Word: law
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Perhaps the best hope in dealing with the erotic explosion is that the crassest, most commercial panderers will be curbed by law; beyond this, in legitimate arts and entertainment, a public sense of taste?and humor?will act as the best censor and restore some balance. Gresham's law does not necessarily apply to literature, theater or cinema. The bad drives out the good only temporarily. The point has been made briefly: anything can be shown. Now perhaps the time has come to remember that not everything has to be shown...
...being churned out today. Most of it is perverse, narcissistic, brutal, irrational. And boring. As George Steiner observed: "The number of ways in which orgasm can be achieved or arrested, the total modes of intercourse, are fundamentally finite . . . Once all possible positions of the body have been tried?the law of gravity does interfere ?once the maximum number of erogenous zones of the maximum number of participants have been brought into contact, abrasive, frictional, or intrusive, there is not much left to do or imagine...
...what may be a classic definition: "Pornography is in the groin of the beholder." Though, as Rembar notes, there is virtually no such thing as obscenity in the literary legal lexicon today, the courts have insisted that minors should be protected from exposure to prurient material. And by federal law an individual may take action to prevent receipt of unsolicited pornography through the mail...
...severity of King James I and the censorious society of Oliver Cromwell. The excesses of the Restoration were sobered by Victorian propriety. The licentiousness of Weimar Germany ended in the austere and brutal anthill of Nazism. Constitutionally and temperamentally, the U.S. is probably immune to such violent reversals of law and mood. Nonetheless, as in any other democracy, change in the U.S. tends to be uneven: two steps forward, one step back. Whatever the disposition of the new Supreme Court, there is real danger of repressive action at the local level?in all likelihood by policemen and prosecutors not intellectually...
...thing that alarms me is that there are so many clergymen who say that the so-called "new morality" is all right. They say we're living in a new generation; let's be relevant, let's change God's law. Let's say that adultery is all right under certain circumstances; fornication's all right under certain circumstances. If it's "meaningful...