There was a time when the catholic Church would instruct their followers on what they could read and see at the movies. They would “ban” a book such as “Peyton Place” or a movie such as the one in which Bridget Bardot made her debut because it was to explicit sexually.
The result of this was obvious. the book became a number 1 best seller and the movie broke box office records and made a star out of Bardot.
We see the same thing happening here when these weapons were banned in MA.
I bought mine years ago.
This woman is an idiot.
Mmmm, the result was obvious at a particular moment in time. But recent history goes back a little longer than Peyton Place. From the 16th century to 1966, the Church maintained an "Index" of books the faithful shouldn't read--other than specialists and scholars and such who needed to for research. The banned books tended to be creepy, pornographic, atheistic, anti-clerical, or heretical in bizarre ways. Most ordinary Catholics avoided them.
The motion picture industry in the early 20th century lived or died by the pronouncements of the Catholic Church and influential Protestant ministers and state governors. There was a real problem, which was that many of the early movies were pornographic shorts, and many features from the 'teens and Twenties would shock us today. In their personal lives, actors and actresses were morally living off the grid, and there were prominent cases of rape and several deaths in Hollywood that increased calls for Federal censorship of movies. In addition, institutions like the Bank of America, founded and run by A.P. Giannini, a devout Catholic and Hollywood investor, were cutting their investments in the movies.
The industry's response was to create an office to give studios guidelines on how to stay out of trouble. The chairman, Will Hays (former chairman of the Republican National Committee), received in the mail one day a proposed set of guidelines on what should and shouldn't be portrayed in the movies. It had been written by Fr. Daniel Lord, a Jesuit priest, writer, performer, movie-fan, historian of drama and the arts, and advisor to Cecil B. DeMille. It didn't simply say movies shouldn't be dirty, but also that they should avoid being unpatriotic, disrespectful of religion, and should avoid portraying the triumph of evil. It's very positive and artistically sophisticated, and worth reading today. Hays and the industry adopted it whole.
By 1934, the movie industry was living by the Code, and no longer worrying about whether states would ban their movies or whether Christians would boycott them and dry up box-office receipts. And as it happened, most of the best movies ever made, were made under the Code.
Condemnation of immoral or evil-promoting works of art worked in those days because books and movies were not as easy to produce, distribute, promote, and consume. As those technological barriers dropped, it became easier to run around the authorities and distribute the product anyway. That had the effect of cutting the legs off moral authority of any kind, whether religious, governmental, or within families. By the 1960s, books and movies were using city, state, and religious bans as part of their marketing.
Now moral authority is enforced instead by the pack behavior of the Hollywood producers and writers themselves, who hate America, God, and families more than they love money. And by social media--which we have discovered is manipulated by multi-billion-dollar "authorities" at Facebook and Twitter. And ultimately by the Left's masters in a Federal government that has used our tax money to insert itself into every corner of our lives.
If the people take back their lives and institutions from the 0bama regime, moral institutions that know how to use modern media and production will gain back some of the influence they have lost. Perhaps they can help re-shape our culture toward God, rather than "Allah" or Satan.