Besot and Bethrodden! Hear ye, for a badge of shame - SHAME - hangs deep in the smoky air of our very vanity like a loose gown and easy cap -- or britches on a scoundrel, hanging too and fro as the urban las does love to endue themselves with whilst rhyming nonsense. Let it be known that our Lord and Protectorate, his eminence King and FCC council, in reverence to the creator of all flesh, hath lightly recognised a deed of sin - SIN I SAY - by the personages at ABC. I pray you, examine this misdeed, as ABC did, during one episode of NYPD Blue, showing a woman's bottom. We make no account the distinction between unhallowed lust and holy love, or between device and babysitter. I pray you, that Americans, in their domestic privacy--having been permanently scarred by a woman's bottom on television, shall take comfort in an FCC fine of $1.43 million dollars. And our lady liberty, she recognizes, believe me, the solemn miracle which God hath wrought in the existence of our moral Congress, which has passed legislation such that the fine will further be $16.9 million in the future for any disgrace upon decency. You may feel, too--what, methinks, is the very truth--that this blessing was meant, above all things else, to keep the child's soul pure, the parents in comfort and slumber, and to preserve America from blacker depths of sin into which Satan might else have sought to plunge us!

May our conservatives and liberals continue this holy war on decency, for only freedom can arrive when all manner of thought is regulated, when a man of comedy is strictly punished, and speech is tempered with the religious zeal that brought other emigrants across the Atlantic, away from loathsome places in Europe where nudity, profanity, and freedom poison the spirit.

The Republic, in memoriam

With apologies to Hawthorne.

posted by lazlow at 10:58 PM  on Saturday, January 26, 2008