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Later in the week, Dole's wife Libby announced that she would be selling more than $15,000 in Walt Disney stock after learning that Disney, through its subsidiary Miramax, is the distributor of Priest. The controversial film, which her husband had already denounced several weeks ago, depicts a gay clergyman and a sexually active straight one. And coming soon from Miramax is Kids, a raw depiction of a sex-obsessed, drug-bleary day in the life of some New York City teens. It's the sort of thing Mickey Mouse would have to peek at through trembling white-gloved fingers.
To be sure, Dole's remarks were an unmistakable pitch to the culturally conservative wing of the Republican Party, which will have a lot to say about who becomes the next G.O.P. presidential candidate. Dan Quayle, their favorite son, never entered the race. Pat Buchanan, their guilty pleasure, is probably too extreme to be elected. Even before it turned out that he once invested in an R-rated film, Phil Gramm of Texas had left them cold. Until recently, so had Dole, who never showed much interest in the politics of virtue before the Christian right emerged as a power bloc in the party. In an effort to gain their attention, he has been sniping for months at Hollywood. Last week's salvo was like a proposal of marriage.
But Dole's attacks resonate beyond the party faithful, in all senses of the word. In a TIME poll conducted at the end of last week by Yankelovich Partners, Inc., 77% of those questioned said that they were very concerned or fairly concerned about violence in the media; 70% said the same about media representations of sex. With numbers like those, it's a safe bet that Campaign '96 will also be Murphy Brown II, a further chapter of the conservative assault on Hollywood that Quayle launched in 1992.
"What we need is a national debate over the relationship of liberty to virtue,'' says Gary Bauer, the former Reagan White House aide who is president of the Family Research Council. "If you expose children to uplifting and noble material, you're more likely to have noble citizens. If children are wallowing in sexual images and violence, that is bound to have an impact on those who are most vulnerable.''
In Hollywood, whose denizens have already been ridiculed for getting too close to the Clinton White House, the outraged response to Dole has been quick and complete. The speech was "a '90s form of McCarthyism,'' said Oliver Stone, whose Natural Born Killers was on Dole's hit list of objectionable films. "I don't think the public is that stupid,'' said Clint Eastwood. TV producer Norman Lear said he was "turned off by the excesses in some films'' but insisted that Hollywood these days is making more pictures like The Lion King and A Little Princess.