May we Idahoans qualify as mature audiences, only

Last Tuesday I saw an enchanting movie that played at the East Bonner County Library. The role of the hero was performed by 1,490 people who signed petitions strongly requesting software that filters Internet pornography be installed on library computers.

The protagonist was the U.S. Constitution and public concern over potential censorship, and where that might lead.

Serving as the de-facto directors, the library board served up victory and defeat to both sides, offering to install the software but only on a few computers dedicated to use by minors.

It was in a sense a nicely crafted political move. No one could claim total victory and consequently start fantasizing that they had suddenly become the new library policy-maker. Neither could anyone, from a position of total defeat, demand political revenge seeking out that same policy control through a recall petition.

The library board in a way forced free speech lovers and porn haters to shake hands and go back to raising their children.

In that spirit I applaud the board and all those in attendance. Civility, something that surfaced for only the first three minutes of the recent presidential campaign, lasted through two hours of commentary and debate. Having heard Bonner County citizens in the midst of such controversial discussions yell everything from "You baby-killers are history!" to "Liar! Lair! Pants on fire!" it was welcomed, needed and a lesson to all.

The complex connections this issue has with our social and personal experiences, however, leaves many questions up for grabs. If one interest group can get public money spent to address its fears, can the next group do it, and the next? In a world where parents are rarely if ever at home after school, are libraries now turning away from their ancient role as repositories of knowledge and into day care centers for latch-key kids?

I suspect neither of these questions will get much air play in the aftermath of last week's decision. As the great populist lecturer, Stump Ashby, might have said, "Democracy is comatose in most places but dead in Idaho." The issues such questions raise are seen as too remote, too unlikely or too anti-American to even be allowed into the public debate. (A unique form of censorship in itself.) A question that cannot so easily be ignored and excused away, however, is that in the light of our concerns about pornography, when will we decide to openly and honestly deal with human sexuality in this society, and take a significant bite out of the alluring taboo taste of porn?

In this appeal for a new social attitude toward sex, I am not calling for a love fest on First Avenue during the Aryan Nations parade this coming April. History shows that overindulgence in sexuality is just another form of pornography that turns our bodies into things and spreads sexual energy around like an Indian monsoon, until we drown in it. What I am suggesting is working socially to finally allow sex to have an honest and acknowledged role in our world and in our lives.

When de Tocqueville wrote exhaustively about the American experience in the 1830s, he observed that the pursuit of religious virtue was as powerful an impulse as the pursuit of liberty. Sadly, however, this virtue has showed itself all too often as a carryover of the early Puritan fathers, persecuting witches, Jews and homosexuals in pathetic succession. And one of its favorite targets is human sexuality, attempting to keep it locked up in the dark corners of the bedroom and our minds. Keeping it evil, dirty and sinful.

We do not need a 1960s permissive sexuality, nor a 1360s repressive sexuality. Nor do we need a repeat of the ridiculous debates over sex education in the schools as "just say no" went from being an anti-drug abuse nostrum to being a sex preventative. We need a mature, rational, vulnerable dialogue about our divine sexual passions and their often shameful pitfalls.

In a society where it is illegal to show women's breasts on TV but blowing bodies apart with a .44-caliber magnum is deemed not only ethically OK but supportive of some perverted concept of Americanism, pornography will always flourish.

Allow open discussions and pictures of sexual acts to be shown on TV for everyone to see - as they do in Sweden, for example - and the sweet taste of taboo is left only for the worst of sex offenders whom no cultural or governmental restriction ever controls.

Until we are able to say "condom" without turning red in the face, library boards will remain the guardians of sexual safety.

Copyright 2001 Cowles Publishing Company
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