were comparatively moderate but indecisive.[44] Thus the revolution degenerated into a crazed and licentious rampage. The great historian, Thomas Carlyle, summed it up in these words:

the friends of freedom and order
lost to the friends of freedom simple.[45]

The ongoing social change in America offers similar alternatives. In regard to sexual mores, we can continue the policy of drift and passively acquiesce while profiteers ranging from Playboy Magazine to the operators of pornographic video stores and internet sites fashion social change in their own image and interest. Or we can intervene decisively to defend the sanctity of sex from the powerful alliance of lust and monetary greed.

Let us make a pact with the reader, here and now, to approach this subject, the subject of censorship, in a rational matter without vituperation and personal invective. As Brian Wright O’Conner puts it:

The days are past when the war-cry of censorship worked like a charm,
branding the “moralists” as a pack of cultural fascists
eager to revive book-burnings and city censors.[46]

The constellation law would instead strike a blow for morality by capping one of the worst forms of pollution a society can suffer. The aim is to put a lid on the problem, not to repress democracy or genuine liberty. Regretfully, some people who acknowledge the enormity of the pornography problem still become overwrought at the idea of any intervention beyond voluntary boycotts. Though effective in isolated cases, boycotts have proven as potent in dealing with the aggregate problem as in fighting a cockroach infestation by using one’s thumb to squish them one at a time.[46a]:

When a solution to the problem of pornography on the macro level is proposed, defenders of prevailing postmodern paganism have no scruples about branding reformers with slanderous labels, like their ad hominem trump-card, “Nazi.” Even when the censorship is proposed in a form similar to what was commonplace in America for generations, an influential minority discounts history and opposes moves to restore order, being as they are dead-drunk on civil rights.[47]

The truth is that we already have some censorship, on child pornography for example; though even there – where it does not take a so-called moralist to have one’s conscience offended – cultural libertines are winning in postmodernist courts.[48] So for anyone who can apply logic to the issue of suppressing pornography, the question is not whether we should cap the problem, but how far down society should push the lid. The pornography problem is so thoroughly out of hand that limits need to be applied with a firm purpose of restoring moral order.

"There is," says Edmund Burke, "a limit at which forbearance ceases to be a virtue."[49] Allow the neo-Jacobins, the postmodernists, to retain their political leverage in the courts, and they will rip society away from what moral roots still remain. On the other hand, we can secure the Constitution for the forces of moderation; which is indeed what the constellation amendment proposes. Section eleven is proposed as a means for moderate society to intervene firmly, to act decisively in defense of genuine human dignity.

Pornography and Society

Some who acknowledge a personal revulsion for pornography nonetheless dismiss its social impact as relatively trivial. The very quantity of analytical literature on the problem indicates otherwise, however. In 1980 an annotated bibliography on the conflict over pornography in the United States — covering books published over the previous two decades and articles during a single decade — fills a volume of some 130 pages.[50]

Law professor, Peter Teachout, wrote that the legal battle over pornography involves "a life-and-death struggle between two powerfully competing conceptions of law," between society's right of self defense on the one hand, and the individual's right of personal preference on the other. The drama being played out over obscenity law is nothing less, according to Teachout, than a "critical struggle for the soul of the law."[51] During the quarter century after Teachout’s forewarning, the postmodernists won the sexual revolution and consolidated their gains through the courts. Groups like the American Family Association lost the battle, and the law lost its soul.

With the postmodernist regime now firmly in place, working assiduously to promote sordid sexual manners, nothing short of a counterrevolution can reverse the trend. Trying to convince the regime to restore high standards of sexual morality is, and will continue to be, an exercise in futility.

Surveys and referendums indicate that rank-and-file public opinion in America as a whole still opposes pornography and desires to curb it, though the strength of popular conviction is gradually eroding.[52] The popular desire to do something about the problem indicates what political science professor Harry M. Clor calls "an awareness (however unarticulated) that vital questions, ultimate questions, lie beneath the surface."[53]

The founder of the sociology department at Harvard University, Petrim Sorokin, looked at the whole issue of the sexual revolution in the Western World. Anarchy in sexual mores "deserves as much public attention as any political or economic change," wrote Sorokin, and the consequences "are likely to be more far-reaching than those of almost all other revolutions, except perhaps the total revolutions such as the Russian Revolution."[54]

According to Sorokin, Euro-American culture is in a degenerating phase similar to that of ancient Greece and Rome, where also sexual anarchy and eroticism began to pervade the cultures.[55] For America, however, the process is not yet irreversible. "Once in a while," says Sorokin, "through a lucky combination of circumstances, and through an earnest and strenuous effort of the society itself, it may regain its mental and moral sanity; may halt the dangerous drift...."[56] Sorokin cites the massive cross-cultural study, Sex and Culture, by Joseph Unwin who presents historical evidence that the falling away of sexual restraint does not exert its full negative impact upon the vitals of a culture for three generations.[57] For nearly half that duration the postmodernist regime has been ruling America.

There are voices today who will oppose any concrete action to save the situation unless it is justified beforehand not just by historical, philosophical and religious rationale but by the most rigorous scientific demonstrations of a cause/effect relationship. Theirs is a formula for paralysis, inasmuch as the effects of a bad moral environment are in some cases impossible to isolate in controlled laboratory conditions.[58] Society is virtually helpless to defend itself if it must first justify that defense by tracing visible social evils back through a labyrinth of complicated causal sequences until the culprit is bird-dogged by a consensus of sociologists.

In the struggle of the last four decades or so to win protections against despoilers of the environment, corporate polluters have sponsored scores of quasi-scientific studies purporting to prove that we have little or nothing to worry about. Inevitably, also, they resort to the mantra that "more study is needed." In other words they want us to wait interminably for still more studies and "scientific evidence" before we attribute any blame to industry for the long-term health problems that burden our society with productivity losses and health-care costs.[58a]

Likewise as regards cultural pollution: Corporate pornographers hire psychologists and other "experts" to wrap the frock coat of the junk scientist around denials of good sense. Reason, logic and religion all give testimony that profiteers in pornography are giving a powerful push to the moral decay of American society, with a host of attendant costs to all of us. But the multi-billion dollar pornography industry has an interest in confusing the issue with demands for empirical proofs so stringent as to cast doubt on any value judgment, no matter how well it might accord with right reason and intuitive understanding.

Logic and intuition are anathema to the most avid apostles of the empirical method. An example of the way exclusive reliance on empiricism would paralyze social activism is exhibited in a recent column. The author quarrels with prominent posting of the Ten Commandments for lack of scientific proof of their worth:

Some would have the Court scuttle its interpretation of the First Amendment and allow the posting of the Ten Commandments in public places. But to do that, we'd need irrefutable evidence that it's the absence of the Ten Commandments in public places that's the main cause of our social ills, and that simply posting the document would cure those ills. Allegations wouldn't be enough here.[59]

The demand for a rigorous proof of the cause and effect relationship between pornography and social decay is probably more unreasonable than requiring similar proof in the case of poverty and crime. Our intuitive belief that poverty breeds criminal behavior would alone suffice to justify anti-poverty action, even though cause/effect can be demonstrated for only a small minority of impoverished people.[60] As Clor points out, given the impossibility of proof, "science tends to give way to social philosophy and to sober reflection upon common experience."[61]

In the case of the pornographic deluge of recent years we may be inclined to say with Burke, "there are some follies which baffle argument, which go beyond ridicule; and which excite no feeling in us but disgust; and therefore I say no more upon it."[62] Today, unfortunately, it is necessary to say more, if only in response to groups like the majority for the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (1970) who not only whitewashed the problem of pornography, but tried to claim scientific support for the proposition that pornography is socially harmless.[63] Sixteen years later, during the Reagan administration, another U.S. Government commission on pornography took the opposite view.[64] The years between the two commissions saw pornography increase vastly, both in magnitude and malevolence. New studies on sexual morality and conduct were also forthcoming, notwithstanding that for the most part "methodological problems would seem to be insuperable.”[65]

Not all attempts to overcome the difficulties of the empirical approach in intimate matters have been complete failures. As detailed in the University of Pennsylvania's Journal of Communications, professors Dolf Zillman and Jennings Bryant subjected 180 college students to varying doses of pornography over an extended time frame. The longer the duration of viewing time the more the students surveyed tended to trivialize the seriousness of rape, and to lose compassion for rape victims.[66] Pornography callused the viewers to what had previously revolted them, and eventually even allured some to it – by the same process which Alexander Pope put to verse 2½ centuries ago:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,
As to be hated needs but to be seen;
Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,
We first endure, then pity, then embrace.[67]

Not all social scientists limit themselves to empirical studies under controlled conditions; some like Unwin venture into the great record book of history. Others find contemporary evidence in the laboratory of the living society. Ernst van den Haag, finds desensitization operable on the national scale and draws conclusions. "If we indulge pornography," says Haag, "our society at best will become ever more coarse, brutal, anxious, indifferent, de-individualized, hedonistic; at worst its ethos will disintegrate altogether."[68]

A wealth of scholarly literature is available dealing with pornography and other forms of sexual anarchy, and their effects upon culture and society; but the literature is too extensive for a thoroughgoing survey here. Recommended are the cited works of Berns, Clor, Devlin, Haag, Linedecker, Mishan, Robertson, Sorokin, Stanmeyer, Sunderland, Unwin.

Walter Berns' analysis suggests that it is natural and healthy when the publicizing of private parts begets a personal sense of shame; this instinct of shame serves to protect private tenderness and love. By breeding shamelessness, pornography diminishes the social prevalence of compassion and true love, which are great wellsprings of self-restraint in a populace.

There is a sense of shame laden with guilt,
and a shame that merits honor and respect.

Old Testament, Sirach 4:21

Democratic forms of government require of the citizenry a self-governing of the passions; and when this government from within the personality gives way to license, the political government gravitates naturally toward oppression. Berns concludes that "tyranny is the natural and inevitable mode of government for the shameless and self-indulgent who have carried liberty beyond any restraint, natural or conventional."[69]

In other words, there is not only a distinction between license and liberty but also an implacable enmity. License undermines liberty as surely as termites can ruin a house. As license becomes more prevalent in society the populace becomes tumultuous and unstable. Civil liberty is used with less and less responsibility; it becomes an excuse for discord and sinfulness. Finally an increasing yearning for order is answered by some form of despotism.

Herbert Marcuse

Herbert Marcuse
(1898-1979)

Of course there are increasingly vocal and highly placed Americans, like Debra Haffner of the sex information council, who fail to see anything positive in a personal sense of modesty and shame when confronted with explicit sexual terminology. On the contrary, Haffner disapproved of the discomfort exhibited by Senators over vulgar language during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Ms. Haffner perceived the senatorial qualms as a manifestation of puritanical mores that is overdue for extirpation. Extending sex education with the most explicit terminology even to kindergartners is the way she would rid society of its scruples.[70]

There are an increasing number of Americans like Haffner who see our reluctance to talk freely and openly about intimate sexual matters as a "hang-up" that needs to be overcome. Such people will not agree, of course, with Berns on the cultural utility of a sense of shame. They see modesty as a vice and shamelessness as a virtue. Indeed, the pornographic mentality is quite in tune with Marxist, Herbert Marcuse, and the Frankfort School in advocating free and open sexuality as a weapon with which to destroy the system and usher in Marxism.[71] Most Americans have never heard of the Frankfort school, or Professor Marcuse, and would, I dare say, oppose them in proportion as they understood them.

Relatively few Americans would embrace, for example, the Marcusean principle that moral perversions are good insofar as they cause traditional culture to crumble and Judeo-Christian morality to disintegrate. Riotous rock music did not escape Marcuse’s attention as a harbinger of neo-Marxist “freedom.” I’m not sure if James Hetfield, cofounder of the heavy metal rock group, Metallica, has ever read Marcuse, but his conception of freedom exhibits a similar, if less erudite, mania.

Upon learning that the U.S. military had adopted Metallica CD’s as a new form of weaponry in “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” Hetfield expressed satisfaction that his tunes were proving culturally offensive to the Iraqis. “For me, the lyrics are a form of expression, a freedom to express my insanity,” said Hetfield. “If the Iraqis aren't used to freedom, then I'm glad to be part of their exposure.”[72]

Hetfield was at least willing to be direct. The Frankford School was less candid. Their approach was to insinuate poison into a country’s culture gradually, rather than blast it into unreceptive ears via boom boxes and speakers as big as sepulchers hung on Humvees.[73] But Metallica and Marcuse do exhibit common traits. Both propose a wild and selfish vision of freedom, and neither care a whit for the freedom of respectable Americans to create an environment where families and children can live happily under laws that favor piety and promote social harmony.

In utter contrast to the Frankford School, religion, right reason, and the Father of our republic, George Washington, all urge us to distinguish between license and liberty and to choose the latter.[74] John Milton describes the result of opting for license:

Reason in man obscured, or not obeyed, immediately inordinate desires and upstart passions catch the government from reason, and to servitude reduce man till then free. Therefore since he permits within himself unworthy power to reign over free reason, God in judgment just subjects him from without to violent lords. (Milton, Paradise Lost)[75]

Paradise Lost is an apt citation for America at this time because, as the poem’s title suggests, we risk losing something wonderful unless we heed the warnings that are replete in our national heritage. A mid 19th century Speaker of the U.S. House, Robert Winthrop of Massachusetts, said this: "Men in a word must be controlled by a power within them or by a power without them; either by the word of God or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible or the bayonet."[76]

It is one of the great signs of spiritual and political obtuseness in modern times that censorship of any kind is opposed because, we are told, it will take us down the road to a police state. Yet censoring immorality (“to execute wrath on him who does evil”[77]) has a history of slowing or reversing the very cultural trends that usher in the iron brutality of political tyranny. With the inexorable advance of cause and effect, the police state we dread will rear its ugly head unless Americans emerge from their stupor and redirect censorship, putting down vice rather than censoring religion in public life. In other words, let us identify ethical problems that have the potency to demean the culture and ruin the nation – whereupon the imperative is to pursue direct solutions.

