Skipping Towards Gomorrah Read Free Page A

happiness. But if I’m not hurting anyone, my pursuit of happiness is no less virtuous than Bennett’s.
    To be fair, for some of the high-profile virtuous, living an upright life may not make them all that happy. In fact, it may make some of them miserable. There may be conservative pundits out there who desire to smoke dope or sleep around but deny themselves these pleasures, and their public calls for virtue are simply an externalization of their own inner struggle to be good. “Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised,” wrote La Rochefoucauld in his Maxims (1665), a point driven home by former television evangelist Rev. Jimmy Swaggart. Swaggart, you’ll recall, condemned pornography and prostitution for years, and then was caught visiting prostitutes and “consuming” pornography. Swaggart had deeply conflicted feelings about pornography and prostitution, and he called for the more restrictive laws against both in hopes that the state might help keep him right with God. But those of us who enjoy pornography and prostitutes without conflict shouldn’t have to go without to protect Swaggart from himself.
    Whether virtue comes easy or the virtuecrat has to do battle with his desires, the virtuous all conspire to force their virtues on us sinners, which is not something sinners do. The existence of the virtuous is not regarded by sinners as a personal threat, nor do sinners attempt to stamp out virtue wherever we find it. No urban music lover has ever, to give one example, placed a gun to Robert Bork’s head and forced him to buy a rap CD. Nevertheless, in Slouching Towards Gomorrah , Bork argues that no one should be allowed to buy rap CDs. “Is censorship really as unthinkable as we all seem to assume?” Bork asks in a chapter titled “The Case for Censorship.” “I [suggest] that censorship be considered for the most violent and sexually explicit material now on offer [including] the more degenerate lyrics of rap music.”
    Personally, I never wanted to buy a rap CD until I read Bork’s book, which is the strange—and strangely predictable—thing about censorship: It creates a demand for the very things the censors want to stamp out. Even if it were possible to scuttle the First Amendment—so much for original intent!—and ban rap music, the effort would fail. The Soviet Union, a police state with unlimited powers and spies in every workplace and apartment building, attempted to ban rock and roll music. It failed. It’s hard to imagine how our government could enforce a ban on rap music in a country whose citizens own almost as many CD burners as they do guns. Not that I would put it past John Ashcroft. Social conservatives will sometimes argue that rap music or violent movies or drugs need to be banned to protect the weak and vulnerable from taking up a life of sinful indulgence. It would be easier to take these arguments more seriously if the same social conservatives weren’t opposed to laws that protect the weak and vulnerable from unsafe workplaces, flammable children’s pajamas, and arsenic in our drinking water.
    Rap versus show tunes; monogamy versus variety; pot versus Bud Light—different things make different people happy. It’s such a simple concept, so—what’s the phrase? Oh, yeah. It’s so self-evident . Why, then, do so many conservatives have such a hard time wrapping their heads around it?
    Like a room full of Victorian spinsters with the vapors, virtuecrats would have us believe that the mere knowledge that sinners are out there having fun keeps them up nights; indeed, knowing that someone, somewhere, might be pursuing happiness in ways they disapprove of is a profound psychological torment to them. Therefore, they argue, it’s in the best interest of society—and by society they mean, “me and everyone who agrees with me”—for the law to come between sinners and