Straight-talkin' prudes: the silver linings in the Senate Republicans' censorious agenda.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Column

IF REPUBLICANS EVER wonder why libertarians are suspicious of them, they need look no further than the U.S. Senate. For all their yammering about being the party of limited government, individual responsibility, and traditional American liberty, the Republicans there sure have a funny way of showing it.

Consider how they're whiling away their majority in what senators love to insist is the "world's greatest deliberative body"--a sobriquet every bit as self-styled, grandiose, and unconvincing as Michael Jackson calling himself "the King of Pop" and Miller High Life dubbing itself "the Champagne of Beers." Increasingly, it looks like the Republicans can't get their act together on Social Security privatization, with Majority Leader Bill Frist flip-flopping like a fish in the sand on whether his colleagues will deliver any proposal for personal accounts this year. (Let's just hope for his patients' sake that the Tennessee surgeon is less shaky with a scalpel than with legislative promises.)

But the upper-chamber Republicans know damned well they need to stop the dread menace of "indecency" from invading the family rooms of the 85 percent of American households that shell out hard-earned cash to watch cable fare ranging from Comedy Central's raunchy Chappelle's Show to Nickelodeon's gay agitprop (so conservatives swear) SpongeBob SquarePants to Showtime's overtly Sapphic The L Word.

Ted Stevens, from the famously mild-mannered state of Alaska, is mad as hell and he's not going to take it any more. "Cable is a much greater violator in the decency area [than broadcast]," Stevens recently told the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB), the odious industry group that represents over-the-air TV and radio affiliates. "There has to be some standard of decency." For Stevens, that standard apparently can't be decided on a home-by-home basis, though he also unconvincingly insists that "no one wants censorship." Except, of course, Stevens and, one presumes, the membership of the NAB, who want to undercut the competitive advantages of cable and satellite TV.

The Senate is already widely expected to follow the House of Representatives' lead and increase existing broadcast indecency fines from $32,500 to $500,000...