Lord Patrick Devlin, the late British jurist, questioned whether any Plimsoll line exists to indicate the level at which unrestricted indulgence will sink freedom. Nevertheless it is obvious, he says, that somewhere a threshold does exist, and that if a sufficient portion of the populace becomes habituated in vice, "society will succumb either to its own disease or to external pressure." Lord Devlin adds pointedly that "a nation of debauchees would not in 1940 have responded satisfactorily to Winston Churchill's call to blood and toil and sweat and tears."[78]

Sorokin writes that "a perennial war among members of the collectivity" is the direct result of a general decline in morality. He elaborates as follows. "No law-abiding and morally strong society is possible when a large number of its members are selfish nihilists preoccupied with pleasure. For inevitably such men and women come into conflict with one another, and are led to chronic violation of moral and legal imperatives and to endless transgression of the vital interests of each other."[79]

This prospect of increasing division and divisiveness calls ominously to mind the late Chief Justice Warren Burger's oft repeated lamentations about the increasing litigiousness of the American people.

Pope Leo XIII wrote in 1891 that "when a society is perishing, the true advice to give to those who would restore it is to recall it to the principles from which it sprang."[80] By restoring a measure of reverence and spirituality to education, section twelve of the arch-amendment represents a stanza in the bugle call for the restoration of original principles. But no such call can be accepted or even heard by a society which suffers from obsession with sensual indulgence.

Fine manners need the support of
fine manners in others.
Emerson[81]

At a heavy metal concert one could hardly do justice to Bach or Mozart. As Franz Schubert said, bad music is conducive not to love but to madness. Likewise, a pornography saturated society has its attention diverted by "appeals to the basest propensities" in human nature.[82] To whitewash all this, the regime’s spokespersons for postmodern paganism proclaim the thesis that no one is compelled by force – that one has only to avert the eye and stop the ear. The power at work via the entertainment industry is of a more subtle kind than physical compulsion, however. As Judge Robert Bork puts it in his book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: "‘Don’t buy it’ and ‘Change the channel,’ however intended, are effectively advice to accept a degenerating culture and its consequences."[83]

An instructive analogy is the policy of the United States and the Western World on bigamy. A libertarian might oppose government intervention on the grounds that a woman has only to say no to a proposal of polygamous marriage. Yet no Western leader of sense wants to let his country become a harem ridden society. Not even in Utah [84] does public opinion support a policy of tolerance for polygamy or bigamy. "Let the prospective wife decide whether to enter the harem and without government interference," is as plausible an appeal to freedom as to allow X-rated television on grounds that nothing prevents home audiences from switching the channel. In an ideal world where everyone decided aright there would be no need for public intervention on these or any other questions.

The practical fact, the social reality, is that a captivating appeal to the darker instincts in men, women and children is indeed securing a widespread and increasing following. Expanding markets for so called "gay" pornography, and materials depicting child molestation, croak out warnings that Western culture is descending into regions unvisited since pagan antiquity.[85] The roman city of Pompeii comes to mind. The city abounded in pornography. Venus was the city's patron deity, and her numerous household shrines have been unearthed from beneath the ashes of Mt. Vesuvius. As an historian of the ill fated city puts it, "the worship of Venus Physica by wealthy Romans knew no bounds in their debaucheries at Pompeii, where every new excess was hailed as another triumph of the goddess."[86]

Unless we change directions and defend modern American culture against what First Things editor, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, has called “the New York-Hollywood axis,” it takes no prophet to foresee that the moral standards of pagan antiquity are going to resume their cruel ascendancy. Under the postmodernist regime we are almost there already.

What we must fear is the ongoing process of cultural saturation. A Time Magazine survey reported in 1986 that 62 percent of adult Americans had attended an X-rated motion picture at least once, almost double the percentage for Americans a decade earlier.[87] Employing cable, satellite and computer technology, modern porno pushers are able to reach the remotest small towns and farms, thereby to spread the morals of the New York-Hollywood axis to every village and hamlet. At Carnegie Mellon University a dozen years ago a research associate studying computer networks found that nearly a million explicit images were on line, including child pornography and other perversions.[88] About the same time Yahoo did an analysis of its www search engine and found that a majority of the hits were to pornographic sites.

As this ongoing corruption infects the multitude, the pornographic mentality leads to cultural changes that include all sorts of aberrations. Mass murderer, Ted Bundy, was a case in point, according to his own testimony.[89] Of 36 serial sex murderers interviewed by the FBI in 1985, four out of five admitted to using pornography.[90]

However, if we halt and reverse the contagion by political means, and thus give society a chance to cool off, as it were; the call to the original principles from which our culture sprang can receive a fairer hearing. As Clor observes, if pornography becomes less freely available, "there is some prospect for healthier attitudes to win out," i.e. for the high and the serene to be heard over the din and the glare of the lower impulses.[91] In other words, American culture needs some time to sober up, i.e. to undergo sexual detoxification.

Free circulation of pornography has both direct and indirect effects on collective values. Directly, according to Clor, it leads the multitude to conclude that their moral code is outdated, especially where the habit of restraining passions and forgoing certain pleasures seems to be at variance with modern trends.[92]

The indirect effect is this: Social mores do not rest solely upon well formulated convictions but also on what Clor calls "a delicate network of moral and aesthetic feelings, sensibilities, tastes" including attributes like mercy and compassion. When delicate feelings of this kind are swamped by a culture saturated with pornography, says Clor, the prevailing moral code "tends to degenerate into a collection of abstract precepts or a calculus of self interest."[93] Or worse, people become like the prison guards at Abu Ghuraib. In short, pornography desensitizes people, promoting selfishness and the grosser passions while corroding the more refined feelings, thereby downgrading society's ethical and aesthetic sensibilities.

Taking Action

The objective of section eleven of the arch-amendment is not to put a watertight seal on the flow of pornography but rather to close the floodgates, i.e. to stop the mass-marketing. As much as we might personally rejoice to see every vestige of pornography absent from the United States, this ideal is not the intent of section eleven, nor a realistic possibility under the institutions of a free republic. The best to be hoped for in a democratic society is to keep sexual vice within reasonable bounds – to get a handle on it, to keep a lid on the problem. As the historian Macaulay observed, "when a government, not content with requiring decency, requires sanctity, it oversteps the bounds which mark its proper functions. And it may be laid down as a universal rule that a government which attempts more than it ought will perform less." Thus, according to Macaulay, the Puritanism enforced in Cromwell's England tended to inspire and enhance that period of license which broke loose during the Restoration.[94] America's prohibition of alcohol (1919-1933) is another case in point — government not just checking public drunkenness but going so far as to enforce tee totaling.

The intent of the constellation law is to deter and greatly to slow the commercialization of sex,[95] particularly as manifested in obscene magazines, motion pictures and internet sites. To create a new Plymouth on the Puritan model is definitely not the idea; but rather to prevent obscenity and debauchery from becoming principal features of American culture — that is to return these evils to the marginal and subterranean spheres of society where, if anywhere, they are endurable.

While emulation of the Puritans is out of the question, nevertheless a relatively hard line is intentionally built into section eleven by reserving the office of Cultural Laundress for females exclusively. In 2005 when the U.S. Army hired at public expense a scantily clad troupe which specializes in provocative “dancing,” and then sent these “Purrfect Angelz” (as they called themselves) on a tour of military bases in Iraq, it was females in the military who voiced the strongest objections. And it was U.S. Air Force public affairs officer, Sharon Kibiloski, stationed in Baghdad, who had the courage to complain to the press.[96]

Surveys show that women are generally more restrained than men on sexual matters, (though under the postmodernist regime that is eroding), and that women tend to find pornography more objectionable than do men.[97] The inclination of females to higher morality in sexual matters is one that transcends national borders. In France, for example, 76 percent of females in 2002 backed a ban on television pornography, compared to 51 percent for the men.[98]

Since females are the primary focus of pornography, it is no surprise when women are most anxious about the problem. She cannot be comfortable who goes on display like beef in a meat market. Pornography feeds the view of women as objects meant for exploitation. The increasing accessibility of obscene materials, and the cruel passions which such materials generate, has created a stock yard, slaughter house environment for many women.

Sooner or later, in one way or another, the
consumers want to live out the pornography
further in three dimensions.[99]

One in nine American females have been raped at least once, according to a 1990 survey. Of the some 12.1 million rape victims, 62 percent were minors under the age of 18, and 29 percent were ten years old or younger.[100]

The office created by section eleven (Cultural Laundress) is designed to spearhead a national cleanup. With a woman at the helm, minimum age 35 – same requisite age as the Presidency – the discernment and repudiation of pornography in America should proceed more rapidly and steadily than if the pace depended on the level of male concern. Let a lady govern the agency and gauge the urgency.

In deciding upon a title for the leader of a cultural cleanup, we might go with “culture keeper” to reflect the ecological parallel. Better, however, would be a title that reminds our public servant that her purview is limited to swabbing the ship of state’s deck and cleaning it of pornography, i.e. SLOPP; and that she has no jurisdiction over other cultural shortcomings like violence or functional illiteracy, or like the four other evils addressed at the beginning of this chapter – abortion, sodomy, human cloning, and euthanasia. Since her only job will be to lead a national clean up of a besotted and sullied culture, I propose the title, “Cultural Laundress,” for the elected federal official charged with sanitizing America’s ethical laundry. Indeed our collective laundry is badly soiled as a result of popular obsession with sex, and decades with little or no limits on its expression.

Another choice suggesting a bit too wide a purview would be the title, “mistress of sexual mores.” To be sure, the aim in creating the new office is not to regulate activities carried on in private, but rather to put a lid on the abominations spewed forth and spread abroad via the media and the multi-billion dollar entertainment industry. Cultural Laundress is preferable, therefore, because it connotes more closely the limited job description of cleaning up the culture from the smut meant for display in public – hence laundering as distinguished from suppressing immorality carried on privately. Another advantage to the proposed title is that the office of Cultural Laundress could be represented by a meaningful acronym: CuL. We the people would commission madam CuL to cull the toxic fare disseminated to the public via the mass media and obscene forms of entertainment. Her job would be to cull out the contagion of lewd images by which unregulated capitalism is corrupting kids and poisoning American culture.

Community Standards

Under section eleven of the constellation law, contemporary community standards would become the chief criteria whereby to pinpoint the obscenity that society wants to suppress. Section eleven would specifically outlaw "sexually licentious or pornographic public phenomena" (abbreviated SLOPPP) and would authorize the newly created Cultural Laundress to determine whether or not particular sexual phenomena circulating in public fell into the SLOPPP category. This exercise of 'judicial discretion' is to be made by the Cultural Laundress on the basis of case by case inspections. As the spokesman for contemporary community standards, her credentials would consist of her unique status as the only member of the Supreme Court whom the people elect. Every two years there would be an election for the position of Cultural Laundress, with the campaign focused on the issue of pornography.

In 1927 Benjamin Cardozo, later U.S. Supreme Court Justice, wrote: "Law accepts as the pattern of its justice the morality of the community whose conduct it assumes to regulate."[101] In practice the convoluted process of determining what is lawful or not according to contemporary community standards, and the five additional criteria required by the Court,[102] has made the task of identifying obscenity more complicated than a bucket of worms. The procedures are so labyrinthine and uncertain of result that prosecutors and police rarely make more than token efforts anymore to enforce community standards through obscenity laws.[103] Society is faced with this dilemma: the Court has often said that obscenity may be outlawed;[104] but what obscenity is – how society identifies it – is virtually impossible to determine for the practical purposes of legal enforcement. As early as 1940 a Federal Appeals Court recognized that "obscenity is not a technical term of the law and is not susceptible of exact definition." Yet during the subsequent generation or so a floundering and futile quest has continued for a definition that satisfies the passion of legal theorists for symmetry and exactitude.[105] The quest has been a debacle at best, with virtual anarchy today in the field of obscenity legislation and enforcement.

The currently prevailing criteria were set forth in the Miller case (1973), and are replete with more subjective terms and adjectives than ever, such as "prurient interest," "hard core," and "serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."[106] Applying traditional due process procedures, the Court requires the most rigorous specificity by legislators in defining beforehand the proscribed obscenity; and yet given the very nature of the problem, the Court itself is unable to define for us the constitutional meaning of obscenity except by employing a lot of adjectives and subjective terms.[107] Our system has yet to come to grips with this fact: that enforcement of subjective norms on obscenity requires subjective discretion by someone representative of community standards.[108] Meanwhile the Court has proceeded as if legislators can draft airtight and enforceable definitions in advance.[109] The result has been a legal Gordian knot, or to use Geoffrey Robertson's phrase, a "jurisprudential morass."[110] Gary Wills has called obscenity law a "legal tangle," as "spaghetti-like as any orgy scene."[111]

It is no accident that the postmodernist regime has tied up in the courts any hope of reviving Judeo-Christian social norms. Legal obfuscation that hamstrings moral reform, especially in the realm of human sexuality, is quite in keeping with what the regime is all about. In his prophetic, Eros and Civilization (1955) Marcuse considered a world of “polymorphous perversity” as an aim to be pursued as part of the Frankfurt School agenda.[112] And alas the postmodernist regime has taken Marcuse’s vision and enforced it with a vengeance. Thus the postmodernist era features a victorious sexual revolution that scorns chastity and marginalizes the virtue of modesty. Postmodernists consider this development desirable and delightful – a worthy cause for the politburo of nine to defend. The job of postmodernist judges is to make sure that restoration of mores based on modesty and Judeo-Christian morality is a cause that remains forever entwined in the tentacles of judicial usurpation.

