<http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/nov/02/ condemning_porn_is_the_new_porn>
Condemning Porn is the New Porn
By Nathan Newman | bio
You know the problem with porn? It's so common that it's lost the ability to shock, so Tom has to resort to condemning porn in order to start a fight at a liberal website. How dare he say such a thing? It's an insult to liberal values!
I'll leave it to Tom to discuss the substantive differences between promoting legal censorship and just acknowledging that a lot of folks think too much porn-- and excessively large Big Gulps -- aren't good for our society, even if they don't want to ban either.
But it is interesting that some liberals condemn religiously-based OPINIONS the way conservatives often condemn sexual imagery or other libertine values. You get the sense that some liberals aren't really looking for a live-and-let-live society but to clone themselves and their values everywhere.
On the porn issue, there is a whole realm of non-conservative feminists who have deep antipathy to the values embodied in prevalent porn in our society. As long as they don't jump to government censorship, why shouldn't liberals celebrate the diversity of opinions as what makes a pluralistic society great?
I'm personally pretty much a libertarian atheist in my personal values, but I actually think the political values promoted by many liberal commentators is sometimes intolerant as many of the conservative values on the right in their rejection of diversity. Isn't it kind of countercultural to be against porn in a culture saturated with it?
I think progressive politicians sometimes pay the price because while the policies they promote-- minimum wage, health care for all, even diversity of thought -- have supermajority support in the population, many religiously-minded progressives feel that their values aren't respected. Maybe folks don't think they deserve respect because they fear the next step will be censorship, but there is a middle ground which just means standing up for the First Amendment while suggesting that if more people just personally rejected the products of excess Tom talked about, we all might be better off.
I'm not even sure I agree with Tom on the cultural causes of the excesses he's talking about-- I'm probably more of an economic determinist in my explanations and probably more tolerant of some of the cultural results. But I do find it amusing that so many of the commentators are so offended.
As the title says, condemning porn it the new porn. It seems to offend certain people the same way porn upsets other people.