Wheel of hypocrisy!

 Frank Pavone runs an outfit called "Priests for Life," which is ironic in that the Vatican defrocked him.  Before that he was head of "Catholics for Trump" and a major banker for the anti-abortion crowd.  With all that on his agenda he just didn't think the celibacy thing was important, according to at least four women who are accusing him of "unwanted sexual advances, non-consensual touching, grooming and lewd suggestions."  (He asked one woman if she liked roller coasters, which is a new one on me -- whatever happened to gladiator movies?)  None of this is surprising.

Nor is the news that Jessa Duggar of Arkansas's vast reality-TV family, has participated in what she once called "the Holocaust of our time."  She had an abortion.  She's calling it a miscarriage but in fact a "non-viable" pregnancy was terminated by a D&C, not spontaneously.  I'm sorry she lost her pregnancy, but not as sorry as I am for women who don't have any options because of terrible laws and the hypocrites who shout for them.

As must be explained, slowly, every time a cable company drops a right-wing channel or a newspaper decides to stop running the cartoons of a racist, the First Amendment restricts the government from interfering with free speech.  Here's how to tell the difference:  Trump was so angered by Jimmy Kimmel's jokes about him that he told underlings to tell Disney to tell ABC to gag him in 2018.  "Nobody thought it was going to change anything but he was focused on it so we had to do something," said one functionary.  How envious must Seth Meyers be?  (Maybe he's on too late for Donzo.)  Some were reminded of Nixon's hatred for the press and that time he tried to have Jack Anderson killed by -- wait for it -- rubbing LSD on the steering wheel of his car.  And Nixon had G. Gordon Liddy, who was just mad enough to do it.  Apparently the Trump courtier just called somebody at Disney and whined, "Aw, come onnnnnn..."  Anyway, Anderson died of natural causes in 2005 and Kimmel is still on the air.

On a related subject, it's not "cancelling" if you do it yourself for financial reasons.  The waters are roiled at the moment over the decision of the Roald Dahl estate to tweak a few words in his books for children.  (For example, in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Augustus Gloop will be "enormous" rather than "enormously fat," truly a distinction without a difference.)  Puffin, the UK publisher, responded by promising to keep the unexpurgated books in print.  Ian Fleming Publications, Ltd  has gone further in excising some of the racism, sexism and homophobia from the James Bond books, which is going to anger the people who nearly burst into flames at the suggestion that 007 be played by Idris Elba.  The estate of Theodore Geisl tried to sidestep the editing problem by withdrawing six Dr. Seuss books altogether rather than try to make the texts and pictures less racist.  Similar problem with Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle books.

None of this is A-list literature.  I wince at the casual stereotypes in Fitzgerald and Dreiser, but nobody is proposing their re-writing (that I know of).  I'm more troubled by That Word in Huckleberry Finn because it discourages people from reading a genuinely great book, especially for its time (1884).  But re-writing is not new.  A century after Shakespeare, actor-managers like Tate and Cibber were performing his plays in versions they thought audiences would accept, most infamously the happy-ending King Lear.  (Happy insofar as Lear and Cordelia are reunited -- Gloucester doesn't get his sight back.)  By 1807 there was Thomas Bowdler's The Family Shakespeare, tidying up the sex and mayhem long before Victoria ascended the throne.  Dickens himself rewrote the end of Great Expectations when Edward Bulwer-Lytton (who nobody now reads) said it was too downbeat.  Many writers have tried to conceal early work they later found embarrassing, which we hope will not apply to the cache of pseudonymous Terry Pratchett stories to be published in October.

Publishing is a business before it is anything else, and if readers are willing to buy more stories about Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, Scarlett O'Hara et al., some writer will be hired to produce them.  Likewise if parents think the original books expose their children to racial stereotypes or body-shaming, the owners of the copyrights will do what's needed to keep them profitable.  I hate censorship when it imposes a political agenda on teachers and librarians; I happen to think most of them have more respect for books and readers than almost all politicians.  But there's a benefit to new, improved Dahl or Lofting -- future cultural historians (if we have a future and it has historians) will have a rich store of material for studies of what the early 21st century found disturbing and why, and the battles over how to fix it.

Postscript:  I happened to pick up Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and read the introduction by Anthony Arnove.  Back in 2010, when Ron DeSantis was still an assistant US attorney, Mitch Daniels, the awful governor of Indiana who preceded awful Mike Pence, sent an email celebrating Zinn's death and trying to ensure that no Indiana teacher would use his book.  He called it "a truly execrable anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page."*  By 2014 students and teachers in Colorado were picketing a local school board trying to ensure that AP history courses "promote citizenship, patriotism, essentials and benefits of the free-market system, respect for authority and respect for individual rights."  A year later the Common Education Committee voted to ban all AP history courses in Oklahoma because they focus on "what is bad about America."  Florida is just trying to catch up with the other monsters.

Trust the historians.    

*For this he was rewarded with the presidency of Purdue University.  I assume he is very good at raising money.