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Tuesday, January 07, 2003
Dildos, Free Markets, and Ben Shapiro
I have to admit that Ben Shapiro became my favorite rightwing punda-loon only after the SD Union dropped the columns of Joseph Perkins. Perkins, for those who never read him, was a former aide to ex-VP Dan Quayle. Perkins managed to parlay that "insider" gig into one that allowed him to rewrite Heritage Foundation press releases into profoundly fact-challenged columns that the UT found fit to publish. The fact that Perkins was black and conservative, making him rarer than a George Bush deep thought, allowed the UT editors to bite their collective tongues and ignore the many sarcastic Letters to the Editor that inevitably followed a Perkin's column.
But then I discovered Ben, the Hey Arnold! of conservative punditry and I knew I had discovered a new source for twisted conventional wisdom, a narrow minded outlook, and stunted social development. Much has been made of Ben's failure to dabble in the conjugal arts (he claims religion, but I think we all know better), and he wonders why everyone is so obsessed with his "sexual status".
Maybe it's because of columns like this from the Daily Bruin:
UCLA has entered the zone of no return. The Zone d'Erotica, that is.
Zone d'Erotica is a sex shop located just 375 feet from Gayley Terraces. This store, offering the only kind of deviancy UCLA lacks, adds a great deal to the campus: a place to buy assorted pornographic videos, sex toys and lingerie. Just what the homeowners, students and faculty need...
There are limits to capitalistic enterprise, and this is one of them. While the government should keep involvement in the workings of the free market to a minimum, the sex industry is one market that shouldn't be too free. It is an illegitimate, unfortunate function of the market that distribution centers exist for such twisted items, and while the government cannot ban them, it can restrict them. Gayley Avenue is a good place to start.
The Westwood Homeowners Association has every right to protest this travesty. Would you want a sex shop opening across the street from your home? If you had a five-year-old child, would you want him to ask "Mommy, how much is that vibrator in the window?"
Sex shops happen to have a certain, less-than-reputable audience. Such stores gather a very exclusive, perverted clientele likely coming from near and far to find such a treasure trove. Must we wait before the shop is already established to realize that sordid men walking around Westwood holding Wicked Enterprise videos will make the area look bad?
snip
Any paper equating a Christian bookstore with a pornographic sex shop is not worth the paper it is printed on. This is another disgusting example of an attempt to strip away stable values and implement a set of "subjective, tolerant, diverse" values.
Anyone who believes that a Christian bookstore promoting God, love and morality is as offensive as a sex shop promoting animal lust and the degradation of sexual intimacy into a merely hedonistic act is quite simply a disgrace to the human capacity for knowledge and reason.
The Westwood Homeowners Association has the moral and intellectual high ground. The kind of situation that would allow a child to be exposed to pornography mandates some sort of action, governmental or otherwise. There is no benefit to having this sort of smut in any decent neighborhood.
For those keeping score at home, sex involves "deviancy", and is "twisted", "perverted", "sordid", and involves "animal lust and the degradation of sexual intimacy into a merely hedonistic act"...but only if done right, I might add.
I think that we can safely say that young master Shapiro's "sexual status" indicates the soul of Carol Ledoux trapped in the body of a young, male, socially inept, poli-sci undergrad.
Now that's twisted....
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