Word: moralizes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...chastity, the religious right has a voracious appetite for tawdry tales of sexual impropriety. These conservative Christians may spurn gossip about movie stars and trashy afternoon talk shows, but their interest in unsubstantiated rumors about Bill Clinton's alleged affairs is more than a healthy concern for the moral compass of the President. It represents an irrational hatred of Clinton and a perverse desire for smut...
Which is not to say never. A potential human person is not yet an actual human person. Thus abortion, if repellent, is not exactly murder. And in most legal codes and systems of morality there is such a thing as justifiable homicide. It might be helpful to look at the case from a perspective other than the orthodox Christian one-a Buddhist viewpoint, let's say. Two great Buddhist principles collide here: reverence for life vs. the precept that the purpose of a human life should be to reduce suffering; any act that increases the total of human suffering...
...parents, with no prospects for anything but a life of poverty and welfare dependency? Does the suffering she and the child would undergo if it was born outweigh the horror of snuffing out a potential human personality? It is a close call-and precisely the kind of tortured moral judgment that the government has no business making. A nontotalitarian state must leave such judgments to its citizens to make for themselves, according to their individual ideas of religion and justice. For that matter, my belief that abortion is usually, if not always, immoral is fiercely disputed by many people...
Does that mean, then, that the state may never legislate on questions of morality? If it must not ban abortion, is it also foreclosed from banning murder, arson, rape, theft? Certainly not, but it should act only under two conditions. The legislation must express an overwhelming moral consensus of the community-not 55% or even 75% but something like 95%. And the conduct in question must pose a serious threat to public order...
DIED. ROBERT BOLT, 70, playwright and screenwriter; after years of declining health; in southern England. The theme of an individual's struggle for moral equilibrium in the face of world-shattering historical events runs through much of Bolt's work, from his career-making play, 1960's A Man for All Seasons, which he fashioned into an Oscar-winning screenplay for the 1966 movie version, to his scripts for the David Lean epics Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Dr. Zhivago (1965)-the latter earning Bolt an Oscar...