HEF & GUNTHER: Bunnies & Body Worlds

Last updated on: April 4, 2006 at 5:53 am by Fr. Joseph Huneycutt

HEF & GUNTHER: Bunnies & Body Worlds 2006-04-04T05:53:00-05:00 Fr. Joseph Huneycutt

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Audrey Ignatoff

I have written about the devil before, but always in a metaphorical way. However, I now feel that an evil force has come too close to home. Even this embattled “health care warrior” was shocked to the core to learn that school children in my district were being taken on a trip to see an exhibit called “Body Worlds” at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. This goes against all religious and ethical beliefs in the civilized world, and has given me nightmares from just looking at the website.

There was a dark and joyless time in America when one could actually go about daily life without ever encountering pornographic images. A child could grow up scarcely knowing that “adult entertainment” existed, much less acquainted with its many varieties. Hotel stays, in that prudish, stuffy era, had to be endured without pay-as-you-go porn, in-room and On Command. American males could not avail themselves of hundreds of millions of obscene films every year–as they do now, courtesy of even respectable corporations like Time Warner and Comcast–or take in the show at “gentlemen’s clubs” when porn is not enough.

It was Mr. Hefner who put the real money in porn …

He is not the worst of America’s celebrity pornographers, though being the first is no great distinction either, and but for Hef a few standards of public decency might actually have held awhile. Without his pioneering vision, we might, in our own time, rise every morning to face a world without “Girls Gone Wild” or Sex.com, without cable or Internet porn for all hours and all ages. Whatever the problems of those repressed, Puritanical types that Mr. Hefner is still using as strawmen, they did somehow manage to fill their days without such things, and we could use a little more of their self-restraint and modesty.

As to those “major beneficiaries” of porn, you won’t find too many women these days who think that the world is better because of Playboy or the smug, selfish ethic it has always purveyed. For good reason has the Playboy Foundation long been a benefactor to NARAL Pro-Choice America and Planned Parenthood: The Playboy Philosophy has always been for the ladies, too, all right–just so long as they remember what they’re good for, don’t get too sentimental and feel grateful when the playboy in their own life offers to pay for the abortion.

The WHOLE story.

My question: What is the difference between Body World’s Gunther von Hagens and porno mag’s Hugh Hefner?

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