Discussion Group Report

George W. Bush and God Himself are on notice: "The Democratic Party is going to take back God this time," Gore operative Elaine Kamarck announced a few months ago as the vice president made his play for the Almighty. He declared his disdain for "hollow secularism," his support for state funding of sectarian social service programs, and his conviction that "the purpose of life is to glorify God." Gore said of his religious faith, "I don't wear it on my sleeve, but faith is the center of my life."

The above paragraph opens Wendy Kaminer's article in The American Prospect, November 23,1999, with the same title as the present article. She further observes that a lack of faith in the intelligence of the American people inspires educated candidates like Gore, Bush, Steve Forbes, and Elizabeth Dole to waffle on evolution. All of them responded sympathetically to recent efforts by the Kansas Board of Education to purge the science curriculum of evolution. A perceived lack of faith in the morality of the American people has inspired a crusade in Congress against popular culture. Congressional moralists leave us no choice but virtue.

What do they mean by virtue? "Godliness in the form of allegiance to an established, mainstream religion (New Age will not do)...we cannot be good without God--a Judeo-Christian God, or maybe an Islamic one," Kaminer says. Virtue is supposedly attendant on respectable religions as shown by the conviction that America is in a state of moral decline grounded in the 1960's and evidenced largely by sexual permissiveness in real life and the media. Only lately has violence in the media become a focus for conservatives.

It could be argued that America made significant moral progress in the '60's. The Civil Rights Movement, feminism, and the Supreme Court's imposition of constitutional restrictions on the prosecutorial power of the state challenged us to turn ideals of freedom and equality into realities for all Americans. The emphasis on the losses associated with the 1960's, such as chastity and traditional religiosity, instead of the gains, dominates the anti-vice campaigns today. The drive to sanctify life by imposing new restrictions on speech and lifting old restrictions on state sponsoring of religions has been evident throughout the 1990's and would have dominated the 2000 campaign if it hadn't gained political momentum from recent mass shootings. These shootings have provided social-issue conservatives with unexpected opportunities for culture control, which Clinton Democrats seem afraid to oppose.

The juvenile justice bill pending in Congress includes amendments aimed at introducing sectarianism into the public schools. It mandates posting the Ten Commandments in the schools and denies attorneys' fees to people who successfully sue a school that has violated rules against establishing religion by conducting sectarian services or erecting sectarian memorials. A majority of House members also voted for a resolution exhorting all Americans to engage in "prayer, fasting, and humiliation before God." It failed on a vote of 275 for and 140 against (less than the two-thirds needed for passage). Kansas Republican Senator Sam Brownback introduced a resolution to create a Special Committee on American Culture "to study the causes and reasons for social and cultural regression," to determine the impact of unspecified "negative cultural trends" on "the broader society" and on "child well-being," and to "explore means of cultural renewal." This agenda "represents one of the periodic campaigns against popular entertainments and the people who enjoy them...Congress has been tenacious in its efforts to censor images of sex and violence it doesn't like," says Kaminer. She points out that in 1996 Congress also passed the Communications Decency Act, prohibiting "indecency" on the Internet. When CDA was invalidated by the Supreme Court, Congress passed The Children On-Line Protection Act, prohibiting speech that a federal prosecutor might consider "harmful to minors." In 1996 Congress also passed a law requiring cable operators either to scramble fully or consign to limited late-night hours sexually explicit programs in order to prevent the "signal bleed" that accompanies partial scrambling and exposes fleeting images and sounds of sex. A challenge to the signal bleed prohibition, brought by the Playboy Entertainment Group, will be argued before the Supreme Court. Another proposal currently before the Senate would classify violent "audio and visual media products" with cigarettes and subject them to federal labeling requirements.

All these laws take it as an article of faith that children are harmed by any exposure to virtual sex. Like God's love it needn't be proved empirically. In an evidentiary hearing, Playboy Entertainment Group's experts testified that there is no empirical evidence that sexually explicit videos harm minors psychologically, a point the government's witness did not dispute. Kaminer asks, "If this law is enacted, will film adaptations like Shakespearean tragedies or movies like the Thin Red Line or Bonnie and Clyde be treated like toxic wastes, which must be labeled to the satisfaction of federal bureaucrats?

"Liberals repelled and frightened by hate speech or anxious to restore ill-defined spiritual values to society, as well as centrists and conservatives, need to be reminded of the moral illegitimacy of censorship," says Kaminer. "Liberals troubled by congressional visions of culture control need to address its political implications unapologetically."