Under this anarchistic state of preconceived confusion, contemporary community standards is but one of six criteria,[113] all highly subjective, which must be present to qualify it for suppression as obscenity. The constellation law, section eleven, will consolidate these various elements in the Miller test for obscenity, allowing also for additional considerations that society at large may give priority. The interplay of all these criteria according to their respective weights in society's scale of values will merge as one overriding norm — the contemporary community standards personified in the Cultural Laundress.

With unilateral powers of prior restraint, let her office issue clarion calls against SLOPPP that bring the palisades of premeditated chaos tumbling down like the walls of Jericho.

In U.S. history two institutions have served to represent community standards, the judiciary and the jury. Let us examine the performance of both as regards the problem of pornography.

The Judicial Branch of the Federal Government frequently overturns obscenity convictions and legislation on grounds that the pornography in question was not "hard core" or perhaps not "lacking in serious artistic value," or then again not appealing primarily to the "prurient interest." Such decisions may or may not relate to community standards, but doubtless they do reflect the standards that prevail on the bench — as per Justice Stewart's oft quoted opinion conceding that he might never succeed in intelligibly defining hard-core pornography, "but I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that."[114]

To render such obviously subjective decisions, today's judiciary is singularly unqualified. We are hard pressed to envision a profession that is less representative of the community at large than are the life-tenured Federal judges and Justices. In his 1981 book, the chief justice of the West Virginia supreme court, Richard Neely, elaborated candidly on why judges constitute a privileged class, economically and socially [115] — an elite far removed from the Miller decision's "average person" who is supposed to indicate contemporary community standards.

It is not just the bench but the bar which holds such poor credentials for the arbitration of social issues. The training of an attorney during law school followed by courtroom experience is based on precedent and procedure. The whole orientation is toward adversary proceedings that emphasize strategy, tactics and maneuver. Today’s lawyers may be more poorly schooled in philosophical contemplation than most other professions. It is noteworthy that most of the Framers of the Constitution were non-attorneys. Entrance into the American Bar Association is but scantily correlated (if not inversely so) with the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance.

A decade into the postmodernist era there was a useful study of attitudes toward pornography among university students majoring in sociology. Campuses were quite liberal then, and even in that relatively liberal segment within campus society (sociology), the students introduced an array of moral considerations into their definitions of pornography. The researchers characterized the student definitions of pornography as more like court definitions before 1940 than recent judicial rulings, where the trend had been (and remains) to sanitize decisions of the sort of rationale that carry moral overtones.[116] In obscenity rulings, the Court has strayed very far afield from contemporary community standards.

The body of obscenity law created since 1957 is primarily judge-made law. It was conceived in the confines of the legal system and thus reflective of what chief justice Neely calls the "preeminent shortcoming" of the judiciary. Judges are noted for "looking at one small part of a total social problem – the aspect brought to them by the litigants – and arriving at a solution for that piece of the problem out of the context of the total social system in which the problem exists."[117]

One is reminded of the John Hinckley case of 1982 where the judge instructed the jury to ignore the implications for society of whether an assassination attempt on the President gets punished or not, but rather to reach a verdict solely on the basis of Hinkley's mental competence. The courts are not oriented to decide issues on the basis of the total picture.

For the purpose of arbitrating the nationwide pornography controversy, then, the Federal judiciary has little to recommend it. The legal and the judicial systems are poor tutors for the moral purpose, and a prudent policy on obscenity must take morality into account. Neither are the appointed and life-tenured Federal judges well situated by the nature of their office to represent or determine contemporary community standards.

The second institution which has sometimes been the determiner of community standards is the jury. Before the Roth decision (1957) the issue of whether a work was obscene was "exclusively a question for the jury."[118] At the trial stage, the jury has continued to play a significant role in representing the so called average man of the Miller case, and in discerning contemporary community standards,[119] but the judiciary has assumed full jurisdiction over the rest of the elements in the obscenity test. At the appeals stage there is no jury; discerning obscenity therefore depends ultimately and exclusively on a socio-economic elite, the politburo of nine, who are unaccountable to the people.

In England, however, juries still decide whether a work is obscene, i.e. whether it has "a tendency to deprave and corrupt." Unfortunately, leaving the matter to juries is an enduring failure in England. From the disseminator's point of view, equity is lacking because they have no reasonable certainty about what is illegal; hundreds of cases are resolved in various and sundry fashion by hundreds of juries each following their own standards and lines of reasoning.[120] From the point of view of society, the English system has "misfired" and is not reducing the availability of obscene materials. Law enforcement officials there tend not to prosecute, because each jury is an unknown quantity promising no great likelihood of conviction. When juries do convict, the penalties in England are slight — and rightly so, inasmuch as the plethora of jury decisions indicate no distinct line of illegality to warn the offender in advance. Instead of a clear line of demarcation there is an erratic maze of broken lines. In short, after profiteers opened the floodgates to pornography, the jury system in England proved quite incompetent to close them.

Unlike juries, the verdict implicit in new CuL injunctions would have consistency and regularity, insofar as a single national official, the Cultural Laundress, draws by her policies a predictable line of demarcation and defends it for the duration of her incumbency. Both disseminators of pornography and prosecutors would have a standard by which to identify SLOPPP. And in contrast to jury selection by means of the lot, the electorate (through universal suffrage) will deliberate and decide between candidates for Cultural Laundress (constellation law, section 11:3).

The idea of the people electing a member of the Supreme Court is well precedented at the State level. In some two-thirds of the States, popular elections install and/or retain the judges in the State supreme courts.[121] Under section eleven, however, only the new Cultural Laundress will be elected. She will be an ex officio, non-voting member; the original nine permanent Justiceships to remain appointive.

Another consideration concerning CuL elections is that balloting for the office will record the "deliberate sense of the community," as the Federalist Papers termed it.[122] This popular verdict registered after time for deliberation is surely better on vital issues like the value of modesty in society, than casual opinions given to pollsters, or the flip of the dial fancies which fluctuate the ratings for television programs. The verdict of the electorate will follow a campaign of some length (no less than one month under section 11:3) during which each voter will have occasion to reflect on the extent of pornography that is tolerable in his country, and in her home town environment.

In addition Madam CuL will have brevity of tenure — a two year term with rotation mandated after the second term (section 11:2), thus changing the incumbent frequently enough to assure the "contemporary" aspect of community standards. The problem with staying too long at the top is that you lose touch with the bottom. The rotation serves also to prevent the incumbent from becoming callous or indifferent to pornography (or worse, captivated by it), after an indefinite exposure to the problem. Also the four year maximum on continuous service will inhibit any tendency for a crony relationship to develop with disseminators. Finally the rotation will maximize the democratic character of the elections by keeping low the advantage of incumbency.

In terms of efficiency the greatest advantage of section eleven over the pre-Roth jury system is that CuL injunctions will establish well marked unambiguous boundaries between what is lawful and what is illegal. If the Cultural Laundress decides, for example, that a particular X- rated film constitutes SLOPPP, then when she enjoins its dissemination it will be obvious to any operator or distributor that he will be dealing in contraband if he continues to show or distribute that particular film. The defendant would claim in vain that the system deprived him of reasonable certainty. From the perspective of law enforcement, prosecution will be greatly simplified, since a presentation to a jury need only consist of evidence that the defendant did indeed distribute, say to a web site, the X-rated film (or clip) after the injunction against it was properly promulgated by Madam CuL's office. The prosecutor need plunge into none of the nebulous and abstruse questions about what obscenity means. The American people will determine such questions when they elect the Cultural Laundress.

Another advantage of the office of Cultural Laundress over the pre-Roth jury is the powerful deterrent that springs from having one person acting with unity of purpose and with the authority to act on a moment's notice. As in the UK, having the innumerable juries lead the reform would be too cumbersome, slow, and inconsistent in results to budge much less to close the pornography floodgates. But by the grace of God and a willing electorate, we will soon hear the floodgates groaning on their hinges, should the constellation amendment be ratified.

Section eleven will combine the popular and representative character of Madam CuL with her ability to act quickly, efficiently and with unmistakable authority. A good part of her effectiveness will depend upon the nature of her staff. The constellation law provides for three levels of paid service under the office of CuL, each dependent on the three basic levels of government, Federal, State and local. Section 11:10 gives each level the authority to provide for salaried positions whereby to enforce CuL injunctions in the respective jurisdiction. In addition Cultural Laundress may deputize volunteers, so that another consideration than tax revenues may come into play in the battle against cultural pollution. This will help silence the old refrain [“Manana is soon enough for me”] on the pretext that cleaning house is a laudable cause, but we just cannot afford it at this time.

Critics will no doubt make disparaging allusions to Marshall Dillon deputizing citizens in the wild-west. Let our refutation be threefold. [1] None of the CuL injunctions will invoke raw power. Section eleven is replete with checks and balances, including the authority of the legislative branches at the Federal, State and local levels to determine what punishment, if any, is meted out for violation of CuL injunctions. [2] At its worst the wild-west featured violence, turmoil, and lawlessness – the very contours of the pornography landscape today. Deputizing volunteers may prove indispensable as in the past. Volunteerism is a powerful force in America, and a potentially decisive resource in the counterrevolution against postmodern paganism. [3] Uniquely American environmental protection laws, including citizen enforcement ordinances, authorize private citizens "to stand in the shoes of the U.S. Attorney, to bring lawsuits against polluters, and levy penalties to the U.S. Treasury." Provisions of the law that empower individuals outside of government to play a role in enforcement of environmental protections is, according to Bobby Kennedy, Jr. and John Cronin, an indispensable element lest legislation protecting the nation's public trust become no more weighty than ink on paper. Thus the central tenet of the Waterkeeper movement is "the idea that all members of a community are the owners of its resources and that injury to resources is an act of theft against each member."[122a]

Supporting Role of the Jury

Notwithstanding the disutility of the trial jury as a spearhead of reform, the jury system would play an important supporting role under the constellation law in (A) complementing CuL injunctions, and (B) serving as yet another check to any abuse of discretionary powers by the Cultural Laundress.

In complementing the CuL's work, the jury will be able to smooth off any rough edges in her injunctions. Suppose, for example, that a charge is brought against a distributor who ships an issue of Hustler magazines in violation of a CuL injunction promulgated on the CuL website the previous day. The defendant claims that his machinery of distribution was already in motion and that one day's notice allowed insufficient time to stop shipment. The jury would resolve this question of equity on the basis of information brought to light at the trial.

Suppose again that after a CuL injunction against a particular X-rated film, its producer makes a few inconsequential modifications and reissues the film under a different title – a dodge already pioneered by pornography producers.[123] At the trial it would be the jury's task to determine whether the reissue was essentially the same as the enjoined version, or whether in reality there was a significant departure from the original, or at least a good faith attempt.

As for checks to Madam CuL if she goes off the deep end, the twelve jurors would be able to cast their historic and well precedented veto against any too rigorous enforcement of morals. Judge Devlin describes the juror in this role: "If he gravely dislikes a law or thinks its application too harsh, he has the power, which from time immemorial he has exercised, to return a verdict of acquittal that is unassailable."[124] A case in point would be the Mapplethorpe Obscenity Case of 1990, in which a Cincinnati, Ohio jury returned a verdict of not guilty in the criminal trial of an art museum director.[125] That negative by the jury ended the matter. Similarly, if the injunctions of a particular Cultural Laundress should become too puritanical for the public mind, then juries may impose their check.

In the event that property is seized, and the office of CuL gets sued for damages, a jury would again decide. Awarding punitive damages would be another way for the jury to deter a Cultural Laundress inclined to abuse her discretionary authority.

Suppose that a particular incumbent CuL fell victim to aberrant zeal and began moving against phenomena that were unrelated, or but remotely related, to her area of jurisdiction — consisting as it does under section 11:5 exclusively of 'sexually licentious or pornographic public phenomena' (SLOPPP). Suppose she started issuing injunctions against The Ladies Home Journal on the basis of its swimsuit advertisements. (I use this unlikely burlesque to make a point). Assume also that the U.S. Supreme Court fails to overturn the injunction, as it can under section 11:12. Carrying this highly unlikely scenario still further, suppose that a Federal prosecutor is found and a grand jury [126] persuaded to bring charges, all this before the incumbent CuL is rotated or voted out, and before her successor cancels the injunction. After this improbable series of events, the glaring issue of whether Madam CuL exceeded her constitutional authority is going to be prominent in the courtroom, to put it mildly. The trial jury might then acquit the defendant. The errant incumbent would doubtless also face some of the additional checks and sanctions indicated in the paragraph after next.

Summing up the role of the jury: The office of CuL is to be a special tool in our system of justice. By electing a Cultural Laundress to delineate the threshold of obscenity, trial juries can convict those who cross the clear-cut and uncomplicated line. On the other hand, the power to acquit and award damages will enable juries to check CuL injunctions should the incumbent's zeal become foolish or intemperate.

