course, Iowa farmers may actually grasp that an unclothed human figure can be a legitimate subject of art, as it happens to have been for more than 2,500 years. They might know that nudes appear in many thoroughly Christian places, starting with the Sistine Chapel, and countless paintings of biblical subjects.
Some can be found in various public sites around the world, where they can be gazed on by youngsters and everyone else. In Des Moines, an array of naked people is immortalized in works on exhibit at the Art Center. And would you believe that director Susan Talbott says she frequently sees Amish patrons?
Maybe they know what art historian Kenneth Clark pointed out: “The nude is the most serious of all subjects in art.” His answer to the question of whether there aren’t “more beautiful and acceptable things to be admired” would probably be the same as the ancient Greeks, Michelangelo and Renoir would have given: No, there isn’t.
Why would an artist insist on portraying a naked person when she could portray a modestly attired one? Not usually out of a desire to evoke lust, but because there is something elemental, timeless and classic about the nude form. Artists also realize the undeniable fact that the human body is a subject of great interest to anyone who has one.
For some subjects, nudity is not just appropriate but mandatory. Michelangelo’s “David” — that’s King David, of Israel — would not be the same wrapped in a loincloth. Narduli’s men would lose something if they were wearing togas.
Southern California is not alone in having some residents who doubt that nakedness can ever be aesthetically valuable. After a shop owner in Lake Alfred, Fla., placed a replica of “David” outside his store, the city demanded that he cover its nether regions. Complaints from workers at Kennedy International Airport in New York prompted an artist to paint a loincloth on her depiction of a nude Jesus on the cross.
After the State Bar of Wisconsin decided to adorn its Madison headquarters with a classical sculpture of a woman holding the scales of justice, with her eyes covered but her breasts bare, a handful of employees expressed discomfort. So the artist was brought back in to put some clothes on the hussy. There are people out there upholding the crucial principle that the uncovered human form should evoke shame rather than pleasure.
But in Los Angeles, where Victorian values are under unprecedented assault, sensitive travelers may see things they might not see just anywhere. So they should take the advice that has always been prudent for anyone journeying to California: If you’re easily shocked, close your eyes.
Our unwarranted ban on polygamy
Thursday, August 30, 2001
Let’s say Tom Green is a handsome young NBA star with a lusty nature and some irresponsible habits. He has prolonged sexual relationships with several different women, and over the years he manages to father a couple dozen children. In those circumstances, no one would be surprised if Green’s conduct earned him widespread scorn and ridicule. But we’d be very surprised if it got him sent to jail.
The real Tom Green is a bit different. He’s a pot-bellied, 53-year-old salesman, not a glamorous professional athlete. Instead of having affairs with an assortment of partners, he’s been living with five wives in a polygamous household in the Utah desert, along with most of their 30 children. And no one seems shocked that last week, a Utah court sentenced him to five years in prison on four counts of bigamy.
Green is a so-called Mormon fundamentalist who thinks he has a religious duty to practice “plural marriage,” as the original Mormons who settled the state did. Utah, however, had to ban polygamy as a condition of joining the United States, and Green’s outspoken defiance of the law got him in trouble with the local prosecutor.
In an era of sexual freedom, there’s something quaint about prosecuting someone because he insists on formalizing his relationships with multiple women and the children he’s fathered with them. We generally no longer enforce laws against fornication, adultery and sodomy, which are regarded as infringements on the right of people to live their lives as they choose. Still, though a man may have five girlfriends, and a woman may enjoy several suitors, the law says spouses are one to a customer.
Green is not the ideal poster boy for efforts to repeal such policies. Many of his wives were 14 or 15 years old when they married him, and he faces child rape charges because one of them allegedly was only 13 when he impregnated her. Besides the bigamy counts, he was convicted of failing to support his children and has to reimburse the state nearly $80,000.
If Green is a child molester and welfare cheat, he ought to be prosecuted for those offenses. There is no good reason to put somebody in jail merely for living openly with more than one spouse.
Laws against bigamy almost always address an entirely different form of misconduct: fraud. Most men who are prosecuted for bigamy have two or more wives who don’t know about each other. A guy will leave one woman and marry another without first getting a divorce, or he’ll pretend to be a faithful husband to each of two women living in separate cities.
In those cases, the crime has victims who were grossly deceived. But when a man whose religion dictates plural marriage embarks on matrimony with women who accept the deal as consenting adults, their living arrangements should be treated as their own affair.
Polygamy opponents may reply that Green and Co. can live however they choose — they just can’t enjoy the benefits of a state-sanctioned institution. The same excuse is used to justify the ban on gay marriage.
Denying the institution of marriage to gays and polygamists only discourages responsible adult behavior. Men who want to pursue all manner of fleeting sexual encounters — with numerous partners of the same or the opposite sex — are not inconvenienced. The only ones who suffer are those willing to accept the socially valuable constraints of matrimony. How does society gain from that?
Likewise, the ban on polygamy doesn’t prevent thousands of polygamists from practicing their beliefs in the shadows, where they won’t attract official scrutiny. By forcing them underground, in fact, the law breeds the very abuses decried by opponents, since the victims may fear that going to authorities will mean destroying the family.
It’s not even clear that the ban on polygamy is constitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court has struck down laws against contraceptive sales and abortion because they intrude on intimate personal decisions involving family, marriage and procreation. Polygamy laws make the same intrusion into this private realm.
Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia has suggested as much. He dissented from a 1996 decision that struck down a Colorado constitutional amendment barring local governments from adopting gay-rights laws because it targeted one group for unfavorable treatment. Polygamists, argued Scalia, have been singled out “for much more severe treatment” than gays, and under the court’s reasoning, “polygamy must be permitted.”
The Supreme Court and the American public may take some time to get used to the idea of letting people choose such arrangements. But someday we may recognize that if people want to engage in polygamy, it’s really not our business to stop them.
What we lost — and what we will keep
Wednesday, September 12, 2001
The scenes of apocalypse that transfixed Americans Tuesday evoked feelings of panic, helplessness and acute vulnerability in a nation accustomed to tranquility. For an enemy to strike multiple targets on the U.S. mainland is an experience no living American can recall.
Not since the Cuban missile crisis, when Americans
