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July 22, 2003
Doing the Nasty
Somewhere in this great nation of ours, people are bickering about the future status of Kobe Bryant much the same way they did about the future of a guy named Bill Clinton.
Elsewhere, however, they are talking about freedom, specifically the freedom of North Koreans. Most of us, I would say, would have a very difficult time understanding the mentality of a people who would make Kim Jong Il into a hero. As a leader of a country, he sucks. Why 2 or 3 million of his people starved to death. That's 1 out of 10. We in America have a tough time dealing with 10% unemployment, imagine if it were 10% starvation. Starvation to death.
In North Korea, we are told, all of the radios and televisions only tune to government channels. You can't travel anywhere. You must serve in the military whether you want to or not, and above all you cannot say anything derogatory about the government and its primary hero Kim Jong Il. Any misspoken words or illegitimate freedoms will be reported to the authorities by a nation of stooges. In North Korea, you had better watch what you do.
Americans rightly sneer at such oppression. Who in their right minds would suffer a society where people who exercise basic freedoms are destroyed? Who indeed.
Over here, we have many freedoms. Perhaps that is why we are so willing to suffer the ignominity of our sexual taboos. Whether we like it or not, the freedom to have sex how we want, with who we want, whenever we want is freedom. But we, like North Korea, have a nation of stooges who cannot wait to destroy the lives of people who exercise that freedom.
We make fun of Mrs. Bryant and Mrs. Clinton when they defend their wayward spouses, but could it be that they know something about freedom that we don't? Could it be that they among us have learned something about the juggernaut that is unleashed around this unsightly obsession Americans have when somebody famous is a bit too free with their sexuality? I think so.
We have been given a stark and brilliant lesson by the Supreme Court this year in the matter of bedroom behavior and the public interest. It's none of our business how, when and why people do the nasty. So long as we call it 'the nasty', there will be a familiar and repressive force against sexual freedom in our society. It is at this point that I will try to remind everyone that we are a nation of laws and that we should respect those laws.
Kobe Bryant is charged with sexual assault, and he is innocent until proven guilty. That's the criminal standard. Americans can and will rightly judge him when that charge is proven or disproven in a court of law. But that is not the nature of the talk in our nation of sexual stooges. People are in a quandary about why somebody who has every advantage our society has to offer its heros should go in this direction.
Perhaps it is because we are not truly willing to admit that sexual freedom is a real freedom.
Posted by mbowen at July 22, 2003 02:35 PM
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