Other checks under section eleven include the power of Congress to impeach Madam CuL (11:13), to reduce or rescind criminal penalties for violation of her injunctions (11:9), and to withhold funding for her staff (11:10). Section 11: 9-10 allows considerable leeway also to the States in enforcing her injunctions on the intrastate level. Finally the democratic process itself serves as a check against objectionable bans, insofar as the Cultural Laundress is subject to biennial elections and to term limits after one reelection. The voters can soon elect a new Madam CuL who campaigns on the promise to overturn the outrageous injunctions.

Sex and Violence

In an insightful document on the problems of pornography and violence in the media, the Vatican observed in 1989:

As reflections of the dark side of a human nature marred by sin, pornography and the exaltation of violence are age-old realities of the human condition. In the past quarter-century, however, they have taken on new dimensions and have become serious social problems. At a time of widespread and unfortunate confusion about moral norms, the communications media have made pornography and violence accessible to a vastly expanded audience, including young people and even children, and a problem which at one time was confined mainly to wealthy countries has now begun, via the communications media, to corrupt moral values in developing nations.[127]

Concerning the constellation law the question arises: Since we are going to all the trouble of amending the Constitution, why not launch a simultaneous attack on media violence as well as media sex, by including both in section eleven? Here I propose four points for your consideration.

First, sex is an intrinsically private activity and when kept in its natural seclusion it serves as a wonderful and most personal bond between husband and wife. But when displayed on stage or before a camera, sex is distorted and unnatural, made so by the very presence of spectators. The element of privacy is so intrinsic to human sexual relations that going public introduces a twist to sex that is contrary to its basic nature, and the outside observer himself assumes a perspective that is kinky and perverted.

Privacy is not basically a plus, however, in the case of violence. Ask any victim of attack in a secluded place. Rather media publicity of violence can, if presented truthfully to the public, communicate revulsion for the suffering that accompanies violent assault and can convey a moral motive for self control of violent impulses.

Here was (and still may be) a significant difference between Japanese and American media. Although Japanese television has plenty of violence, the major dramatis personae – even including the good guys – often experience violent injury or death accompanied by visible suffering, thus providing the viewer with cause for sympathy with the victim and distress over the violence, rather than merely an occasion to cheer.[128] American media is less inclined than the Japanese to portray the victim sympathetically — as a family man, for instance, whose children are left orphaned and whose wife is widowed.

Media violence is very much a two sided coin, with at least the potential to contribute lessons that discredit rather than glorify violence in society, and even promote peacemaking as a cultural norm. It is one thing to communicate an aggressive assault to the audience; quite another to make slasher films in an appeal to impulses that may lurk within the viewer's subconscious. This same distinction was widely debated on the issue of whether to broadcast Nick Berg’s sufferings (his gruesome beheading) during U.S. occupation of Iraq. Media violence properly presented can serve a socially benevolent purpose – to discredit acts of violence and cruelty in real life.

By contrast, public displays of sex have no positive potential; they are inherently degrading to both performers and spectators. The latter, the viewers, become in essence Peeping Toms, and each newly initiated American voyeur becomes another pawn in the strategy of postmodernist cultural revolution.

Some of the evils associated with media violence can derive from the bad application of a good principle, whereas pornography is fundamentally flawed in the principle itself. The public portrayal of violence should be upgraded not suppressed; whereas sex in public must ipso facto be disordered, sex being by nature private.

A second rationale for prioritizing sex over violence is that the decline of sexual discipline leads to loss of control over other impulses, including violent passions. As sexual continence can beget personal discipline, so its opposite, sexual debauchery, is the parent of pedophilia and many other disorders, including uncontrolled and violent outbursts. It is no coincidence, therefore, that sex and violence often accompany each other in the same magazines and films;[129] that violence pervades the neighborhoods that surround sex shops and theaters; and that organized crime, which rules by violence, is heavily involved in the commercialization of sex.[130] And so closing the floodgates to pornography will simultaneously undermine many forms of physically abusive conduct.[131]

A third consideration is that dramatized media violence is only a simulation; whereas media sex is the real thing. The U.S. Cavalry and the Apaches are not really killing each other in films like Geronimo. In sex movies, however, the portrayals are quite real. Porno stars are evidently committing the sin they seek to glorify, whereas the film Gettysburg presents only an illusion of bloodshed on the battlefield. What the viewers of pornography are really watching is actors earning money by performing sexually before a camera. The media serves up an actual or virtual act of prostitution, and the dramatized circumstances do not alter the fundamental nature of the presentation. Therefore the main targets of the constellation law, section eleven, are real phenomena, not just simulated ones as with media violence.

The foregoing three reasons weigh against targeting media violence under section eleven. Of course the constitutional convention may decide otherwise and include both sex and violence in the portfolio of the Cultural Laundress, in which case she might more aptly be vested with the broader title of "Culture Keeper." Her effectiveness will suffer, however, if we divide her attention and her energies. Carrying out Madam CuL's mission will be a very full-time job without magnifying the duties of the Cultural Laundress further.

A fourth issue concerns the merits of maximizing the representativeness of her office. The single issue portfolio on pornography will give the voters a straightforward and clear-cut way to manifest community standards by electing the candidate who best articulates the voter's viewpoint on the pornography problem. But if both sex and violence are campaign themes, the electoral choice will be less clear in terms of issues. The typical voter might prefer one candidate's position on pornography and another's stand on media violence, and so a winning candidate would be less reflective of community standards on either issue singly. A raison d'etre of the office of Cultural Laundress is for Madam CuL to personify as closely as possible the standards of the community on the one particular issue.

If, however, an Article V convention does insist on including gratuitous violence in the purview of section eleven, we would urge the convention to let contemporary community standards on media violence be thrashed out and identified in a campaign that deals exclusively with the violence issue. Insofar as Madam CuL will be a kind of elected tenth justice on the Supreme Court, electing an “eleventh justice” with jurisdiction over media violence, would make for a clear distinction from the culling of pornography from society as as led by the Cultural Laundress. The two campaigns might even be held in different years in order to clearly demarcate the issues. Both pornography and violence are festering sores in our culture, but each requires its own kind of medicine.

Moreover, expansion of the jurisdiction of any office generally increases its power, and the more power that accrues to the culture keeper office, the closer it would approach the status of media czar. An exalted public official with press and media control is emphatically not the intention of section eleven (though the interim TAsC may well contemplate something of the kind during their transitional regime). Rather the intent of section eleven is an elected official possessed of veto powers solely, and with pornography as her single focus. The wider her jurisdiction the more real the possibility that one official could become a dominant personality threatening the independence of the press. However, with quite separate jurisdictions [pornography and violence] two officials would divide the power, diminish the status, and diminish opportunity for realizing czarist ambitions.

Prior Restraint

In recent years the United States has seen growing judicial antagonism toward prior restraint as distinguished from subsequent punishment, i.e. banning dissemination of pornography beforehand vs. prosecution of disseminators after the fact.[132] Prior restraint would have empowered society to prevent the broadcasting of, say, Deep Throat before it could inject its venom into the culture. Subsequent punishment would put the disseminator on trial afterwards, perhaps months or more after the X-rated poison pervades and demeans the general public.

Opponents of prior restraint cite Blackstone's dictum – more practical in a slower age – that liberty of the press "consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published."[133] Today the incredible rapidity and pervasiveness of mass media, dispersing its product forthwith to the four winds, requires as a practical matter that society be able to outlaw obscene dissemination beforehand, not just try to chase down all vipers from Pandora's box after the lid is opened.

In 1931 the U.S. Supreme Court enunciated its opposition in principle to prior restraint (Near v. Minnesota). Writing for the majority in this landmark case Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes did recognize some concessions or "exceptional cases" where prior restraint is justified, including publication of classified materials during wartime and, notably for our topic, obscenity. Against the latter, prior restraint ought to be permissible, wrote Hughes, because of "the primary requirements of decency."[134]

Contrary to each of these Hughesian qualifiers, the tendency during the postmodern era has been to extend speech and press freedoms with doctrinaire absolutism, deprecating the very idea of exceptions or concessions to decency. In 1979 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) opposed with its characteristic zeal the U.S. Justice Department's attempt to impose prior restraint against an article that detailed methods of assembling a hydrogen bomb.[135] The article was indeed printed, quite contrary to the spirit of Justice Hughes' first exception and oblivious of the fact that terrorist armed with nuclear weapons could make moot every one of our political liberties, including freedom of the press. Consequently the article is now available in libraries across America.

With regard to prior restraints on pornography, the Supreme Court had by 1965 hedged and pruned an already endangered species. Freedman v. Maryland reduced prior restraint of obscenity to a non-entity.[136]

It is a principle of moderation and common sense that most general rules are nuanced by exceptions. Pressing the Hughesian doctrine against prior restraint to the most unequivocal rigidity by eliminating every concession to reality, threatens to convert our practical liberties into doctrinaire manifestos, discrediting even that liberty which is America's glory. As James Madison put it in the Federalist Papers, "liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as by the abuses of power."[137] Or as Daniel Webster said, "liberty exists in proportion to wholesome restraint."[138]

Some of the opposition to prior restraint of pornography is well meaning enough, being an effort to maximize fair notice for the disseminator. And implicit in the constellation law is indeed a dual system of fair notice. Section eleven would serve notice to financiers that pictorial forms of pornography are henceforth a risky field for investment, inasmuch as publications in that field are liable to face injunctions before then can yield monetary returns. Entrepreneurs will know this hazard in advance of investing; their failure to exercise caution will not be the law's fault. And once an injunction is formally issued by Madam CuL, that will be fair and clear warning that continued dissemination of the specified SLOPPP will risk not merely monetary loss but imprisonment when and if a jury convicts.

In deference to the political axiom that compromise renders government workable;[139] the prior restraint enforceable against obscene films, magazines, and theater, is counterbalanced by the constitutional freedom that section 11:11 extends to prose and poetry, however lewd and lurid. As Pope Pius XII conceded, social peace requires sometimes that moral and religious errors be tolerated.[140] One of his predecessors, Leo XIII, quoted St. Augustine's observation that human authority has "'to overlook and leave unpunished many things which are punished, and rightly, by divine Providence.'"[141] And so as a kind of concordat with libertarians, or tradeoff for the restrictions on obscenity in pictorial form, the publisher and writer of printed non-pictorial works will be constitutionally safeguarded under section 11:11 from government censorship – by prior restraint or otherwise – on the basis of sexual content. The exemption of prose and poetry assures also an avenue of communication whereby to express intellectual dissent from contemporary community standards.

However, the constellation law guards against the old ruse used by pornographers of including a wholesome appetizer along with their lurid lunch. Under the present system, they claim constitutional protection for the entire menu on the basis of the side dish. By adding one respectable article, the foulest magazine can pass the Miller test,[142] a measure of obscenity conjured up by the Supreme Court in 1973, which says the whole work must be lacking in "serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value." This tactic will fail against a CuL injunction, which would outlaw the entire work when it contains any SLOPPP, (section 11:11). In 1982 when Tylenol bottles were found laced with cyanide, no one argued that the product should remain on the shelves because the cyanide was only one component of the contents. Neither will the obscene centerfold be entitled to constitutional protection because it shares the same cover with legitimate prose.

The desire to protect due process may lead some Americans to wonder if the discretion of the Cultural Laundress to determine what constitutes SLOPPP is consistent with the idea of rule by law. It is a cherished principle that ours is a republic of laws not men.[143] It will be said that following legal formulations set down on paper is more in the tradition of rule by law than is official discretion, which involves rule by men (or women).

Such an objection fails to take into account the U.S. Constitution itself, the quintessence of rule by law in this country. In its Fourth and Eighth Amendments, the Bill of Rights vests discretionary authority with the judiciary to interpret the meaning of specified subjective terms. The provisions of the Fourth Amendment against "unreasonable searches and seizures," and the Eighth Amendment against "excessive bail," "excessive fines," and "cruel and unusual punishments," are implicit grants of authority for Judicial Judgment and discretion on the meaning of the adjectives — unreasonable, excessive, cruel and unusual. Similarly, section eleven of the constellation law grants the office of CuL a limited latitude [144] to determine the meaning and application of the phrase "sexually licentious or pornographic phenomena" (SLOPPP).

The ad hoc authority for applying general principles to particular situations has similarities also to the 1914 reform legislation against industrial monopolies. The Clayton Act of that year is still on the books and outlaws mergers and other practices whose effect is to "substantially" lessen competition or to monopolize an industry. Rather than attempt to draft an airtight law indicating all the ways the adverb "substantially" is applicable, Congress recognized instead that in the realm of unfair competition, "'there is no limit to human inventiveness.'"[145] To check the multiplicity of possible tactics by aspiring monopolists, the Federal Trade Commission was established. The F.T.C. has power to issue "cease and desist" orders against specific industrial transactions which violate the general spirit of the Clayton Act. Under its discretionary authority, the F.T.C. draws the line on an ad hoc basis, and prosecutors may then move against corporations who fail to cease and desist.

Under the constellation law, however, Madam CuL will not be appointed like the F.T.C. Instead she will be elected democratically. In comparison to F.T.C. cease and desist orders, her injunctions will be more representative and thus better armed with the force of public opinion.

Objections

A formidable opposition to the constellation law is likely to originate from special interests. The multi-billion dollar pornography industry ($10 billion by a 2003 estimate)[146] will doubtless dust off an array of arguments that have seen front-line service against earlier cleanup efforts. Four are considered here.

