Fair Game

...On the other hand, if we find that they are meeting our needs, enhancing our lives, then surely we ought to speak up for them when they are abused...

...It was not so long ago that liberals were joining in the call for bigger households, a return to the extended family with its place for the old and the young, for unmarried aunts and widowed cousins...

...When the courts established a test of socially redeeming value for dirty books, that was entirely within the liberal tradition...

...Today, liberals are in the fore of the movement for Zero Population Growth, in order to save future generations from the dire consequences of a jam-packed planet...

...Parts of the attack are no doubt justified...

...To support, by rote, every sort of lifestyle but our own, to join in the recurrent attacks on the middle-class values around which we organize each day's activities, to bow good-naturedly before those who deride our most intimate relationships-and yet never seriously to consider altering anything we do by a jot or tittle-that is more serious than hypocrisy...

...Don't we have to make some connection between our principles and our most cherished practices...

...Before we can defend, we must examine-but if, having examined our households, we find them to be as wanting as our critics maintain, then surely we ought, insofar as we can, change our way of living...

...Perhaps we will be surprised at how sturdy and wholesome those middle-class values turn out to be by comparison...

...Yet we continue to give them our blessing...

...Still, a willingness to learn does not require that we greet every attacker with our heads between our knees, urging them to kick harder, harder...

...But there are other changes that have won liberal support almost automatically, whose repercussions we can neither escape nor by any means enjoy...

...Nor am I in favor of hiring the Advertising Council to do up a series of billboards proclaiming the virtues of the nuclear family, particularly one that worships together...

...But see, liberals, what we have won...

...Such questions do not faze conservatives...

...Values and Verities At this point, I suppose, I had better insert a disclaimer...

...Are family matters simply a matter of personal taste, or do deeper currents move men, women and societies into family patterns-and if so, can we fail to respect them without paying a price...

...Yet here, too, we find liberals being tossed on the winds of fashion or ideology...

...Sometimes they react out of fear, sometimes out of faith, but it must be said for them, at least, that they are willing to declare themselves publicly for their own real, lived values...

...In our detestation of censorship, we have given up the field to the pornographers, at what cost to our own values we scarcely dare ponder...

...they ought not to be resorted to lightly...

...I do not propose that we pass laws against alternate lifestyles or in any way harass their practitioners, unless, like Charles Manson and his family, they try our patience beyond reasonable bounds...

...But, despite all the exhortations, we continued to operate within our small families and make certain that our in-laws did not get too close...

...The best tribute we can pay to counterculturists, communards, pornographers, and swingers of all sorts is to reassess our own lives in the light of their examples...

...Is it possible to be in favor of extended families or of no families in principle only...

...We opposed censorship because we believed or kept telling ourselves that, on balance, society would come out the better for freedom...

...We are like members of a fundamentalist sect, pained by diseases of the flesh but bound by our faith to stand fast against all effective remedies...

...It is as though our engines of political action, having been set for us three or four decades ago, continue to function, and we move forward or sideways like robots, without regard to the injuries we cause ourselves or the nuisances we may be inflicting on those around us...

...The ACLU position against censorship has at least the virtue of consistency, and it relieves the rest of us of the need to make difficult decisions...

...Nonetheless, our family lives follow the same old reactionary pattern...

...After all, liberals are entitled to their share of hypocrisy, or virtue-at-a-distance, and we may be certain our critics will not fail to point out to us the instances when we recommend for others inconveniences that we personally prefer to forego...

...To be sure, powerful drugs have powerful and invidious side effects...

...More difficult to understand is the warm liberal response to every innovation in lifestyle that pops up- and they have been popping up all over the place...

...I have in mind not only the suburban liberal who enthusiastically favors busing for integration in the city from which he and his family have fled, or who champions "community control" of schools his children no longer have to attend...

...One need not like the consequences of divorce to insist that the state leave people to muddle through their personal affairs as best they can so long as no babies are left to starve in the streets...

...The laws that would drive Deep Throat from Times Square can also be used to drive textbooks out of West Virginia schoolrooms...

...Perhaps we may even reach a point where we become concerned enough about them to start cleaning up Times Square...

...I don't think many of us would contend that French Blue or The Life and Times of Xaviera Hollander have a lot of social value, a humorous test from the beginning...

...Whether it is Open Marriage or Contractual Marriage, or marriages without children, or children without marriage, or any sort of commune, liberals have tended to greet them with the welcome for novelty for which we are famous...

...Lenny Bruce was good for us...

...I don't think most of us find much that charms or edifies us around Times Square these days...

...Diffidence does have its charms, and it is all very well and very liberal to try to "understand" an unusual idea or practice rather than condemn it by reflex as many of our compatriots do...

...Well, we were right, I think, and we won a famous victory...

...The liberal spirit was naturally offended by the banning of Ulysses and Lady Chatter-ley's Lover...

...Are we in fact practicing a benighted, destructive way of life...

...The separation of one's private values from one's public statements is a common and demoralizing ailment...

...But to raise a cheer for every innovation because it is innovative is no compliment to the conformists out there, and it may be an insult to ourselves...

...conclusion that we are heartily in favor of monogamy, the nuclear family, a couple of children, and so forth...

...Fair Game BY WALTER GOODMAN Principles and Practices Between liberal pronouncements and the ways most of us liberals really live, divisions have developed in recent years that threaten to engulf our principles altogether...

...Walk west on 42nd Street in New York or on like streets in many other cities and take in the fruits of our victory...

...it is a form of schizophrenia...

...For liberals, the challenge is more difficult...

...Indeed, they have a disagreeable tradition of employing their powers to suppress unorthodoxy...

...Yet inherent in many such experiments is an attack on family life as most of us live it...

...More difficult to justify, however, is the open-minded, open-mouthed reception by people who have absolutely no intention of altering their own lives, who would be grieved to see their children follow strange paths, but refuse to think through the implications of the many-fronted assault on the family...

...What sort of comment is it on ourselves when we dare not mount a vigorous defense, in theory as well as in practice, of institutions around which we have built our entire lives...

...We knew the censors were out to suppress Art, and that we were representing Enlightenment and, yes, even Civilization against the backward, the ignorant and the fearful...

...But we have scarcely made an effort to face up to that dilemma...

...Fads and Families Most of the liberals I know are conventional family people...

...For many years, to take a simple example, the fight against censorship was a liberal cause, and it remains so today...

...I don't think most of us encourage our adolescent children to visit the neighborhood...

...I am pretty sure, in fact, that a poll of the liberals I know would show pornography in its various forms to be in disfavor, yet I am also sure that if the word censorship were invoked as a way of dealing with pornography, the opposition to it would be overwhelming...

...Unlike those wrong-headed parents in West Virginia, we seem to be afraid to trust our own reactions, our own experience, preferring to put our confidence in the American Civil Liberties Union...

...The liberal position on such issues as divorce and abortion seems to me generally justified...

...Outside of disbanding our homes and backpacking into the Rockies, the only way we can evidence our serious attention to novel family or nonfamily or antifamily arrangements is to examine our own situations...

...They are only too ready to establish their favored arrangements as standards for all the rest of us...

...Yes, we have our share of divorces (followed quickly by remarriage in most cases), and we do our share of fooling around, but if a sociologist were to set out to determine our attitude toward family life from the sort of lives we have chosen for ourselves, he would be forced to the...

...When laws do more harm than good, they ought to be changed, the metaphysical views of one or another congregation notwithstanding...