tangents

news & views

1959 has been a clamorous year for the Vigilantes of the Dirty Mind. Led by that intrepid, filth-hunting crusader from the GOPorkbarrel, Arthur Summerfield, who received the Post Office Dept. as a reward for services in Ike's 1952 campaign, the censors have been swarming out of every cranny and borough in the country. "Tighten up the laws on filth!" they shrill. "Protect Our children!" And if they think tighter laws won't do the job, they are quite willing to raid or intimidate newsdealers. Their hysterical moralizing almost rivals the lunatic vigor of the late Jr. Senator from Wisconsin, now departed to happier witchhunting grounds.

The nation's courts, all thru 1959, have been consistently clipping the censor's claws. In retaliation, the Postmaster and friends, plus a few topcops like Salt Lake's Skoussen, have been trying to galvanize the nation's lady's clubs into a army of anti-freedom fighters, hoping to twist a few legislative tails. They've made speeches galore, blaming everything from juvenile delinquency to Russ space superiority on obscene literature supposedly flooding into every 2-yr.-old's mailbox. For the impressionable ladies, they've arranged special obscene and shocking showings of materials illegally seized from the mails. Dunno if these showings were really as nasty as the PM says, but the ghastly countenances some shocked club-

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by dal mcintire

women turned on for press fotogs were pretty fierce. When such materials, stripped of any possible reasonable or artistic context (of which the courts have ruled the PM to be no competent judge), are deliberately shown for the sole purpose of offending women who are acting in no official capacity, then the arrangers of such a show are guilty of a felony and should be so prosecuted. If Postmasters, governors and police chiefs openly display their contempt for our courts and laws, can ordinary citizens be expected to respect them?

OTHER VOICES

1959's next biggest issue, and probably the problem of the century, has been that matter of birth control and world population explosion.

Medical experts, social workers, demographers and administrators from 27 nations met last spring in New Delhi to point out the danger for countries, already unable to support their populations, and now doubling their numbers every few decades. It took hundreds of centuries to reach a billion people on earth, less than one century to double that, and by the end of this century, there will likely be 6,000,000,000 people on earth, with the rate of growth just getting started.

Men have always averaged enough offspring to have doubled their numbers every generation, had not high infant mortality rates acted