Jock and Smithie

Here are two things you might not know about Molly Ivins. She was a basketball player when she was young. And she was a Smithie. She received a Smith College Medal in 2001. You can read Ivins’ 1993 Rally Day address, but here is one part I enjoyed:

Well, in Austin, Texas, there is a fundamentalist divine, the Reverend Mark Weaver by name. Reverend Weaver heads an organization called Citizens Against Pornography. He is hell-bent on driving sin out of Austin, Texas. I believe that he has his last work cut out for him. Reverend Weaver and his group march around outside the dirty bookstores and movie theaters of our town with signs that say, “Honk if you hate pornography.” I always honk. I do hate pornography. And besides, I think those signs add a certain je ne sais quoi to our municipal life.

Weaver and his group had come up with proposals for an ordinance under which you could not have a dirty bookstore or dirty movie theater within so many feet of a home, or school, or church. The upshot of it would be to drive all the dirty bookstores and dirty movie theaters out of Austin, Texas, to the general cultural deprivation of the citizenry.

Now, as a matter of fact, I do hate pornography, don’t like it worth a damn. On the other hand, I did not think it was a good idea to have Reverend Weaver deciding what movies we could watch and what books we could read. And so I hastened that very night to a meeting of the city planning commission and found there 350 citizens against pornography and four of us from the American Civil Liberties Union. I’m here to tell you there is nothing like sitting in the midst of a sea of citizens against pornography to make you notice that your friends look like perverts.

Now Weaver was up to speak first on behalf of his amendment, and Reverend Weaver is a fine preacher; he has a certain old-fashioned style of preaching, and he got preaching that very day.

That very day he got a telephone call from a lady who lives behind the dirty movie theater on South Congress Avenue. Well, I perked right up at the mention of that; it’s my neighborhood dirty movie theater.

In fact, driving up to the meeting that night I noticed they’d changed the billing. The new quadruple-X attraction was called The Nun’s Bad Habit.

“Yes,” said Reverend Weaver, “and after the five o’clock show a man came out of that theater, he went in the alley behind that theater, which is directly behind that lady’s home, and he there masturbated.”

Three hundred and fifty people simultaneously went “Ohhhhhhhh”—it made a very odd sound. “Yes,” said Reverend Weaver, “that man masturbated, and that lady has two little girls, two little girls who might have seen that man do that terrible thing, except, praise Jesus, she has a large wooden fence around her back yard.”

Whereupon, we all praised Jesus, and with that he was off and running, cussing sin up one side and down the other, and by the time he got through, it looked bad for the First Amendment.

We decided to send up our oldest living member, Mr. John Henry Faulk, who, doing his well-known impersonation of an enfeebled senior citizen, shuffled up to the microphone, and said, “Members of the planning commission, Revered Weaver, Citizens Against, ladies and gentlemen, my name is John Henry Faulk. I am 75 years old. I was born and raised in south Austin, Texas, not a quarter of a mile from where the dirty movie theater stands on South Congress Avenue today. I think you should all know that there was a great deal of masturbation in south Austin before there was ever a dirty movie theater.”