William O. Douglas
William Orville Douglas (1898-1980) was the longest serving Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in history, remaining on the bench for 36 years. Appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Douglas had been a law professor at Yale and Columbia University. Douglas is considered to have been one of the smarter Supreme Court Justices in history,[1] but also one of the most activist.Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag</blockquote>
But by the end of Justice Douglas' career in the 1970s, he had become hostile to everything religious and conservative. The future President Gerald Ford even felt compelled to attempt to impeach Douglas while Ford was a congressman. Douglas remained on the bench too long for even his liberal colleagues, and in Douglas' final year on the Supreme Court his colleagues refused to issue opinions in which Douglas was the deciding vote.
Pornography
Douglas justified a famous work of pornography [2] as "more significant and moral" [3] than Rev. Norman Vincent Peale's Sin, Sex and Self-Control. Douglas describes the two books in terms of moral equivalence:
- The search for the moral in Fanny Hill is clothed in erotic passages which seem to equate morality with debauchery as far as the general public is concerned. At the same time, Dr. Peale’s book is punctuated with such noble terms as "truth," "love," and "honesty."
Notes
- ↑ http://www.alandershowitz.com/publications/docs/WildBill.html
- ↑ Fanny Hill ... the thoughts and experiences of a common prostitute [1]
- ↑ …I firmly believe that Fanny Hill is a moral, rather than an immoral, piece of literature. In fact, I will go as far as to suggest that it represents a more significant view of morality than is represented by Dr. Peale’s book Sin, Sex and Self-Control.