One such argument is that the dirt associated with diffusion of pornography throughout society is the price we must pay for liberty. Writing in a respected law journal two defense lawyers for Hustler magazine's Larry Flint offered this advice. "We must never forget," they say, "that those who dwell on the dark side of the First Amendment, exhibiting X-rated movies, operating peep shows, and selling dirty books, must be protected if first rate films and publications are to remain safe."[147]

Surely a more logical position is this. If recent judicial elaborations and innovations have given the First Amendment a dark side, then the best course is not submissively to suffer the darkness, but rather to dispel it by the light of a clarifying Amendment.

The United States has for generations been, to use Winston Churchill's book title, "The Great Republic" of modern history.[148] Yet only during the last few decades (Playboy Magazine first appeared in the early 1950's) did Americans allow the floodgates to open for pornography. If keeping the floodgates ajar is the price of liberty, then how pray tell did our ancestors enjoy the blessings of liberty without paying the piper by tolerating obscenity?

Spokesmen for the price of liberty thesis often point to John Stuart Mill, the 19th century sage of libertarianism. They do Mill a disservice, however. In his On Liberty, Mill includes "offenses against decency" among the acts which society may rightly prohibit.[149] If a citizen "has infringed the rules necessary for the protection of his fellow creatures, individually or collectively," says Mill, "the evil consequences of his acts do not then fall on himself, but on others; and society, as the protector of all its members, must retaliate on him."[150]

Part of the real price of liberty is to maintain some decency in social behavior. For example, the changing quality of motion pictures since World War II demonstrates quite vividly how freedoms inconceivable in say 1950, yet commonplace today, have degenerated from true artistic liberty into freedom for licentiousness. Neither the American people nor any other population in history has been able to escape the demeaning and ultimately destructive effect of unbounded freedom. We pray that the American people will soon choose a limited censorship that is self-imposed through the democratic process, rather than incur censorship later as a involuntary yoke worn under a ruthless despotism. Our choice as a society is like Mosaic Israel's option of blessing or curse.[151] We choose a soft form of moral discipline now, or suffer the iron discipline that will accompany political tyranny later.[152]

A second and related argument against suppression of pornography is that it will give elements who are zealous for political censorship a foot in the door.[153] E.J. Mishan points out, however, that the right to express dissenting or radical political views has continued to exist in Britain for over two centuries — simultaneously, until recently, with suppression of what society deems obscene.[154] Moreover, even conceding for the sake of discussion the barely plausible proposition that suppressing pornography will give some future foes of freedom a pretext for political censorship; section 11:11 of the arch-amendment will safeguard the avenues of prose and poetry. No matter what happens to the photos in magazines, for example, the arch-amendment would impose all the authority and sanction of the written Constitution itself to keep prose and poetry free from censorship on the pretext of pornography.[155]

A third argument certain to surface is linked to the old mantra that you can’t legislate morality.[156] Even if it could withstand historical scrutiny, this cliché misses the point. As a civil rights activist has put it: "Strictly speaking, one cannot legislate love, but what one can do is legislate fairness and justice....Legislation affords us the chance to see if we might love each other."[157]

To be sure, there is a strong public interest at stake in morality. As political science professor Lane Sunderland writes, "the very character of democratic rule" depends on the capacity of the citizenry to make moral judgments.[158] Visitors to this country during the last century – like Alexis de Tocqueville and James Bryce – were struck by the importance of popular morality in producing austerity of manners and in facilitating the wise and moderate use of political freedom.[159]

Under postmodernism, however, in a characteristic commitment to libertine absolutism …

many sensible people who typically eschew extremism have embraced it where entertainment is concerned. Here alone, they have been persuaded, one principle never meets a counter-principle that limits its proper reach. Here alone, no excess is so flagrant that society should intervene.
Professor Reo M. Christenson, Miami University of Ohio[160]

The purpose of section eleven is not to legislate anyone's morality, but rather to provide society a legal means to meet a moral and cultural threat. Society has the right to protect itself. To fight pollution of the moral environment is a case of society acting collectively in self defense.

A fourth pro-pornography argument is that obscenity laws have a "chilling effect" on the literary marketplace. In one sense we would say, hallelujah for such a chill! The marketplace in literature is currently in a state of sensual agitation. Bringing the temperature down from its fever pitch would indeed be an occasion for celebration.

Edward Gibbon said, "all that is human must retrograde if it do not advance."[161] Since the fall of the Roman Empire, history records no great civilization, nation or society that has continued to advance in association with long-term commitment to sexual licentiousness.[162]

But all unconscious of the coming doom,...

Strange modes of merriment the hours consume,...

Here Folly still his votaries inthralls;

And young-eyes Lewdness walks her midnight rounds;

Girt with the silent crimes of Capitals,

Still to the last kind Vice clings to the tott'ring walls.

Lord Byron, Childe Harold 1:46

National decline is not the worst of it, for in the thermonuclear age our attempt to establish pornotopia might be very deadly for the human race as a whole. Pornography erodes discipline in society, and the decline of self control is hardly the formula for survival given the proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction.

Even if a licentious society could somehow control the pugilistic passions and refrain from using such weapons, still a hyper-pagan society during peacetime might be as hellish to experience as war. Mishan warns: "In the unrelenting search for the uttermost in orgiastic experience, cruel passions might be unleashed, impelling humanity into regions beyond barbarism."[163] Sexual perversion is a form of cruelty to one’s partner(s), and out of preferential treatment for cruelty may come persecution of people who promote kindness and compassion.

He who is nice to the cruel

will be cruel to the nice.”

Rabbinical commentary on Ecclesiastes[164]

The chilling effect argument does not usually attempt to answer such broad political/cultural objections, but confines itself more to the sphere of art per se. Yet the larger sphere impinges inevitably upon the smaller. Art may play the leader or the straggler in social movements, but in a democratic society corruption of the arts must sooner or later accompany corruption of the populace.[165] A leading neoconservative, Irving Kristol, exposes the fictional nature of the chilling effect thesis. Referring to a principle of economics, Gresham's law, which says that bad currency will drive out the good, Kristol writes:

Gresham's Law can work for books or theater as efficiently as it does for coinage – driving out the good, establishing the debased. The cultural market in the United States today is being preempted by dirty books, dirty movies, dirty theater. A pornographic novel has a far better chance of being published today than a non-pornographic one, and quite a few pretty good novels are not being published at all simply because they are not pornographic, and are therefore less likely to sell. Our cultural condition has not improved as a result of the new freedom.[166]

A few years ago the late Princess Grace of Monaco expressed her shock and dismay at the state of the film industry and the difficulty in finding suitable films to attend. Bing Crosby too lamented the decline in quality of screen productions. And the late actor, Jason Robards, excoriated what television had done to America. He went so far as to say that we have become a "junk society" consisting largely of "vidiots" who feed at television's trough.[167] Even V.K. Zorykin, who has been called the father of television for developing the picture tube, was revolted by the kind of programming that has come to dominate his invention.[168] Nor has the decline reached bottom, as cable television and the internet opens the American home to so called “adult” materials.

What section eleven represents, therefore, is not an attempt to chill creativity in theater, film and literature, but rather to extinguish the obscene fires which threaten to make America a cultural wasteland. The multi-billion dollar commerce in pornography tends to displace the art with trash. Suppressing pornography will not suffocate culture; it will clear the air for an artistic renaissance.

Moderation

It is difficult for us to understand how people of sensitivity who have a genuine love for the arts, or how intelligent thinkers not without patriotic motives, can bring themselves, as some do, to defend the right of pornographers to saturate society with the very commodity which debases the field of art and which promotes national decadence. A partial explanation might be the totality of their political or ideological commitment to the individual as opposed to the community. The moderate position will, by contrast, treat the individual/community dichotomy as a blend – a both/and – not as an either/or proposition.

The communitarian impulse reemphasizes the interests of the citizenry as a group, as distinguished from the virtually exclusive orientation toward citizens as individuals that has for decades dominated the concept of constitutional protections.[169] The challenge is to give legal substance to the communitarian approach, i.e. to blend individual liberty and overarching community.[170] How do we achieve a blend or balance between these two key principles?

Concerning pornography, a middle ground between the two poles of individual and community would mean that maximizing opportunities for voyeurs, performers, etc. will have to be juxtaposed to the collective interests of society.[171] Society's interests include a social environment where moral hazards and stench are kept within tolerable limits. As the late Alexander Bickel of Yale University law school observed: "'Even supposing that each of us can, if he wishes, effectively avert the eye and stop the ear (which, in truth, we cannot), what is commonly read and seen and heard and done intrudes upon us all, want it or not.'"[172] Or as longtime film critic, Michael Medved, noted,

To say that if you don’t like the popular culture,
then turn it off, is like saying if you don’t
like the smog, stop breathing [173]….

A dichotomy that polarizes extremist libertarians and fascist types, but which the moderate position treats as a blend, is the concept of rights vs. responsibilities. The necessity of balance between the two is expressed by an engraving on the U.S. Department of Justice building which depicts a set of scales with the fulcrum centered between privilegium and obligatio.

The early 20th century saw the scales dip radically in the direction of obligation. Among the most lurid and tragic threads running though the political fabric of that time were the totalitarian extremes of fascism and communism. The Italian and German fascism [1923-1945] and the fascism of the left exhibited in the USSR [1917-1991], have profoundly affected Euro-American thought and engendered a powerful reaction, i.e. all-consuming individualism that is obsessively opposed to controls on culture.

It has been a great defeat in the culture war to have had the judiciary and the media side with radical individualists on the pornography question. Consequently the scales of justice are steeply slanted toward privilege and freedom. Obligation and responsibility are given far less weight than in the past, before American justice gave way to partisanship, politicization, and usurpation. Our safety is in purposes that are sober and moderate. Instead the judiciary and the media together with a politically correct public education system have reduced the public mind to a state of insobriety. Increasingly intoxicated public thinking perceives rights and obligations obtusely as either/or propositions, and thinks of the individual/community concepts as mutually exclusive.

The constellation law takes solid middle ground. By coming down hard in defense of the written word and against its suppression on grounds of obscenity, section eleven would reinforce freedom and individual rights. The flip side of the coin is the cleanup operation against pictorial pornography. There the reform would defend community interests and emphasize social responsibility.

In the past, one of America's secrets to success was pragmatism, our willingness to find compromise positions that were realistic. It was uncharacteristic of Americans obstinately to embrace doctrinaire theories and implacable factions. An eminent historical example is the "great compromise," built into the Constitution itself during the Convention of 1787. After long and difficult debates, the Convention opted for equal representation of States in the Senate and for proportionate representation in the House of Representatives according to population. Had either faction been too doctrinaire to agree on a mix between their respective positions, it is probable that the Convention would have failed to produce a constitution that could be ratified.

On the issue of pornography’s threat to the moral health and spiritual quality of the nation, let us revive the venerable American tradition of pragmatism. The constellation amendment provides a middle ground between meritorious but dichotomous principles. Section eleven, blends individualism with community and balances freedom with responsibility.

Conclusion

Given the fundamental importance of society and culture to national health, John Adams’ maxim is salient to our situation as patriots seeking to save the country and restore America the Beautiful. We cannot possibly restore the republic under God, and under the written Constitution, without restoration and upkeep for the nation’s cultural condition. Just as Waterkeeper Alliance attorneys seek injunctions and if necessary punishments for “Crimes Against Nature” in the physical environment, so by analogy must the law regard the cultural environment as another public trust that demands protection from corporate thieves.[174] The proliferation of pornography, sodomy and abortion has created public nuisances of the highest order, and has violated the public trust, i.e. our social environment, by converting the culture from a nurturing parent to a Saturn who devours its own children.

The spread of the waterkeeper movement nationally and internationally under the umbrella of the Waterkeeper Alliance (Bobby Kennedy, Jr., chairman), is testimony to the growing awareness and willingness of citizens to work in defense of the physical environment – as, for example, the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance headquartered in Seattle, with which your author is glad to be associated. If we are willing to expend so much effort to protect and restore the water, land and air (as for sure we should), how then can we environmentalists count ourselves patriotic if we neglect to protect and restore the culture which forms, as it were, the deck of the ship of state?

On every seaworthy ship the sailors swab the deck regularly, lest passengers and crew lose their balance on a slimly and befouled deck and go tumbling overboard. Similarly, maintenance is an indispensable necessity for society and culture, given that our social order is the cultural footing of the republic. Negligence on this score goes a long way to explain why so many Americans are dysfunctional citizens, and why upwards of two million of them are in jail – half again as many as serve in the U.S. Armed Forces.

As citizens we are called to upgrade the culture when it begins to deteriorate. Our duty here is not only in the way we conduct ourselves as individuals, but in how we organize ourselves collectively. Speeches and admonitions about individual responsibilities are fine, as far as they go. But no tight ship will leave deck swabbing, and other cleanup work solely to voluntarism. There is no escaping the necessity of a regular regimen of organized effort, supervised ultimately by the ship’s captain who may delegate immediate supervision to a first mate or some subordinate crewman. In America, analogously, the ship of state is led by we the people, supervised by our captain, the U.S. Constitution. And under section ten of the constellation amendment we the people would elect a public servant, a Cultural Laundress (CuL). Her term would be two years, limited to one reelection. Madam CuL’s supervisory commission would be to upgrade society by cleansing it of a demeaning malady, namely the omnipresence of pornography.

Insofar as today the popular culture promotes vulgarity and encourages vice over virtue, then we have a pressing imperative. Allegiance to God and loyalty to country calls us to take power away from what is Saturnian in society, and to restore a social order that serves as a benevolent nurturer of children and citizens of all ages. Our aim must be, as Peter Maurin put it, “to create a society where it will be easier for men to be good.”

