Word: moralisms
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Given the postelection focus on "moral values," indecency has been even more oversimplified as a red-state-vs.-blue-state issue. But it doesn't break neatly along Republican and Democrat lines. It is one of the few issues capable of uniting, on one side, Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, and on the other, New York Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton and Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. If the FCC is strengthened, Limbaugh has argued, what happens when a future Democratic Administration decides that conservative talk radio is violence-inciting "hate speech"? Meanwhile, earlier this month, Clinton took the stage with Santorum...
Robert Acosta, a police officer from Florida who worries about protecting his 6-year-old son from dirty TV, expresses that sentiment plaintively: "We have to go back to the '50s. The world is going crazy. The '50s was a great time." Perhaps decency advocates mourn not only the moral standards of the '50s but also the social consensus. Opinion about today's balkanized media is as fragmented as their audience. So who should set the standard? Parents of kids under 18? (They make up only 36% of U.S. households.) Senior citizens? That gay guy with the nipple ring...
Kennan retired from the foreign service 50 years ago to perch at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study as America's most venerated foreign policy intellectual. Although he retained the moral streak of a Presbyterian elder, it was balanced by a Bismarckian realism. With a clarity of mind to the end, he issued warnings about the dangers of the ideological passions and crusading hubris that he saw infecting America's foreign policy today. --By Walter Isaacson
Sullivan misses the central moral message. The consensus goal should not be to reduce the number of abortions but to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies. The sanctity of human life is best upheld when we make sure life is not created carelessly. Precisely because life and parenthood are so precious, we must ensure that no woman is coerced into carrying a pregnancy to term. We suggest working for a world in which abortion is safe, legal, accessible--and rare...
Andrew Sullivan's Essay on abortion presented a sound middle ground for those on both sides of the issue to approach [March 7]. I hope the argument of moral consequences vs. a woman's right to choose can be set aside in order to focus on what everyone really wants: fewer abortions. As a staunch pro-lifer and Christian, I have a hard time admitting that we need to increase access to contraception, but I certainly would accept pills and condoms (with a healthy dose of lessons on abstinence and self-control) to avoid the taking of human life...