Word: sin
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LESS well remembered than Lord Acton's celebrated aphorism about the corrupting effects of power is his dictum that "Everything secret degenerates; nothing is safe that does not show it can bear discussion and publicity." Carl Jung agreed that "all personal secrets have the effect of sin or guilt." These statements aptly define the attitude of a democratic society-particularly the U.S.-toward its leaders. The man in public life has a private life that is not exclusively his own. It is assumed that the people's right to know includes the right to know all, or almost...
...Blows. Nothing of the sort, says Vidal. "I do not prefer homosexuality to heterosexuality," he writes, "or, for that matter, heterosexuality to homosexuality . . . But regardless of tribal taboos, homosexuality is a constant fact of the human condition and it is not a sickness, not a sin, not a crime." Vidal insists that "I am not an evangelist of anything in sexual matters except a decent withdrawal of the state from the bedroom." He calls Buckley one of those "morbid, twisted men" who are always "sniggering and giggling and speculating on the sexual lives of others...
...that details are lacking; there are too many details, piled like bodies. The Rhone River was consecrated by Pope Clement VI so that corpses could be thrown into it; the living abandoned virtue in one town and sin in another; doctors and clergymen fled and hid at their country estates, or they stayed courageously with the dying and died themselves. Columns of flagellants, convinced by the Death that God had found them guilty, marched through German towns whipping themselves. Jews were accused of causing the plague by poisoning wells and were burned in their ghettos. But the emotions-then...
...that it is being called upon for more than its fair share of those sacrifices. The Kerner commission cited "white racism" as the principal cause of racial violence. Up to a point, the charge is just, and the white lower middle class carries its share of bigotry - a moral sin against blacks that will have to be paid for sooner or later as surely as the economic and social sins. But as the nation recognizes the le gitimate demands of the black revolution, it must also acknowledge the legitimate fears of the white reaction. Otherwise, feeling threatened, the marginal whites...
...Protestants in the ecumenical Consultation on Church Union and the various Baptist groups -will be "credal": they will not, as groups, adhere to a fixed creed. On the other hand, nine million Lutherans with an orthodox set of beliefs that include such traditional doctrines as the Trinity and original sin would occupy a unique and important position between the rest of American Protestantism and Roman Catholicism...