HOME: Front of Book & Table of Contents

Advance to Chapter Eleven

ENDNOTES

[1] Or, as a denizen of Washington, D.C. in October 2002 might put it, a sniper’s freedom in the capitol city.

[2] Henry Hyde, (Heritage Lecture #673, July 19, 2000). Quoted by Fr. Frank Pavone, “Virtuous Democracy,” 8/29/03, http://catholicexchange.com/index.asp (“The Edge”)

[3] John Adams, Address to the Military, Oct. 11, 1798 "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."

[4] Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, 21 Jan. 1812.

[5] Pavone, “Virtuous Democracy,” supra.

[6] Sex and violence were increasingly imbedded in PG, PG-13, and R-rated movies released between 1992 and 2003. Conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health, a study of 1,906 feature films found a ratings creep over that period, confirming what moviegoers knew all along, that today’s PG-13 movie content would have warranted an R-rating a decade ago. Sharon Waxman, “Study Finds Film Ratings Are Growing More Lenient,” The New York Times, online ed., July 14, 2004.

[7] Rev. George Grant, "Abercrombie and Porn," January 2002, by the Chalcedon Foundation, available online. Rev. Grant quoting Theologian R.J. Rushdoony.

[8] FDR’s four freedom’s address to Congress, 1/6/1941:

“The first is freedom of speech and expression – everywhere in the world.

“The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way – everywhere in the world.

“The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants – everywhere in the world.

“The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor – anywhere in the world.”

[9] The five prongs are: (1) pornography (2) abortion, (3) sodomy (4) euthanasia (5) human cloning. The fifth evil, human cloning, has been banned from time immemorial by humanity’s scientific limitations. In the 21^st century, however, it may be that science will surmount the practical proscriptions that have heretofore governed, necessitating legal intervention to check the new Frankenstein.

[10] “How Reagan and the Pope conspired to assist Poland’s Solidarity movement and hasten the demise of Communism,” Time, cover story, Feb. 24, 1992; Roland Flamini, “Reagan’s secret contacts with pope,” The Washington Times, online ed., 9 June 2004.

[11] John Paul II in Lithuania, The Pilot (Archdiocese of Boston) 10 September 1993, p. 6.

[11a] Robert Reich, Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy and Everyday Life (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007),pp. 98-99, 119-21, 126, 167.

[12] President G.W. Bush at the 20th Anniversary of the National Endowment for Democracy United States Chamber of Commerce, Washington, D.C. 11/6/03.

[13] John Paul II, citing his 1987 encyclical, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis 38 in his Centesimus Annus 60 (1 May 1991) expresses "reasonable hope that the many people who express no religion will also contribute to providing the social question with the necessary ethical foundation."

[14] Patrick J. Buchanan, The Death of the West: How Mass Immigration, Depopulation and a Dying Faith Are Killing our Culture and Country (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2002), chapter 4.

[15] For an entire chapter on bin Laden's accusations, see, Dinesh D'Sousa, The Enemy at Home: the Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (New York: Doubleday, 2007), chapter 9, "The War Against the War: Decoding bin Laden's Message to America," pp. 227-253.

Open “Letter to America,” translated from the Arabic in the London Observer, Sunday 11/24/2002. Attributed to Osama bin Laden:

“The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.

(a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honor, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants….

(b) It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind:

(i) You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. You are a nation that permits the production, trading and usage of intoxicants. You also permit drugs, and only forbid the trade of them, even though your nation is the largest consumer of them.

(iv) You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honor nor your laws object. Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he 'made a mistake', after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?

(v) You are a nation that permits gambling in its all forms. The companies practice this as well, resulting in the investments becoming active and the criminals becoming rich.

(vi) You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools calling upon customers to purchase them. You use women to serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins. You then rant that you support the liberation of women.

(vii) You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its forms, directly and indirectly. Giant corporations and establishments are established on this, under the name of art, entertainment, tourism and freedom, and other deceptive names you attribute to it.”

[16] Arnaud de Borchgrave, “Blighting the Message,” Washington Times, April 15, online ed.

[17] 2nd Corinthians 6: 17 (KJV); Isaiah 52: 11.

[18] “At present, U.S. abortion policy, which permits abortion on demand at any point in pregnancy is among the most extreme in the Western world. And that status quo shows no signs of changing since Roe established it. In fact, legally speaking, we are further behind now than in 1973.” Teresa R. Wagner , “30 years after Roe vs. Wade,” The Washington Times, 21 January 2003. Teresa R. Wagner is editor, Back to the Drawing Board: The Future of the Pro-Life Movement (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine Press, 2003).

[19] Revised Code of Washington. Formerly 28A.02.030; replaced by RCW 28A.230.140.

[20] Justice Anthony Scalia argues that one of the flaws in the Casey case 505 U.S., at 856, is that it “falsely assumes that the consequence of overruling Roe would have been to make abortion unlawful. It would not; it would merely have permitted the States to do so. Many States would unquestionably have declined to prohibit abortion, and others would not have prohibited it within six months (after which the most significant reliance interests would have expired). Even for persons in States other than these, the choice would not have been between abortion and childbirth, but between abortion nearby and abortion in a neighboring State.” (Lawrence v. Texas, 26 June 2003)

The constellation law takes a different tack in the direction of leniency: it would make abortion unlawful, but would mandate nothing as regards enforcement, leaving the issue of punishment to be resolved in the states.

In October 2004, a report by a pro-abortion group, The Center for Reproductive Rights, concluded that if released from the Roe v. Wade mandate from the federal courts, some 30 states might end up with pro-life legislation, while 20 would retain a pro-abortion policy. Associated Press, “Thirty states ready to ban abortion if Roe overturned,” 10/5/04. According to the report, the 21 states likely to ban abortion: Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin. The nine states with some chance of banning abortion: Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, New Hampshire and Pennsylvania. The 20 states likely to retain abortion on demand: Alaska, California, Connecticut, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Tennessee, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia and Wyoming.

[21] BBC News, online ed., “Human Cloning 'Flawed:' Human Cloning May Never Be Possible Because of a Quirk of Biology,” 4/10/03.

[22] UN vote of February 18, 2005, by a margin of 71-35 condemning all forms of human cloning.

[23] “Their right to liberty under the Due Process Clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government” (Lawrence v. Texas, 26 June 2003, emphasis mine). In the same case, however, Justice Anthony Scalia states at the outset of his dissent: “nowhere does the Court's opinion declare that homosexual sodomy is a "fundamental right" under the Due Process Clause.” But in his conclusion Scalia argues: “What Texas has chosen to do is well within the range of traditional democratic action, and its hand should not be stayed through the invention of a brand-new ‘constitutional right’ by a Court that is impatient of democratic change.” (emphasis mine) In Justice Scalia’s mind the Court majority’s full right seems to be another form of constitutional right than the fundamental right which he takes pains to deny the majority.

The distinction between a “full right” and a “fundamental right” must lean rather heavily on the definitions of two adjectives, full and fundamental. I wonder why Anthony Kennedy said nothing on this point. Black’s Law Dictionary, 5^th ed., defines fundamental rights as those which “have their origin in the express terms of the Constitution or which are necessarily to be implied from those terms.”

When it comes to their standing as constitutional rights – as opposed to their origins – one presumes them equivalent, though Scalia never addresses the distinction. Fundamental rights might connote a more prestigious origin, but no more authority or binding power. By analogy, cardinals and bishops dress somewhat differently, but they have the same diocesan authority. In seventeen US states, senators and state representatives have equivalent terms and powers, but the appellation of “senator” is still coveted, partly perhaps because membership is more exclusive – there are fewer senators than representatives. But determining whether “fundamental rights” are rarer than “full rights” would first require some precision in defining these terms. Could it be that in 2003 the usurpers indulged in a semantical invention, which they left intentionally obscure, precisely because they had snatched it out of the air?

Though Scalia makes no specific reference to full rights, in part II of his dissent he does cite definitions of fundamental rights as rights which are "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition," or "so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental," or "traditionally protected by our society," or "those privileges long recognized at common law as essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men." These passages suggest that fundamental rights carry an antiquity that full rights might not.

[24] Mr. Justice Anthony Scalia’s dissent is a brilliant dissection and refutation of Lawrence v. Texas, well worth the reading for insights on a number of matters, including how our nation goes about legislating on questions of morals. Scalia also exposes the postmodernist court for the partisan political body that it is: “Today’s opinion is the product of a Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.”

[26] In the conclusion to his dissent, Scalia describes the Lawrence decision as fundamentally anti-democratic, being “imposed by a governing caste that knows best.”

[27] James 1:12; 1st Peter 1:6-7; Revelation 7:14.

[28] Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, quoting CDF’s “Declaration on Certain Questions Concerning Sexual Ethics” (1975) in, “Some Considerations Concerning the Response to Legislative Proposals on the Non-Discrimination of Homosexual Persons,” Vatican City, July 23, 1992, 1.1

[29] The Roman Catholic religion came permanently to the shores of what is now the United States in 1565, at St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest still existing city in the country. In his 2005 book, Memory and Identity, Pope John-Paul II points out that homosexual marriages (so-called) are part of "a new ideology of evil" posing an insidious threat to civilized society.

[30] See, for example, “Threats to the Family Abound in America, Vatican Document Warns,” in National Catholic Register, vol. 78, no. 43 (10/27-11/2/2002), p. 4. The Vatican document addresses what adds up to a “major assault on families in the Americas.” Entitled, “Situation and Prospects for the Family and Life in America,” published 10/11/02 by the Vatican Press Office, the document states in part, “‘It is inadmissible to want to have homosexual and lesbian unions accepted as legitimate unions and even as marriage, with the alleged right to adopt children.’”

[31] Romans 1:27-32 states that God gives up idolaters to shameful perversities. The footnote in my Bible adds: … “as St. Thomas Aquinas says, not by impelling them to evil, but by deserting them. He justly withdrew His grace from them in punishment of their idolatry, and being thus abandoned by God, men followed the bent of fallen nature, and fell into the degradation of unnatural vice.” (Confraternity edition)

[32] Paul Cameron, “Medical Consequences Of What Homosexuals Do,” Family Research Institute, Inc., 1999. Among the reports findings, confirmed in other studies, homosexual activity causes people to die younger.

[33] Bryan Fischer, June 13, 2005 email newsletter of Keep the Commandments Coalition.

[33a] Florida’s 30 year old ban embattled in courts. Time, 11/26/2008.

[34] See, for example, J. Budziszewski, “The Natural, the Connatural, and the Unnatural,” paper presented at the conference "St. Thomas and the Natural Law," Jacques Maritain Center, University of Notre Dame, July 2004. http://www.nd.edu/Departments/Maritain/ti04/budz.htm

[34a]Reich, Supercapitalism, op. cit., p. 213.

[35] On consumerism Pope John Paul II writes that when "a direct appeal is made to [man's] instincts – while ignoring in various ways the reality of the person as intelligent and free – then consumer attitudes and lifestyles can be created which are objectively improper and often damaging to his physical and spiritual health. Of itself, an economic system does not possess criteria for correctly distinguishing new and higher forms of satisfying human needs from artificial new needs which hinder the formation of a mature personality." Encyclical Centesimus Annus 36 (1 May 1991).

[36] The Pontifical Council for Social Communications, "Pornography and Violence in the Media: A Pastoral Response," 14, 16, the Vatican, 7 May 1989. English version printed in Origins, June 8, 1989, pp. 49-54. Hereafter cited as Vatican Commission, 1989.

[37] Patrick Madrid is the publisher of Envoy Magazine, a leading journal of Catholic apologetics and evangelization. His books include Search and Rescue, Pope Fiction, Where Is That In the Bible?, and Why Is That In Tradition?, and the multi-volume Surprised by Truth series, which he contributed to and edited. Patrick is also the host of two EWTN television series: "Pope Fiction," and "The Truth About Scripture and Tradition."

[38] Patrick Madrid, “Coming Home to Roost,” Catholic Exchange, online ed., 5/13/04

[39] Bernard Schwartz, quoted in National Catholic Register, 14 February, 1999, p. 6.

[40] Op. Cit., Vatican Commission, 1989.

[41] Thomas Babington Macaulay, "Hallams's Constitutional History" (1828) in Critical, Historical And Miscellaneous Essays And Poems By T.B. Macaulay, 3 vols. (New York: William L. Allison, 1880), 1:304.

[42]Theodore Roosevelt, Speech At The Minnesota State Fair, St. Paul, Sept. 2, 1901 (3 days before McKinley was shot)

[43] Mona Charen, "Childless state becomes one of feminism's prices," The Bremerton Sun, 15 August 1994, p. A4.

[44] For an excellent analysis of the errors and the indecisiveness of the Girondists see, Macaulay's essay on "Barere" (1844) in ibid., 3:99-103; also Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History, 3 vols. (1837), vol. III book III.

[45] Carlyle, ibid., III, III, chapter 2.

[46] Brian Wright O’Connor, The Pilot, 12/10/93

[46a] Despite boycotts and protests, Ford Motors continues, as of January 2008, to offer aggressive support to the homosexual agenda. See Reich, Supercapitalism, op. cit., pp. 166, 182-84 on the futility of boycotts for the purpose of an enduring reform of the supercapitalist system.

[47] Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (New York: The Free Press, 1991).

[48] On June 29, 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned COPA (the Child Online Protection Act) enacted into law by Congress in 1998 and signed by then President Bill Clinton. Mark Corallo of the U.S. Justice Dept. denounced the ruling. "Our society has reached a broad consensus that child obscenity is harmful to our youngest generation and must be stopped," he said. "Congress has repeatedly attempted to address this serious need and the court yet again opposed these common-sense measures to protect America's children."

