Word: moralizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Regarding the controversy over whether the press and voters should concern themselves with the alleged sexual or other moral misconduct of leaders like Senator Gary Hart ((PRESS, June 8)), I offer this quote from John Adams' Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law (1765): "Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have . . . an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers...
...Federalist papers, in a grandiose moment, predicted that the Constitution would "vindicate the honor of the human race." What the founders created, at any rate, was an extraordinary civilizing program, and a moral style in which conscience -- the Judiciary, the third eye -- was turned into an institution. The genius of the Constitution has been the moral restlessness it embodies, and its capacity to change even while its basic structure abides. Today, all but six of the world's nations either have or are committed to having a single-document constitution. That idea was born in Philadelphia. Reverence...
...would be crude and misleading to say that Jefferson's ideas about building illustrate the ideas of the American Constitution. But they certainly grew from the same origin -- the secular humanism that, despite the gaudy bleatings of today's religious right, was their common moral root. Thus the calm, measured, lucid interior of Jefferson's Rotunda, the focus of his "academical village" (the University of Virginia), declares the value of reason and persuades us that humane analysis, not blind faith, is the true measure of a decent society. We sentimentalize Jefferson and his colleagues if we suppose they were...
Neither Peale nor any other American painter of the late 18th century except Copley produced a masterpiece within his own field comparable to the architecture of Jefferson or to the legal and moral qualities of the Constitution. But by 1800 an answer to the haunting question posed by Michel- Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur -- "What then is the American, this new man?" -- was latent in the young Republic's art, and explicit in its architecture...
...porn? What harm does it do? According to the moral right wing, lots. "Erotic material is addictive, like drugs or alcohol," says Paul McGeady, general counsel for the watchdog lobby Morality in Media. "A husband says he wants to see what all this is about and buys a porn videocassette. But he is not satisfied with one that shows ordinary intercourse. Then he fantasizes that he is doing what he sees on the tape. Finally, he turns to his wife and wants to act out kinky sex. She says, 'Get lost!,' and the marriage breaks up." Nor is porn...