French debate over t
In the New York Times, Elaine Sciolini surveys the political battle in France over television pornography.
"We are at a cultural turning point in French society," said Christine Boutin, a right-wing deputy in the National Assembly who is leading a campaign for a ban on pornography on television. "Our children are paying for the libertarian freedom that we experimented with in the era after May '68. This is not about censorship. It's about limits."
On the other end of the spectrum are freedom-lovers like the left-leaning newspaper Libération, which in an editorial on Thursday called the move to ban television pornography "hypocrisy" and "an unsettling oversimplification." It is, the editorial continued, evocative of the "same nostalgia, perhaps, of the good morals of the Balzacan bourgeoisie."
The article also mentions a prostitution crackdown in Bourdeaux and two censorship cases involving novels depicting pedophilia. (Thanks, Mazoola.)
