Media Assault on Decency

Saying the family unit in particular and decency in general were under attack by the media, a prominent figure took aim Tuesday at the decline of U.S. culture.

A grandstanding Senator? A TV preacher? An family activist group? Nope. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, who has been getting a lot of airtime this week with speeches at the UN and Columbia University that included marginalizing the Holocaust and claiming women were treated well in his country.

Whether the media should be giving him as big a platform as it has is a topic of some disagreement.

I tend to think that showing off the freedom of speech we accord our enemies and critics is a good thing. We can’t try to export it to other countries if we don’t posess it ourselves.

I think the Republic is strong enough to take some shots from a guy who, in the process, demonstrates his defecits like a flag, as when he said there were no homosexuals in Iran. If that were the case, it would be becuase they had been driven out by persecution or executed, if human rights groups are correct.

I also was struck by how much his criticism of the culture resonated in a time when it is under assault in Washington as well as Iran.

Take note of his closedmindedness and ponder whether to emulate it in the name of protecting our children, or do establish as large a gulf as possible between our beliefs and his.

That said, we would also be well to trhy to recognize why someone fom the Middle East would believe that the culture we are exporting is violent and oversexualized and unhealthy.