Hunting the last taboo ...

The hunt continues for the last taboo. Of course it will be the one against child-sacrifice, which has already been rehabilitated and made socially normative as a woman's choice. But meanwhile, hunting down those intolerant and oppressive sexual taboos continues. Just when you thought that there couldn't possibly be any more taboos to break. Mark Gordon reports:

Now word comes that Robert Redford’s oh-so-groovy Sundance Film Festival will screen “Zoo,” a sympathetic documentary of men who have sex with Arabian horses.

The Sundance Festival’s official reviewer of “Zoo” calls the film “visual poetry,” and declares that “the cinematic language invented for the film permits us to examine where we draw the line, how much perversity we can tolerate in others. In a broader sense, ‘Zoo’ is really about thresholds. What can we stand to know, and, more importantly, what can we stand to accept?”

Read all of Mark's reflections here.

Lest someone think that the director of this film, Robinson Devor, is either an amoral moron or a unflinching cynic, he finds a way to assure the reporter for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel that he has both moral scruples and a refined aesthetic sensibility, the former for animal rights and the latter for the marvels of nature.

"I'm not in there wrestling with the legal or animal cruelty issues," he said. Rather, he envisioned a film like his others: "I count on the natural world pulling my films through. I thought the marriage of this completely strange mind-set and the beauty of the natural world could be something interesting."

What a relief to learn that Mr. Devor has his cruelty-to-animals moral certification up to date. One might have otherwise approached his work with a degree of skepticism.

Those out to obliterate the last remnants of the Judeo-Christian moral tradition are determined. They now have reason to believe that most of their liberal enablers -- fearing association with "Victorian" prudishness or "the Christian right" -- will never wince, and those who do will take care to wince in a way that is indistinguishable from a wink.