Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, January 14, 1993 TAG: 9301140455
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
MEDIA PROMOTE CAUSES OF CHILD ABUSE
REGARDING your Jan. 7 editorial addressing child abuse, I submit it has probably been with us since human creation/evolution, but has multiplied a thousandfold since the 1960s when the media began championing "anything goes" First Amendment freedom.You wring your hands editorially and demand legislators to do something about the sordid situation. But you advocate treating the effect, not the cause, which is evident to most of us: the prurient filth and social degradation that have been increasingly permitted in television, radio, books, magazines and, yes, newspapers under the misapplied guise of First Amendment freedom. Yet, if legislators took explicit action to expel this garbage from our society, you'd scream your heads off about censorship and constitutional infringement.
If treating the effect called for stronger measures to terminate the sickest of the abusers and keep the rest out of circulation indefinitely, which it does, you'd bleed all over the op-ed pages about rehabilitation, which is a costly failure, and capital punishment, which is not. Eliminate the cause and the effect will disappear.
If some person or group has a highly contagious and incurable disease, shouldn't their individual freedom of movement be restricted by quarantine for the good of the whole community? By the same token, shouldn't we also curtail the freedom of action of that which is infecting and destroying the moral fiber and civilized decency of our society?
The ivory-tower liberals have sowed the wind and are reaping the whirlwind by championing unabridged and undisciplined First Amendment freedom, not just in the horror of child abuse but in most every facet of our ever-sickening society. RICHARD K. CULBERTSON BLACKSBURG