Word: moralizer
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...divestment movement spread like wildfire across the country for this simple reason. It brought together thousands of students and other people, not only because of the moral force of the issue, but because it promised a chance to affect change...
...divestment issue offered a clear-cut moral issue along with a clear-cut populist strategy. Dramatic campus protest generated media interest and catapulted the issue into the national consciousness...
...intelligence feat of World War II. Confronted with an enemy that could change its code in a trice, almost infinitely and randomly, via a complex encrypting machine, Turing outwitted the device by building a sort of early computer. A second allusion is to the code of moral orthodoxy, which Turing violated by his homosexuality. He compounded that transgression by disregarding the Oxbridge gentleman's code of discretion. While homosexual colleagues retained their posts because they did not flaunt their preferences -- some went so far as to marry -- Turing disdained convention...
...stoned viewers at the midnight show in the local art house. The Zeitgeist of that generation is now wildly reversed. Public figures who used pot at that time express regret for the transgression. Political survival demands that they not offend the new cultural norm. Marijuana use now carries a moral taint...
...Ginsburg's marijuana use was greeted with revulsion not because of its illegality, but because of its perceived intrinsic moral taint. Even without law, it is something that demands contrition. Why? Because, to summarize much that has been said on the subject, it is a decadent, nihilistic, frivolous giving over of one's consciousness and self-control to the pleasures of a waking stupor. Fine. But any moral reasoning that leads you to call immoral that kind of self-surrender must lead you to conclude the same about drinking, which can get you to a stretch of Lethe-land right...