By LEE N. HOWELL
Politically Speaking

There has been a lot of comment made about Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura's comments to a Playboy interviewer this year about his views on religion — and on sex — and on just about every other topic imaginable.

After it was published, some wit said that his nickname should be changed from “The Body” to “The Bigot.”

To my way of thinking, he might be dubbed “The Mouth” — for it does seem that he is taking a page out of Ted Turner's playbook and attempting to increase his visibility by being outrageously outspoken.

Now, Ventura is not the first politician to be entrapped into sticking his booted foot deep into his mouth and chewing vigorously on a leather sandwich.

During the 1976 campaign for the presidency, former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter said in response to another Playboy interviewer's question that — while he had always been faithful to his wife Rosalyn — he had “looked on women with lust.”

Expanding on the comment, Carter added that he had “committed adultery in my heart many times!”

The interview was published just a month before the election, and — to say the least — it made headlines and drew a lot of comment.

The pastor of the nation's largest Baptist Church denounced the interview and called the whole situation “distasteful.”

Now, all of us who live down here in the Bible Belt did not think a whole lot about Carter's statement, because we knew what he was saying.

We realized that Carter was simply saying that while he had not ever had an actual affair, he was just as guilty because — using the standard imposed by Jesus during His mountaintop discourse as recorded in the Gospel of St. Matthew, Chapter 5, verses 27 and 28 — he had “looked upon a woman lustfully.”

But, to many folk outside the realm of the wanna-be righteous, they just didn't catch Carter's allusion and they were left to wonder at what he really meant by what they perceived as his quaint verbiage.

Boy, if that Baptist minister — who obviously did understand Carter's use of the allusion — found the future president's discussion of his peccadilloes “distasteful,” what would he think about the way the world is nearly a quarter century later?

Today, our society is saturated with sex, and we are constantly bombarded with imagery so graphic — indeed, so pornographic — that only the perverted among us could want more.

Now, I never thought of myself as a prude, but I am almost to the point that I am sick and tired of sex.

Obviously, I am not talking about the kind of intimacy which loving couples in a monogamous relationship express behind the closed doors of their own bedchambers!

But, I am fed up with a society that uses sex to sell everything from automobiles to zoos and I am tired of living in one in which even the most private moments are discussed graphically on the evening news.

As a journalist and as an American, I have always supported total and completely unfettered freedom of speech — and I still do.

But, there comes a point when even the most freedom-defending among us has to exclaim, “Okay, you have the constitutional right to say whatever you will — but does that mean that you have to say it?”

I do not think so.

Nor do I think I am the sole voice crying in the wilderness when it comes to expressing revulsion at the sad state to which our democracy has fallen.

Someday soon — and hopefully it will not be too far off — there are going to be a lot of people throwing up their windows and crying out in the middle of the night, “I am mad as hell and I am not going to take it any more!”

Then, we will find out how many of those so-called opinion setters in society are really listening to what the people they claim to be leading have to say.

[Lee N. Howell is an award-winning writer who has been observing politics and society in the Southern Crescent, the state, and nation for the past 25 years.]

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