Draw the wagons into a circle, boys, the prigs are on the attack! That is hardly news to those who've been following the antics of the Moral Majority or its sisters under the skin, the unsmiling Women Against Pornography. What is surprising is the lengths to which some of those holier-than-thou fringe groups will go or the pusillanimous behavior exhibited by segments of the media in bowing to their demands. We have a lot more respect for Jayne Kennedy, who---when a church group, after seeing her partly unclad photos in playboy, canceled her scheduled speaking appearance---kept the date, anyway. Paraphrasing Matthew VII: 1, she reminded her audience: "You can't judge me. Only God can do that." Behind much of the effort to censor TV is a Mississippi Methodist minister, the Reverend Donald Wildmon. He had 4000 monitors watching TV for the merest hint that sexual intercourse had occurred, in or out of marriage. Denying prudery, Wildmon told Time he had four kids, and "you don't get four kids by picking blackberries." Apparently, now that he's got his, everybody else can head for the briar patch. Although some see this repressive climate as emanating from Washington, it's really business as usual on Capitol Hill. Remember Liz Ray and Fanne Foxe? This year we had the Jenrettes, Paula Parkinson, Mississippi Representative Jon C. Hinson (caught with a black man, not a constituent, in the men's room) and the Director of the Federal Education Department's office for the gifted and talented (honest!) busted on charges of arranging filmed sex acts. Finally, even protests in 1981 had their lighter side, or, rather, their backside. Turn to the last page of this feature and see how a coalition of Swiss, French and German activists expressed its opinion of a nuclear power plant. Cheeky, we call it.
Bluenose specials:
Monkey Business:
You are what you eat:
The Medium's the Message:
Good Sports:
Jocks & Jills:
Raw Rivalry:
Take it off, take it off:
Dress Option
Above, a little splash party honored the 12th anniversary of Oh! Calcutta!, the long-running nude musical comedy on Broadway.
Washington Merry-Go-Round:
Giving their all for art:
Foreign affairs:
