Censorship, Stereotypes, and Other Fine Things

Art in our day has acquired a special charisma, and many consider censorship a sacrilege against its dignity. I think I love and respect the arts as much as the next man, and I have always thought myself a native of this country, a rather typical native. Yet when I hear the tones and accents of veneration with which many of my countrymen speak of Art, and the unqualified and unexplicated contempt with which they refer to Censorship, I feel like a foreigner, an uninitiated tourist, who has failed to grasp the inner meaning of terms whose obvious senses cannot account for the values and emotions attached to them.

Television, for instance, is getting racier, which leads many to say it is getting freer. The fare of Three’s Company and Johnny Carson’s monologues is the sort of thing that used to get movies C (Condemned) ratings from the Legion of Decency. Such private ratings belong to an ill- understood realm between pure libertarianism and state suppression: the realm of social inhibition, etiquette, things that Just Aren’t Done.

JS

About the Author

Joseph Sobran

Art in our day has acquired a special charisma, and many consider censorship a sacrilege against its dignity. I think I love and respect the arts as much as the next man, and I have always thought myself a native of this country, a rather typical native. Yet when I hear the tones and accents of veneration with which many of my countrymen speak of Art, and the unqualified and unexplicated contempt with which they refer to Censorship, I feel like a foreigner, an uninitiated tourist, who has failed to grasp the inner meaning of terms whose obvious senses cannot account for the values and emotions attached to them.

Television, for instance, is getting racier, which leads many to say it is getting freer. The fare of Three’s Company and Johnny Carson’s monologues is the sort of thing that used to get movies C (Condemned) ratings from the Legion of Decency. Such private ratings belong to an ill- understood realm between pure libertarianism and state suppression: the realm of social inhibition, etiquette, things that Just Aren’t Done.