Like most children, I used to go to bed fearing that there were monsters lurking under my bed.

Unfortunately, times haven’t changed that much, for I still feel afraid when the lights go out – however, instead of checking for monsters, I now look for politicians.

Reverting back to an age in which I wasn’t even alive, audacious politicians are crying for a return to value systems that have long (for good reason) faltered. I, a twenty-something who refuses to wear the ‘Scarlet X,’ only grew up in the recent past, but in a more liberal world than today. It seems as if censorship and petty law of yesteryear are again in vogue. Some fashion trend, I say.

The fact of the matter is, the voices whining the loudest are those with the greatest cowardice. Rather than acknowledging the enjoyment of some of life’s more explicit pleasures and curiosities, lawmakers insist we should forget them. “Dismiss them as uncouth animal urges which have no place in our utopian society,” we are told. As if it were that simple.

If the world is truly “foul,” the circumvention of truth navigates us toward nothing but self-deceit. Cutting ourselves off from even the most obscene things in our world, only binds our hands, removes our eyes and sense of ‘virtual’ reality.

Legislators are embarrassingly out of place as they try and leap at us in the dark of night, giving nightmarish PSA’s about sodomy and oral sex being punishable to no end. Why do these laws exist? And should we really care if they do? If any storm-troopin’, doughnut-eatin’, out-of-touch lawman is going to lecture me about how I should sexually operate, there’s an immediate invitation for trouble. When the door shuts, life is about my lover and I. The rest of the world stops.

If only this were the extent of my insomnia. Unfortunately it’s not. Prudish paranoia extends farther than we’d like to imagine. But, as some powers claim, we have to, in order to purge ourselves of our “ills.”

To see how scary this misguided sense of “morally replenishing” control has become, consider this summers Communications Decency Act (S. 314) originally written by James Exon (D-Neb.). Designed to ban “indecent and obscene materials” on the Internet, the bill also has riding provisions that similarly affect television and motion pictures.

While perhaps fulfilling its theoretical obligation in an illusionary way, it relegates and subjects all of us to what I would term a dangerous infantilism. In fear of our children gaining access to what may be for them, at their developmental age, “inappropriate,” the entire media spectrum is ‘dumbed-down’; all of us, are treated like, again become or forever remain children. Rather than grow up, our lives are subjugated into suspension, in emotional stasis, perpetual Toys-R-Us Kids.

The point is, there is no resolution here. ‘Smut,’ as it’s called doesn’t just disappear – instead it’s following is actually amplified. So, rather than extincting something, we suppress it. But, like I said, suppression causes things to go underground, give them cult status, or glamorizes their so-called “evil.”

Culture has its own sort of natural selection and can’t be “legislatively engineered,” to ones reality-warped ideology. There is, plain and simple, no “clean” society — something will always be objectionable to someone. And as unappealing as it is to the right-wing purists, there is nothing that can be done to become “sanitary.” Legislators are only wasting their time by believing otherwise.

The age dawning upon us really isn’t much that different from Ray Bradbury’s famous tale. This is, after all, just another type of ‘book-burning.” This time it’s without the sickening humility of looking at the ashes. Instead, we’re supposed to turn our heads, hit the delete button, and forget that it ever happened.

But when I think of sickening rhetoric, it’s this recent era of Exonism that I find pornographic, with its orgasmic vision of a topless purity.

To Exon and his cohorts, I say, “Fold your eyelids down to the truth, wash your own mouth out with soap, but don’t crucify the innocent with your twisted ideals. Holding us as criminals, who haven’t done anything to prohibit us from partaking in what you falsely declare as ‘impure,’ you hold us in captivity, but not safety.” Taking away creativity, freedom, expression, is the decline of a society, not the rebirth of it.

Society may indeed need to come to grips with what interests and materials it has in its midst, but it mustn’t tear what it finds ‘distasteful’ to shreds. It needs to understand why subjectively objectionable materials are held in regard at all. Cutting a problem off at its root, not at the intersection of blight, is indeed the way to cure it. In this case, however, there is nothing diseased, obscene or inappropriate, other than the ejaculatory venom that sexually repressed politicians try to make us swallow.

David C. Ptak is a senior in philosophy from Long Island, New York.