Sex

IT TURNS OUT that the politics of personal destruction does have cultural consequences.

As noted by Opinion Journal's Best of the Web, the January 29 edition of the Palm Springs Desert Sun featured an op-ed by a distressed 13-year-old named Lindsay Llarena. It seems that on January 8, a police officer who provided security for the local high school pleaded guilty to having sexual relations with a 17-year-old student.

IN AUSTRALIA, the era of big government is alive and well. WorkCover, the official workplace safety group in New South Wales, Australia, is getting ready to release a set of guidelines aimed at improving the working conditions of women (and men) involved in the sex industry. "Getting on Top of Health and Safety" is loaded with tips and advice for New South Wales's finest prostitutes and state-licensed brothels.

Under the Disorderly Houses Amendment Act of 1995, Aussie sex-selling went legal.

WHO CARES ABOUT a few strippers in the context of the slaughter of 6,000 innocent people?

Actually, the strippers--together with some booze, some hookers, and maybe even a little gambling that some of the hijackers enjoyed before September 11--could help the United States win one of the minor battles in the broader war on terrorism.

The Bush administration has gone to great lengths to reassure Muslims at home and abroad that the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam. It's a key distinction, and one the terrorists and their friends are trying to blur.

OFFICIAL WASHINGTON is a city of the sly evasion, the artful misdirection—spin, we like to call it—but seldom of the outright misstatement. You don’t often see a public official rise in his official capacity to make an official statement that is flatly, demonstrably, unmistakably contrary to the world as it is. It just isn’t done, for heaven’s sake.

David Satcher, the surgeon general of the United States, held a press conference at the end of last month to issue a new report. Issuing reports is what surgeon generals do. Since his appointment by President Clinton in 1998, Dr.

THIS WILL NEVER DO. You can measure the failure of Philip Roth’s latest novel, The Dying Animal, by the comments on the back cover. There’s the blurb from the Times Literary Supplement that acclaims Roth’s three prior novels for the "radical individualism" of which they were, in fact, the greatest denunciation recent fiction has produced.

IS IT WORTH remarking, at this late date, on the near-total acceptance of adultery in contemporary society? Or is it like noting that it is dark at night, or that the car has replaced the horse-drawn carriage? It seemed to happen so fast, really. One day, adultery was an acknowledged evil, a grave sin against God, outlawed by the Ten Commandments.