US: The election is over but the cultural wars continue, writes Conor O'Cleary.
A new hit film, Kinsey, which began showing last weekend, has brought protests from conservative groups across the US.
Alfred Kinsey, repelled by a father who taught that masturbation led to blindness and other such nonsense, produced a revolutionary study of American males that led to the sexual revolution.
A private screening in Los Angeles was halted after 15 minutes when producers discovered Judith Reisman in the audience.
Reisman, the author of a 1991 book, Kinsey, Sex and Fraud, maintains that the Indiana University researcher used sex offenders and children for his work.
The audience in a New York cinema last Friday found the movie amusing and applauded the performance of Liam Neeson, who plays Kinsey as a sympathetic if somewhat weird scientist with a terrible haircut. Focus on the Family, a Colorado-based evangelical group, recruited Reisman to attack the movie, and Concerned Women for America, the nation's largest women's group, encouraged its members to download articles discrediting Kinsey and pass them out at cinemas.
CWA alleges that the movie glosses over the fact that Kinsey, who died in 1956, was "instrumental in advancing acceptance of pornography, homosexuality, abortion and condom-based sex education".
Robert Knight, director of the Culture and Family Institute, compared Kinsey with the Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele, though he later had to apologise for trivialising the Holocaust. He gave notice that evangelical Christian and Roman Catholic groups want to use the political muscle they exercised in the election, when many voters cited moral values as a big issue.
He forecast a hotting up of the culture wars, with pro-family organisations seeking to punish "lewd entertainment" and roll back indecency, which he compared to Ronald Reagan rolling back communism.
Everyone on the Christian right has been energised by the election result. The Rev Bob Jones, president of the fundamentalist Bob Jones University, wrote to President Bush to say his election victory had given America a reprieve from the agenda of paganism.
"You owe the liberals nothing," he declared. "They despise you because they despise your Christ", and the President should fight to make legislation conform to "biblical norm" regarding issues like the family and sexuality.
However, issues of broken families and sexuality will dominate the viewing of 25 million Americans when they settle down this Thanksgiving weekend in front of their TVs to watch the latest episode of Desperate Housewives.
This Sunday-evening series features seduction, divorce and murder among elegant women living in suburbia. The ABC series, now in its seventh week, is over-the-top, funny and totally phoney, but is a big hit even in red Republican states like Georgia and Oklahoma.
The cultural watchdogs were especially outraged when ABC promoted it before a televised football game, with an ad showing a white, blond Housewives star making up to a black player in an empty locker room. It wasn't the interracial aspect of the ad that caused offence, but the sight of the naked actress, filmed from behind, dropping a towel wrap and leaping into the player's arms.
The episode was particularly criticised by commentators on Fox News, owned by Rupert Murdoch, who incidentally owns Fox Searchlight which distributes Kinsey. ABC executives apologised and kept a straight face as Desperate Housewives got massive publicity.
Desperate Housewives stays on the right side of the law by avoiding outright nudity and bad words. That would not be tolerated on network TV by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) which this year punished a flash of Janet Jackson's breast with a huge fine. The mood of censure is widespread.
Seventy per cent of Americans are concerned that television, films and popular music are lowering moral standards, according to a poll this week. In Washington the newly elected senator for Oklahoma, Tom Coburn (an advocate of executing abortionists), tried to keep Schindler's List (Liam Neeson again) off TV because of nudity in the concentration camps.
When ABC last week said it would show the 1998 movie, Saving Private Ryan, to commemorate Veterans' Day, 66 affiliates refused to take it, fearing federal retribution, because the second World War epic uses the banned word 21 times, according to a count done by the American Family Association.
The movie was run by ABC without any problem in 2001 and 2002, before the current bout of self-censorship. Perhaps the raw depiction of what soldiers do in war also made TV executives uncomfortable at a time when US troops are again fighting, this time in an unpopular and dirty war.
CBS's 60 Minutes exposed censorship of a different sort on Monday when it reported that an astonishing 15,000 US casualties have gone unreported in Iraq. They were disabled by "non-battle" injuries, such as spinal fractures from vehicle roll-overs, or diseases, but are excluded from official Pentagon casualty lists.
There are no restrictions on the content of cable television, which brings strong language and hardcore porn into living rooms and hotel bedrooms throughout America, even to the reddest of red states.
In fact the moral divisions between Republican red and Democratic blue in America are somewhat exaggerated, according to a New York Times survey. Iowa has more than twice the number of Playboy readers per head as New York; the three states with the highest divorce rate are red, the state with the lowest is blue (Massachusetts), and the highest murder rate is in pro-life red state Lousiana.
And talking about culture . . . I can't seem to avoid U2 these days. Bono was the spark that ignited the FCC fury against swear words described above. He was at Little Rock for the Clinton library opening. And on Monday when I walked out of my office there were U2 entertaining the neighbours at Brooklyn Bridge, to promote their new album.
Incidentally, at the rain-soaked Clinton Library ceremonies 200 VIP guests, ranging from Queen Noor of Jordan to the former education secretary, Dick Riley, received gift packages from the former president containing bottles of whiskey from the Cooley Distillery, Ireland's only independent whiskey-maker.
The labels said they were bottled in Ireland "in honour of President Clinton and the Clinton Peace Centre in Enniskillen".
It took a week of haggling with customs before the crates of whiskey got to America, according to Stella O'Leary, the Washington-based driving force behind the Enniskillen project, because of a catch-22 provision that only whiskey previously sold in an American liquor store with the same label can be imported into the US.