In Civilized Society, Shame Has Its Place : We the people must rescue America before it becomes one big red-light district.

A few months ago, Sens. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) and I began a campaign to focus public scrutiny on certain daytime television talk shows and their sponsors. The objects of our criticism are not close calls. They are shows that typically cross way over the line. We have described their content as cultural rot. How else could one describe shows whose typical subjects include a 17-year-old girl boasting of having slept with more than 100 men, a 13-year-old talking about sexual experiences that began when she was 10 and “Women Who Marry Their Rapists.”

A number of commentators have defended these talk shows for “reflecting reality,” arguing that our campaign won’t succeed and that sponsors are within their “rights” to advertise on their programs. It is useful, then, to explain what we are attempting to do and what we are not.

First, our campaign is not about rights. We are not trying to curb free speech. I am a virtual absolutist on the 1st Amendment, and we have been emphatic about not arguing for censorship. Nor is our goal to remove every last vestige of garbage from our social landscape; this is impossible in a free society.

But we are asking talk show hosts and advertisers to reconsider their support of some of this daytime television fare. If they continue their support, we are asking that they be able to justify publicly what they are doing, which is to “mainstream” trashy behavior.

Almost every society has its red-light districts. That is part of reality, and we all understand that. A free society can tolerate such districts. But society should also do what it can to discourage them and contain them. And so, too, with the popular culture version of red-light districts. They ought to remain on the periphery, away from Main Street, our living rooms, our schoolyards.

Recent postgame interviews with athletes help illustrate a similar point: NFL players feel free to curse on the field and in the locker room. Not many people object to that. But it is nonetheless true that what you have a right to do is not always right to do. And it is wrong for people, even athletes, to curse on camera for national television.

The aim of our campaign is to use nongovernmental means to make the case that such cultural trash should be less pervasive. We believe that a sense of shame still exists in the highest reaches of corporate America and in the entertainment industry. We believe, too, that progress can be made through moral suasion, not government intervention. And we intend to keep making the case that civilization needs cultural guardrails, certain reliable standards of right and wrong that may not be enforceable in law but must be enforceable through conscience and consensus.

All of this requires that we make normative judgments. Of course, some people balk at any attempt to do this, even as they balk at any effort to declare some things worthy and some things unworthy of human consumption. Martin Luther King Jr. was right when he wrote in his “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” that something that uplifts human personality is just and something that degrades human personality is unjust.

Instead of simply lamenting the debased state of our popular culture, citizens need to do something about it. After all, we are witnessing the pollution of the human environment. Cleaning out our cultural air ducts won’t happen by itself; it requires concerted effort and specific action. Five years ago, our effort would not have resonated nearly so much with the public. But we have hit a cultural nerve. What we are seeing, here and elsewhere, is the shock of recognition that in too many places, not just in back alleys but in the main thoroughfares, America has been cheapened. We, the American people, have allowed this desecration to occur. It is past time that we do something about it.