15 November 2006

lawyers, guns and money

The apparent resurgence in adherence to, or interest in, religion led us here at VVB to wonder about any changes in what you might call the general public attitude to the sorts of things that religious adherents seem to get exercised about. You know: obscenity, blasphemy, lewd behaviour and perhaps what consenting individuals get up to in their own bedrooms. Have there been changes and what has changed?

On father's bookshelves, amongst an eclectic miscellany, I found
Obscenity, Blasphemy, Sedition by Peter Coleman, a former Liberal State and Federal MP. As the frontispiece notes, at one stage he "found himself Chief Secretary responsible for censorship in New South Wales." He is also evidently a small 'l' liberal sort with a keen eye for hypocrisy and the sorts of antics that governments get up to when pressured by particular groups - in the cases cited, the churches, arch-conservative groups and just plain wowsers.

The book covers it subject under a number of categories: sex; blasphemers; revolutionaries (ie political intriguers and scandal. I was particularly struck by the free-wheeling nature of society in Australia in the late 1800s. Some of the examples of scandal sheets were possibly of an ilk such as we now see in publications like Who Weekly - maybe a bit more personal, being aimed at local types rather than our contemporary, overseas celebrity targets.

The book covers government responses such as straight out banning, gaoling of perpetrators as well as bureaucratic mechanisms, such as the Postmaster General withdrawing favourable rates such as applied to newspapers, essentially using an unrelated regulation to put a 'paper' out of business.

It'd be easy to have a few cheap shots here at how ultra-conservatism really hasn't changed over the years, but that's not the purpose. I was more taken by how things haven't changed - sure, we can read (and now see on TV, film and other electronic media such as games) more 'extreme' stuff, but I didn't discern too many changes in how society in the broad has responded.

Which I found somehow comforting. Wherever we're going, it's not to the dogs.

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