I take a cue for my title from a 1992 episode of The Simpsons: “Bart’s Friend Falls in Love.” Bart, well accustomed to using the telephone for mirth and mischief, turns to it this time to inform on his friend, Milhouse, who has met a new girl in school, Samantha Stanky, and gone gooey in love, even up in the sacred zone of Bart’s tree house, making Bart sick and leaving him without the companionship of his best friend. During Bart’s phone call to Samantha’s father with the “shocking news” of the promiscuity in process, Bart is asked, apparently, to identify himself. Bart says, “Who am I? Let’s just say...I’m a concerned prude with a lot of time on his hands.” Surely the creative minds at The Simpsons were dealing out a little payback; they must have received many complaints from the easily offended--whose numbers are legion, even, alas, in the academy--concerning the usual censorship issues: sexuality, the state, the deity (or, perhaps better said, “one of the ‘only’ gods”).
I’m thinking today of a “concerned censor” I watched in a college library day after day as I read such giants as Milton and Wordsworth and Faulkner and Sartre, preparing for a major exam in my field of study. Of this man I knew one specific, telling detail beyond the general word concerning his extreme conservative leanings in politics and religion: he had refused to watch his own son perform in a production of Inherit the Wind because the word “damn” would be uttered in the play.