But couldn’t he have found a better pretext? What’s wrong with suggesting that kids should be taught about masturbationin schools?

But couldn’t he have found a better pretext? What’s wrong with suggesting that kids should be taught about masturbationin schools? Rubbish, say the Washington cognoscenti. She should have known, they argue, that ordinary God-fearing Americans are far too screwed up about sex to handle that sort of talk from a government official Perhaps they’re right. After all, what other explanation can there be for all their extraordinary euphemisms for Ms Elders’s proposed addition to the curriculum? I’d already heard about the monkey. He’s Santa in the highly successful Disney movie The Santa Clause, to be released in Britain next year.n OK, we all know the real reason Bill Clinton dumped Joycelyn Elders, his Surgeon General, was to crawl to the bully boy Republicans. “Prison and Hollywood are exactly the same thing,” he writes, after describing how prison life caused sexually frustrated heterosexual men to turn to other men Allen is not well known outside the US – yet But he will be.

Allen – a former stand-up comic whose fans used to attend his performances wearing pig masks – is also particularly well qualified to comment on “The Wonderful World of Guys” (another of his chapters).In 1980, he was sentenced to eight years in prison for cocaine dealing, eventually serving 28 months in a minimum-security institution in Minnesota. His name used to be Timothy Allen Dick, until he changed it because “in grade school the kids snickered at my name the same way as they giggled when they had to sing the word `bosom’ in The Battle Hymn ofthe Republic”. He’s also the author of Don’t Stand Too Close To a Naked Man, a current US bestseller.
This book conforms to all my guidelines: it purports to celebrate “guyhood”, with chapters entitled “Women Are People, Too” and “Men’s Zones”, and is packed with observations about sex, tools, wives, and – his favourite theme – the male organ, including his own.This is a subject that Mr Allen takes personally. Make it as short and politically incorrect as possible, pack it with c onfessions and facile sex jokes, and Bob’s your uncle. The radio “shock jock” Howard Stern did it with Private Parts, and made millions Roseanne did it And now Tim Allen’s done it. Tim Allen is the star of America’s most popular sit-com, Home Improvement, a mindless show about a do-it-yourself fanatic, the kind of man who utters hairy-chested moans of ecstasy at the thought of firing up a power tool. LOS ANGELES – Who says there isn’t a formula for writing a bestseller? It’s simple: get a part in a soap opera (or, if you must, as a radio host), and tap out an autobiography.

But it isn’t helped either by the addled sentimentality which treats her as a martyr.. Her case has only obscured the larger debate over crime and punishment. The lynch mob who want to string her up make that debate harder to conduct calmly and decently. What she was told on Thursday is not binding, but a Labour Home Secretary is no more likely than a Tory one to release her. Punishment must sometimes be appropriately severe, to fit the crime, to express public anger and, in Hindley’s case particularly, to respect the feelings of the victims’ parents or other relatives.Discussion of Myra Hindley’s future is theoretical. It is one thing no longer to hang murderers, on the grounds that that punishment is barbaric in itself; it is too easy to elide from that into a vague belief that all punishment is wrong. Deterrence really does work in the case of double parking, or even of calculated gangland killing, but not of something as esoteric and mercifully rare as Brady and Hindley’s crime.Their case raises important questions about the nature of justice in general and the function of parole or remission in particular.

Is it right that one person who has behaved better, or more penitently, in prison than someone else who has committed exactly the same offence should suffer a lesser sentence? Reduce that principle to absurdity and you have that interesting form of Chinese penology, the conditional death sentence: if after 10 years in prison a convict is considered no longer an anti-social element, he can spend the rest of his life as a prisoner; if not, he is shot.But the case presents a further challenge to us who oppose the death penalty. And someone like Hindley who has had the law upheld againsther after due process and a fair trial cannot complain of injustice.She can complain of harshness or lack of clemency, but her case makes clemency almost impossible Most of the usual considerations don’t apply She is not “being made an example of” in a deterrent sense. If he who breaks the law is not punished, then he who obeys it is cheated. In that sense the law against torturing children to death is not different in kind from the law against fraud or assault or dangerous driving.