[49] Edmund Burke, Observations on a Late Publication on the Present State of the Nation (1769) in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 15th ed. (Boston: Little, Brown And Co., 1980), p. 372.

[50] Greg Byerly and Rick Rubin, Pornography: The Conflict over Sexually Explicit Material in the United States (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1980).

[51] Peter R. Teachout, "Chains Of Tradition, Instruments Of Freedom: Contours Of The Emerging Right To Community In Obscenity Law," Capitol University Law Review 7 (1978): 686. Teachout was then professor of law at the University of Vermont, formerly of Harvard University.

[52] At the turn of the 21^st century, (December 1999) International Communications Research, sponsored in part by the Kennedy School of Gov. at Harvard University, found that of 1506 adults surveyed nationally, 66% rated “pornography and adult entertainment” a major problem; 21% saw only a minor problem and 10% not a problem. The same year Princeton Survey Research Associates found that most of the 985 American adults surveyed disagreed (margin, 53% to 43%) with the proposition that “nude magazines and X-rated moves provide harmless entertainment.” In 1996 the same organization found that 82 percent of the American public (sample size, 1500 adults) favored proposals to ban child pornography from the internet and online services. Source for the 1999 and 1996 surveys: Public Agenda Online. Edward Donnerstein, Daniel Linz and Steven Penrod, The Question of Pornography: Research Findings And Policy Implications (New York: The Free Press, 1988), p. ix. In a poll conducted by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman [Time (July 21 1986), p. 22], 72% of the respondents wanted the government to crack down harder on pornography, down slightly from 74% in 1974.

[53] Harry M. Clor, Obscenity and Public Morality: Censorship In A Liberal Society (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969), p. 3.

[54] Petrim A. Sorokin, The American Sex Revolution (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1956), pp. 7, 14. The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 15: 61-64, contains a biography of Sorokin (1889-1968).

[55] Ibid., p. 28.

[56] Ibid., p. 87.

[57] Ibid., 111. Cf. 73, 108-113; Joseph D. Unwin, Sex And Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 321, 326.

[58] The minority report by commissioners Morton A. Hill, S.J. and Winfrey C. Link, concurred in by Charles H. Keating, Jr. [hereafter cited Hill-Link report] in The Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (New York: Random House, A New York Times Book, 1970), pp. 456-505. At pp. 488-89 the report states that "conclusively proving causal relationships among social science type variables is extremely difficult if not impossible. Among adults whose life histories have included much exposure to pornography it is nearly impossible to disentangle the literally hundreds of causal threads or chains that contributed to their later adjustment or maladjustment." Moreover, the issue is larger than a link to crime, but the individual's "total relationship to members of the same as well as opposite sex, children and adults, with all of its ramifications."

[58a] Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Crimes Against Nature: How George W. Bush and HIs Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2004, 2005), pp. 77-78; John Cronin & Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., The Riverkeepers: Two Activists Fight to Reclaim Our Environment as a Basic Human Right (New York: Touchstone, 1997, 1999), p. 140, 236-42, 243-51.

[59] Rob Woutat,” Whose Ten Commandments? Let's try Solon's,” The Bremerton Sun, April 26, 2004, p. A6.

[60] Clor, p. 161.

[61] Ibid., p. 172.

[62] Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1780) C.C. O'Brien, ed., (Baltimore: Penguin Books, Pelican Classics, 1968), p. 369. The quotation was written by Burke in another context than obscenity.

[63] The Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (New York: Random House, 1970).

[64] U.S.Dept. of Justice, Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, Final Report (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1986). For a scholarly comparison of the commissions of 1970 and 1986, and also the Williams committee report (UK, 1979) see, Gordon Hawkins and Franklin E. Zimring, Pornography in a Free Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

[65] Clor, pp. 147-48.

[66] Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant, "Pornography, Sexual Callousness, and the Trivialization of Rape," Journal of Communication 32 (Autumn 1982): 16-18. Similar findings have been reported by Seymour Feshback at UCLA according to the National Catholic Register, 24 June 1984, p. 8. Sorokin, The American Sex Revolution, p. 24, says that as a result of pornography "male and female alike are hardened in cynical contempt of human life and values."

[67] Alexander Pope, An Essay On Man (1733-34) epistle 2, part V, line 217.

[68] Ernst van den Haag, "The Case for Pornography Is the Case for Censorship and Vice Versa," in Douglas A. Hughes, ed., Perspectives On Pornography (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1970), p. 130.

[69] Walter Berns, "Beyond the (Garbage) Pale, or Democracy, Censorship and the Arts," in Ray C. Rist, ed., The Pornography Controversy (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1975), pp. 49-50. Berns is far from the first to see shame in a positive light. Aristotle saw it as an internal check to acts which dishonor the self, and shamelessness as the mark of a bad character. [Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 4.9 (1128 b)].

[70] Bremerton Sun, “More explicit sex education proposed," 17 October 1991, p. A4 (Associated Press).

[71] Patrick Buchanan, Death of the West, op. cit., pp. 85-86. At the age of 20, Herbert Marcuse took part in the Spartacist Uprising in Berlin (1919) and remained a self-described Marxist for the rest of his life. For a defense of Marcuse, see, for example, Douglas Kellner, Herbert Marcuse and the Crisis of Marxism (London and Berkeley: Macmillan and University of California Press, 1984). There is a shorter online piece by Kellner at http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/kell12.htm

[72] James Hetfield, radio interview with Terry Gross, quoted in Lane Degregory, Iraq ‘n’ Roll, St. Petersburg Times, 21 November 2004, online edition.

[73] Richard Norton-Taylor, “US Troops Face New Torture Claims,” The Guardian, 14 Sept. 2004. The article includes interviews with detainees in Mosul, northern Iraq, where loud Western music replete with foul language, was inflicted on prisoners in combination with cold water, stripping, beatings and sleep deprivation.

Military guards, intelligence agents and others at Guantanamo, Cuba revealed that loud rap and rock music was used in combination with strobe lights and intense air conditioning to breakdown prisoners for interrogation. The Guantánamo sources specified the bands Limp Bizkit and Rage Against the Machine, and the rapper Eminem. Neal A. Lewis, “Broad Use of Harsh Tactics Is Described at Cuba Base,” New York Times, online ed., 11/16/04. See also, Neil A. Lewis, “Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantanamo,” New York Times, online ed., 11/30/04.

During the storming of Falluja (November 2004) American troops brought gigantic speakers which they blared from Humvees' gun turrets. Boom boxes blasted off soldiers' backpacks. One popular weapon was “Hell’s Bells,” by AC/DC. Metallica, the heavy medal group, was another favorite weapon. [Degregory, “Iraq ‘n’ Roll,” ibid].

Demented “music,” was also inflicted in 1993 on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco TX, before the conflagration that killed some 80 people, and on the Vatican embassy in Panama during the siege of Manuel Noriega, December 1989.

[74] During the first term of his Presidency, George Washington addressed the Congress on knowledge and its importance to “the security of a free constitution.” Echoing Puritan pioneers like John Winthrop of Massachusetts, President Washington contended that knowledge would improve the country by nurturing the people's discernment…”to discriminate the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness, cherishing the first, avoiding the last.” Washington’s first annual address to Congress delivered on 1/8/1790. The full text appears in the Annals of Congress, US Senate, 1 Congress 2, p. 969. Available online at http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llac&fileName=001/llac001.db&recNum=485 .

[75] John Milton, Paradise Lost, book XII, 1.87-93, William G. Madsen, ed. (New York: The Modern Library, 1969), p. 327.

[76] Winthrop quoted in "Separation of Church and State," a video narrated by David Barton (Oak Brook, IL: Institute in Basic Life Principles, 1992). Robert Winthrop (1809-1894) was a descendant of John Winthrop, the governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony for much of the period 1630-49.

[77] Romans 13:4: “For it (authority) is God’s minister to thee for good. But if thou dost what is evil, fear, for not without reason does it carry the sword. For it is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who does evil.”

[78] Patrick Devlin, The Enforcement of Morals (Oxford: Oxford University Press Paperback, 1968), pp. 111, 113. Appointed in 1948 the youngest member of the High Court in the 20th century, Judge Devlin served from 1960-64 in the Law Lords of the House of Lords, the final appellate body in Britain. He then left the bench to become a critic of the legal system. In 1986 he attacked a Government proposal to remove the right of the defense to issue peremptory challenges to jurors. He also served five years as chairman of the Press Council, the body which used to govern press behavior. [See The New York Times, obituary section, 11 August 1992].

[79] Sorokin, The American Sex Revolution, p. 88.

[80] Leo XIII, Rerum Novarum 41 (1891). Similarly the Washington State Constitution, Declaration of Rights, sect. 32, states: "A frequent recurrence to fundamental principles is essential to the security of individual right and the perpetuity of free government."

[81] Ralph Waldo Emerson, Conduct of Life: Behavior (1860).

[82] Sorokin, The American Sex Revolution, p. 24.

[83] Robert H. Bork, Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), p. 152.

[84] In the year 2000 a survey conducted by Dan Jones & Assoc. for Deseret News/KSL-TV indicated that of Utah residents surveyed and expressing an opinion, they supported prosecution of polygamists by more than 2 to 1, – 58% to 26% with 15% uncertain.

[85] So seared were the moral sensibilities of pagan Greece and Rome that homosexual relations between adult males and young boys was a widely condoned practice, rationalized intellectually by some eminent thinkers of antiquity, apparently including Plato but not Aristotle. See for example, Plutarch, (Moralia) The Education of Children 15, and Plato, The Republic 5 (468 B).

[86] Pierre Gusman, Pompei: The City, Its Life & Art, trans, Florence Simmonds & M. Jourdain (London: William Heineman, 1900), chapt. 2, pp. 57-58.

[87] Richard John Neuhaus, “Fighting the New York-Hollywood Axis,” First Things (October 1995), pp. 75-79.
"Pornography: A Poll," Time (21 July 1986), p. 22. The percentage of Americans who had seen X-rated movies was 38% in the 12 months previous to the poll, and 62% at least once in their lifetime. This is up from 1977 when, in a Gallup poll, about a third of the respondents admitted ever seeing an X-rated movie. [George Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion 1976-1977, 2 vols. for 1974-77 (Scholarly Resource Inc., 1978), vols. 2, p. 1031].

[88] Explicit images numbered 914,410. The researcher also tracked 6.4 million users. Pentecostal Evangel, 8 January 1995; Interactive Age, 28 November 1994; American Family Association Journal, “News of Interest,” February 1995, p. 12. See also, The New York Times, 24 March 1995, pp. A1, C7, coverage of Senate Commerce Committee action against computer networks featuring explicit photos, some devoted to “bondage, domination, submission and masochism.”

[89] Jane Sutton, UPI release, "Porn and booze fueled his fantasies, Bundy says," in The Seattle Post Intelligencer, 25 January 1989. The article refers to the execution eve reflections by the serial killer, made in an interview with Dr. James Dobson, 23 January 1989.

[90] Or 81%. Victor Cline, Ph.D. in Pornography Effects: Empirical & Clinical Evidence, pg. 19, quoted in the Victims of Pornography website, 2002, http://www.victimsofpornography.org/Facts_Figures/Pornography_and_Violence/pornography_and_violence.htm.

[91] Clor, p. 169.

[92] Ibid., p. 170.

[93] Ibid., pp. 170-71.

[94] Macaulay, "Leigh Hunt" (1841), in Critical...Essays 2:509.

[95] The primary effect of section eleven will not be the actual confiscations and convictions, but rather in deterrence leading to the decline in circulation of SLOPPP. Clor, p. 194, states that "the results of legal censorship consist not in the confiscation of the relatively few obscene publications which the censor catches, but in the general reduction in the circulation of material of that kind."

[96] Pamela Martineau and Steve Wiegand, “Show's not so 'purrfect' for female forces in Iraq,” Sacramento Bee, online ed., 12 March 2005. The “dance” troupe is know as “The Purrfect Angelz.”

[97] A poll conducted for Time, 21 July 1986, p. 22, found that 63% of the women and 47% of the men surveyed thought pornography leads people to commit rape. As to whether pornography leads to "a breakdown of social morals," 69% of the women agreed but only 44% of the men. See also H.J. Eysenck and D.K.B. Nias, Sex, Violence And The Media (London: Maurice Temple Smith, 1978), p. 233; Zillmann and Bryant, p. 16; Gallup, 1976-77, pp. 1029, 1034.

[98] “Fed Up with TV Porn, French Want It Banned,” Fri Sep 6, 2002, Paris (Reuters)

[99] Catharine A MacKinnon, Only Words (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), quoted in Michiko Kakutani, "Pornography, the Constitution and a Fight Thereof," New York Times, 29 October 1993, p. B4. Kakutani describes MacKinnon as a "feminist lawyer and professor."

[100] Reported April 24, 1992, the 1990 survey of 4000 American women was financed by the U.S. government's National Institue on Drug Abuse and conducted by the National Women's Study.
A wealth of research on pornography and its relationship to rape and aggression is analyzed in Donnerstein, Linz and Penrod, The Question of Pornography, op. cit., pp. 50-73. Their halfhearted call for action (education not legislation) is disappointing. For additional research and a more courageous approach written by the head of the American Family Association see, Donald E. Wildmon, The Case Against Pornography (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books, 1986). On the link to rape and aggression see also, Laura Lederer, ed., Take Back the Night: Women on Pornography (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1980), p. 24; Zillmann and Bryant, pp. 16-17.

