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GORE VIDAL
conservatives are at work strengthening these laws. In Florida the
administration has distributed an astonishing pamphlet denouncing
homosexuals in terms of seventeenth-century grandeur. In Dallas a
stripper named Candy Barr was given an unprecedented I5-year
prison term, ostensibly because she was found with marijuana in her
possession, but actually because she was a sinful woman. In the words
of a Dallas lawyer, the jury was "showing the world they were in
favor of God, heaven, and sending to hell-fire a girl who violated
their sense of morality."2
In this lowering Goldwater time, there
is
a strong movement
afoot to save society from sexual permissiveness. Guardians of the old–
time virtue would maintain what they believe to be the status quo. They
speak of "common decency" and "accepted opinion." But do such
things really exist? And if they do, are they "right"? After all, there
is no position so absurd that you cannot get a great many people to
assume it. Lord Maugham, a former Lord Chancellor (where do they
find them?), was convinced that the decline of the Roman Empire
was the result of too frequent bathing. Justinian
knew
there was a
causal link between buggery and earthquakes, while our great grand–
parents, as Steven Marcus recently reminded us, believed that masturba–
tion caused insanity. I suspect that our own faith in psychiatry will
seem as touchingly quaint to the future as our grandparents' belief
in phrenology seems now to us. At any given moment, public opinion
is a chaos of superstition, misinformation and prejudice. Even if one
could accurately interpret it, would that be a reason for basing the law
upon a consensus? Neither Professor Hart nor the legal moralists go
that far. The conservatives are very much aware that they are living
in an age of "moral decline." They wish
to
return to a stern morality
like that of Cato or of Calvin. Failing that, they will settle for main–
taining existing laws, the harsher the better. Professor Hart, on the
other hand, believes that between what the law says people ought to
do in their private lives and what they in fact do, there is a consider–
able division. To the degree that such laws ought, ideally, to conform
with human practice, he is a democrat. In answering those who feel
that despite what people actually do, they ought not to do it, he re–
marks that this may be true, yet "the use of legal punishment to freeze
into immobility the morality dominant at a particular time in a society's
existence may possibly succeed, but even where it does it contributes
nothing to the survival of the animating spirit and formal values of
social morality and may do much harm to them."
2
Dallas, Public and Private.
By
Warren Leslie. Grossman Publishers.
$4.50.
