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Immorality will implode democracy

March 25, 2007

Dear Editor,

Spring break time is here again and with it the usual display of nudity and drunkenness in the "hot spots" around the country. Some of it is highlighted on national TV. And as usual some of the TV programs consult with some of the so-called behavioral experts in an effort to explain this wild and wacky behavior.

The experts are analyzing the wrong people. They should be analyzing the parents. I can't believe that the parents are proud of their children's behavior. What I can believe is the obvious: They don't care, primarily because there's no stigma of shame associated with it anymore. A few short years ago this kind of behavior would not have been tolerated by either the parents or society. I remember the time when Elvis and his gyrations was censored on TV by showing him from the waist up only. Filthy language and nudity in the movies was not allowed. Public display of homosexuality was considered immoral and something to be ashamed of. Morals were taught at home and reinforced in the public school system.

What has happened to bring about the current state of affairs? There's a very simple explanation. It is the combination of two factors. One, Madelyn Murray O'Hare convinced a misguided Supreme Court that she had the constitutional right to "not be offended" by a display of Christian values in the public school system. No where in the Constitution does it give someone the right not to be offended by someone else's religion.

And No. 2, and probably the biggest contributor to the current state of affairs, was the redefinition of the word "speech" to include physical expression. This is what stopped the censorship of pornographic material, both verbal and physical and gave it First Amendment protection, something it never had for the previous 200 years.

The A.C.L.U. convinced a liberal Supreme Court that the current laws and interpretation of the Constitution didn't support "original intent" of the framers of that document. In order to believe that, one must believe that the founding fathers were in violation of the Constitution from the get go and were not smart enough to realize it.

The legislation that accommodates the current state of affairs was not a remedy for implementing "original intent." It is a violation of 200 years of constitutional law and a recipe for the implosion of a democratic society, the same thing that has happened to all democracies throughout history and for the same reasons.

Jerry B. Waskom

Stanford

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