[101] Parmelee v. United States, 113 F.2d 730 (1940) at 731, fn. 9, quotes from Cardozo's Paradoxes of Legal Science (1927), p. 37. See also pp. 732, 741-42 on the shifting perceptions of "decency" over time.

[102] Since Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) at 24, 35-36, an obscene work is subject to suppression by society if (1) the "average person," (2) applying "contemporary community standards" would find that (3) the work taken as a whole appeals to the "prurient interest." Also the work must (4) depict sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable State law, (5) be "hard core," and (6) lack "serious literary, artistic, or scientific value.” See Frederick F. Schauer, The Law Of Obscenity (Washington, D.C.: The Bureau of National Affairs, 1976), pp. 46-47.

[103] Lester A. Sobel, ed., Pornography, Obscenity & the Law (New York: Checkmark Books, 1979), p. 33; Clifford L. Linedecker, Children in Chains (New York: Everest House Publishers, 1981), p. 270.

[104] Frederick F. Schauer, The Law of Obscenity, p. 50; Schauer, "Speech and 'Speech' – Obscenity and 'Obscenity': An Exercise in the Interpretation of Constitutional Language," The Georgetown Law Journal 67 (April 1979): 920-21, 932; Lane V. Sunderland, Obscenity: The Court, the Congress and the President's Commission ( Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 1975), pp. 41-42; Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) at 23.
In the 1973 Miller case Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote, "...to equate the free and robust exchange of ideas and political debate with commercial exploitation of obscene material demeans the grand conception of the First Amendment and its high purposes in the historic struggle for freedom." (at 34)

[105] Parmelee v. United States, 113 F.2d 730 (1940) at 730; Geoffrey Robertson, Obscenity: An Account of Censorship Laws and their Enforcement in England and Wales (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1979), pp. 6-7, 45, 307-10. Robertson notes that some legal reformers are laboring under the mistaken notion "that the problem is soluble by tinkering with the statutory definition of 'obscene.'" All such definitions, he says, "require the return of a value-judgement verdict, after forensic debates about morality and community standards." (pp. 307-08)

[106] Miller v. California, supra.

[107] Justice William Brennan in a minority opinion written the same day as the Miller decision, stated that "after 16 years of experimentation and debate I am reluctantly forced to the conclusion that none of the available formulas, including the one announced today, can reduce the vagueness to a tolerable level.... Although we have assumed that obscenity does exist and that we 'know it when (we) see it,'...we are manifestly unable to describe it in advance except by reference to concepts so elusive that they fail to distinguish clearly between protected and unprotected speech." [Paris Adult Theater v. Slaton, 413 U.S. 49 (1973) at 84]. Brennan's cure (at 113) for this legal headache is no help at all for the society outside the courtroom. He would have eliminated all controls on the pornography consumed by adults.

[108] See the quotation of Geoffrey Robertson, supra.

[109] Schauer, "Speech and 'Speech'...", p. 933.

[110] Robertson, Obscenity..., op. cit., p. 309.

[111] Wills, "Measuring the Impact of Erotica," Psychology Today 11 (August 1977), pp. 30-34, 74-76.

[112] Patrick Buchanan, Death of the West, op. cit., p. 85.

[113] Miller v. California, op. cit.

[114] Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 U.S. 184 (1964) at 197.

[115] Richard Neely, How Courts Govern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 151-52.

[116] John P. Reed and Robin S. Reed, "Consensus and Dissensus in Pornography Definitions: A Content Analysis," International Behavioral Scientist 5 (Sept. 1973): 11-12. An example of a desire in the legal profession to "sanitize" law of moral connotations is in Schauer, "Speech and 'Speech'...", p. 920, note 119: "For my part, I often doubt whether it would not be a gain if every word of moral significance could be banished from the law altogether, and other words adopted which should convey legal ideas uncolored by anything outside the law."

[117] Neely, How Courts Govern America, p. 207.

[118] Schauer, The Law of Obscenity, pp. 147-48. Roth v. U.S., 354 U.S. 476 (1957).

[119] Ibid., pp. 74, 150-51.

[120] Robert P. Davidson and Michael O'Boyle, "Obscenity Laws in England And the United States: A Comparative Analysis," Nebraska Law Review 56 (1977): 285; Devlin, Enforcement of Morals, p. 98.

[121] As of 1988, the electorate was authorized to choose supreme court members at the outset of their service in 23 States, and in another 16 States the people reelected the justices to the terms that followed their initial appointment. Calculated form The Book of the States 1988-1989 (Lexington, KT: The Council of State Governments, 1988), pp. 163-65.

[122] Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist, no. 71: "The republican principle demands that the deliberate sense of the community should govern the conduct of those to whom they entrust the management of their affairs...."

[122a] Cronin & Kennedy, op. cit,. The Riverkeepers, pp. 114, 130, 175, 277.

[123] Sobel, Pornography, Obscenity & the Law, op. cit., p. 33.

[124] Devlin, Enforcement of Morals, op. cit., pp. 90-91.

[125] New York Times, national ed., 6 October 1990, pp. A1, A6.

[126] The grand jury is a dead letter in many States and the prosecutor alone is authorized to bring charges. In Federal law, however, the Fifth Amendment requires a grand jury before a person is prosecuted for "a capital or otherwise infamous crime." Interstate dissemination of SLOPPP would be a Federal felony under section 11:9 of the arch-amendment, probably requiring a grand jury. To prosecute solely intrastate disseminations of SLOPPP would require no grand jury, although State law might mandate it.

[127] Vatican Commission, 1989, at 6.

[128] Sumiko Iwao, Ithiel de Sola Pool, and Shigeru Hagiwara, "Japanese and U.S. Media: Some Cross-Cultural Insights into TV Violence," Journal of Communication 31 (Spring 1981): pp. 31, 33-34, 36.

[129] Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, 1986, pp. 323-29, reported that materials portraying sexual violence are increasingly prevalent in the United States. The Commission found that such pornography leads to an increased likelihood of aggression on the viewer's part, and that it leads sexual aggressors to believe that when the victim says no she really means yes.

[130] Ibid., pp. 291-97, 1037-1238.

[131] William A. Stanmeyer, "Obscene Ends v. Obscure Truths: Some Notes On First Principles," Capitol University Law Review 7 (1978): 661; Wills, "Measuring the Impact Of Erotica," pp. 33-34.

[132] Schauer, The Law of Obscenity, p. 229. See pp. 228-234 for a textbook approach to the prevailing doctrine of prior restraint.

[133] Blackstone cited in Near v. Minnesota, 283 U.S. 697 (1931) at 713-14.

[134] Near v. Minnesota, Ibid., at 716.

[135] Facts on File, 1979, pp. 713-17. The H-Bomb article by Chuck Hansen was published Sept. 16, 1979 by the Madison Press Connection and Sept. 18 by the Chicago Tribune. The U.S. Justice Department then dropped its case in Muland v. Sprecher. The ACLU and others had opposed the government by seeking to have lifted the preliminary injunction barring Progressive Magazine from publishing the Hansen manuscript.

[136] Freedman v. Maryland, 380 U.S. 51 (1965); Schauer, The Law of Obscenity, pp. 230-31.

[137] James Madison, The Federalist, no. 63, paragraph 16.

[138] Daniel Webster (1847) in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 15th ed., p. 451.

[139] "All government – indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act – is founded on compromise and barter." Edmund Burke, Second Speech on Conciliation with America; the 13 Resolutions, March 22, 1775, in Bartlett's, Ibid., p. 373.

[140] Pius XII cited in, John Courtney Murray, "The Problem of Pluralism In America," Thought: Fordham University Quarterly 29 (Summer 1954): 194.

[141] Quoted in Gustave Weigel, S.J., "The Church and the Democratic State," Thought 27 (Summer 1952): 174-75.

[142] Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) at 24, 35-36. See Miller, op. cit.

[143] John Adams drafted the Declaration of Rights for the State constitution of Massachusetts (1780) ending with article 30 and its memorable phrase: "...to the end it may be a government of laws and not of men."

[144] In identifying SLOPPP the Cultural Laundress would be limited directly or indirectly by the provisos of section 11:5, 11:8-13.

[145] Sidney Ratner, James H. Soltow and Richard Sylla, The Evolution of the American Economy (New York: Basic Books, 1979), p. 292.

[146] According to ABC News.com, 28 January 2003, pornography has grown into a $10 billion business — bigger than the NFL, the NBA and Major League Baseball combined — and some of the nation's best-known corporations like General Motors, AOL Time Warner, and Marriott are quietly sharing the profits.

[147] Herold Price Fahringer and Paul J. Cambria, Jr., "The New Weapons Being Used In Waging War Against Pornography," Capitol University Law Review 7 (1978): 578.

[148] Winston Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples, vol. 3, The Great Democracies, book 11, “The Great Republic.”

[149] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859) chapter 5, paragraph 7, in The Harvard Classics, vol. 25 (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909), pp. 306-07.

[150] Ibid., p. 286 (chapt. 4, paragraph 7). E.J. Mishan, Pornography, Psychedelics, and Technology (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1980), p. 5, makes the case that 19th century libertarians like Mill and Lord Acton had no affinity with carnal types of literature and entertainment. As of 1992 Mishan was professor of Economics, The City University of London.

[151] Deuteronomy 30:19.

[152] Clor, p. 202.

[153] Isaac Asimov employs the "edges of wedges" or "foot in the door" argument in, "Creeping Censorship," Christian Science Monitor, 29 April 1982, p. 23. Clor, pp. 114-17 refutes this kind of argument in detail.

[154] Clor, p. 115; Mishan, op. cit., pp. 42-43. Irving Kristol, "Pornography, Obscenity and the Case for Censorship," The New York Times Magazine, 28 March 1971, p. 116; Miller V. California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973) at 35-36.

[155] On the distinction between prose and pictorial pornography see, Hawkins and Zimring, Pornography in a Free Society, op. cit., pp. 219-20.

[156] For detailed refutation of the "you can't legislate morality" argument, see Clor, pp. 202-06; Mishan, pp. 37-38. See also G.P. Baker, Constantine the Great and the Christian Revolution (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1930), p. 157, on how a state can effectively suppress or legislate against certain actions.

[157] Quotation attributed to American poet, Maya Angelou (1928- ).

[158] Sunderland, Obscenity..., p. 81.

[159] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Phillip Bradley, ed., 2 vols. (New York: Vintage Books, 1945), 1:315-18. On Bryce see Anson Phelps Stokes, Church and State in the United States, 3 vols. (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950), 1:7-8.

[160] Reo M. Christenson, "Disdaining Restraint, Pop-Culture Voyeurs Blight Our Future," Christian Science Monitor, 31 October 1990, p. 19.

[161] Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chapter 71, paragraph 3.

[162] Mishan, p. 54; Unwin, Sex and Culture, pp. 321, 326; Sorokin, p. 28.

[163] Mishan, Ibid.

[164] Post-Talumd, Midrash, Kohelet Rabbah 7:16

[165] Berns, op. cit., in Rist, ed., p. 53.

[166] Irving Kristol, "Pornography, Obscenity and the Case For Censorship," op. cit. In addition to numerous literary credits, Kristol was professor of social thought, graduate school of business administration, New York University. More recently he has authored, Neoconservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Free Press, 1995). Currently, Irving is a senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute.

[167] Kenneth R. Clark, "'TV creates vidiots'" UPI release, in Seattle Post Intelligence, 3 September 1981, p. E9.

[168] Christian Science Monitor, 22 September 1981, p. 15.

[169] Teachout, "Community in Obscenity Law," op. cit, pp, 683-84, 686. On community vs. raw freedom see, pp. 725-28. At p. 684 Teachout follows Horwitz in attributing the anti-communitarian slant of American law to the market ideology of 19th century economics, and to the influence of the business class in maximizing freedom of contract. Early in U.S. history, says Horwitz, law was conceived as protective, regulative, and expressive of the "moral sense of the community," but merchants and entrepreneurs were able gradually "to forge an alliance with the legal profession to advance their own interests through a transformation of the legal system." By 1850 American jurisprudence favored the individual (the businessman) over the community (farmers and workers). [Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law 1780-1860), (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp. 253, 259]. See also, Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, op. cit.

[170] Teachout, Ibid., pp. 684-85, 687, cites Sanford Levinson, then in the politics dept. at Princeton University, and more recently law school professor at the University of Texas.

[171] Mishan, p. 39; Edward J. Berbysee, S.J., "Conflict In The Courts: Obscenity Control & First Amendment Freedoms," The Catholic Lawyer 20 (Winter 1974): pp. 26-27.

[172] Bickel quoted in Stanmeyer, "Obscene Ends v. Obscure Truths," op. cit., p. 681.

[173] Medved quoted in Bork, Slouching Toward Gomorrah, op. cit., p. 152.

[174] Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Crimes Against Nature: op. cit., 279pp. Cronin & Kennedy, op. cit., p. 145, explains how close despoilment of the environment is to theft: "In the early 1960s, U.S. courts and legislatures began to recognize that environmental injury is theft. When one party, for its own enrichment, takes some public trust right that belongs to another – such as clean air, uncontaminated fish, access to waters and fisheries; one’s livelihood, health, recreational opportunities; or publicly owned resources – it is as much as theft as if that party had stolen private property." It also becomes a human right issue "when this theft is committed against the will of the polluted community but with government permission and protection…." Surely these principles apply at least as directly to the moral and spiritual environment as to the physical environment.

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