Incredible image “American Justice” by and property of Mark Velasquez; see more of him here and here and here. Used with express permission. Mark tells us, “I love America and most Americans, but I see us all suffering from a collective stagnance. We’re all pretty sure where we stand and how we feel, but don’t know where we’re going or what to do next. We are looking for something to believe in, someone to tell us its going to be okay, something that feels real and relevant.”
I just read one of the most thought-provoking write-ups about conservatism, sexual morality, Larry Flint’s “right to be left alone” and shared devotions to political ideals in the Liberty Guys’ post IFC Film – “Larry Flynt: The Right To Be Left Alone”. I think now more than ever, we have to end the internal American war on sexual hysteria and sexual intolerance and sexual ignorance, or things are only going to get worse. Snip:
Growing up a good Catholic boy, I learned to despise pornographers like Al Goldstein, Bob Guccione, and Larry Flynt (a not AHEM entirely unhypocritical position.) Coming of age in the confused-but-prosperous 1980’s, I was further encouraged (by the now-burnt-out women’s movement) to despise porn and pornographers as somehow primarily responsible for the oppression of women. The good Catholic liberal in me righteously grunted in assent, if not exactly approval.
I finally awoke from this fog of illogic when I read that some feminists believed and wrote not only did porn cause sexual assaults of women, but that, incredibly, some of them seriously proposed that there was no such thing as volition involved in sexual relations between men and women. This pretty much vaporized any remaining credibility of the “women’s movement” for me, standing in opposition to even my somewhat limited experience.
Yet I retained enough residual revulsion for Mr. Flynt and his ilk to be vaguely disgusted by the hagiographic film “The People vs. Larry Flynt”, a response not helped at all by the casting of the addled-yet-smug Woody Harrelson as Flynt, and the walking trainwreck that is Courtney Love as Flynt’s now-late wife.
Later, Flynt, in response to the wrongheaded and politicized impeachment of President Clinton, offered a reward for evidence of sexual impropriety on the part of a sitting member of Congress. I was, having over several years quietly absorbed the political and culture-war rhetoric of talking heads like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, still more disgusted by Flynt, as well as his cultural and spiritual alliance with Clinton, exactly according to the plans of the people who were conducting psy-ops on me and no doubt many thoughtful, small-l liberal people, who were nonetheless not fans of the Clintons. (…read more, click through for links.)
