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-- A proposal that could quarantine AIDS victims, sponsored by followers of Lyndon LaRouche, has gathered nearly 700,000 signatures to win a spot on the ballot in a California referendum this fall. -- Despite a voter referendum in Maine last month in which citizens soundly rejected an antipornography measure, large-scale efforts to restrict the sale of sexually explicit material are under way in more than a dozen states from Massachusetts to Arizona.
To civil libertarians, these actions raise the specter of an invasive moral vigilantism that could erode the constitutional right of free speech and penetrate the protected realm of privacy. Democrats who have long advocated federal activism note with irony that the traditional Republican principle of getting government off the back of its people has been subverted by the evangelical right, seemingly intent on transforming Big Brother into a bedroom busybody. Conservatives and many mainstream Americans, on the other hand, view the trend as a welcome response to the breakdown of sexual and family values. The reassertion of traditional moral values, they say, is part of a broad conservative realignment in the political process.
The current atmosphere does seem to be part of a national retrenchment from the giddy permissiveness of the '60s and '70s. As the baby-boom generation settles into respectable middle age, many of the trends associated with it are in decline: singles bars seem to be on the wane, promiscuity is becoming a fickle memory. The sexual revolution, which celebrated polymorphous diversity, ended with cruel jolts: first herpes, then AIDS. Says Michael Novak, a social philosopher at the American Enterprise Institute: "The coming theme for the liberal society is virtue and character. In its youth liberal society could claim that the sex shops on 42nd Street represented emancipation. Adulthood means learning to choose, and above all, to say no."
Yes . . . and no. There it is, the old duality, the split personality of the American character. While polls show that many Americans have a renewed appreciation for traditional values, their tolerance of their neighbor's right to reject those values has not declined at all. Notes California Pollster Gary Lawrence: "More people than ever are embracing moral traditional values. But they're saying, I don't want anything to be repressed or oppressed, either."
The debate has been crystallized by the completion of a government-sponsored study that was initially dismissed as a small sop to Reagan's New Right constituency. After hearing testimony in half a dozen cities on topics ranging from sex with fish to baroque forms of bondage, making three field trips to porn shops like Mr. Peepers in Houston, and spending $500,000, the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography issued a two-volume, 1960-page report. In ceremoniously accepting it from Chairman Henry Hudson at a Justice Department news conference, Meese seemed both proud and sheepish as he stood before a seminaked statue of a female figure called Spirit of Justice.