News has always catered to the lewd, the violent and the degrading. With them it makes spicy reading. It is good business because that is what readers buy their papers to read. Men get their names in the papers, not because of anything uplifting and progressing that they have done but because of the protests they have led, the cities they have burned, the members of their own race they have sacrificed in the riots. The moral decay of the nation is indicated by the fashions of the day, and the pornography that floods the mails and the news stands.
Pornography is bad enough hidden under the counters of news stands and bootlegged on the sly.
When you have it walking down the street in the flesh, and even sitting in the pew in church you really have a disease on your hands. And why try to blame it all off on poverty and racial discrimination. The world always has had, and will have till Gabriel comes, an immense amount of both. Yet these have not in other ages and in other places touched off the wave of blood-letting, looting, and total disregard for law, life or limb that has characterized the past summer. It is only when, and where, the principles of Jesus are forgotten or repudiated until the civilization these principles have produced and the society which they undergird disintegrates, that such heathenish chaos as we are experiencing is possible.