Jack Valenti, the creator of the Motion Picture Association of America, the group that supplies all the Gs, PGs, Rs and NC-17s for Hollywood movies, rarely had a good word to say about constitutional free speech while he headed the MPAA. But in the years since his retirement, Valenti seems to have reconsidered where his expression values lie, and in the afternoon session of Sen. Ted Stevens' (R-Aka.) "Decency in the Media" forum on Nov. 29, he gave the attendees an earful of it.

Valenti's remarks were apparently inspired by the censorious tone and wild exaggerations of another speaker, L. Brent Bozell, III, head of the Parents Television Council (PTC), which group, by most accounts, is responsible for 98 percent of the indecency complaints received by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over the past few years.

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"What has made America great is, it's a free country, and when you are a First Amendment person, you must allow into the marketplace that which you find to be meretricious, untidy, unwholesome and sometimes just plain stupid, but that's the price you pay for democracy," Valenti rightly argued. "A democracy is quite messy. If you want to have a pristine television show, you go to Burma or you go to North Korea, and you'll find yourself in a pristine world where nothing that the government doesn't want on the air is on the air. That's the price you pay, Brent, for a democracy."

Picking up on Bozell's failure to mention which shows had depicted sexual acts, Valenti then gave some advice to Sen. Stevens.

"Mr. Chairman, I think you'll find that it's very fine to say you could have standards, but now when you begin to fine people, when you begin to force people, then you must be precise," he cautioned. "You cannot indict a man for a crime without defining what the crime is ... What is the standard? What is too much violence? Where do you draw this line? The idea that the whole country, all of us get upset about a three-second version of an artificial breast to me is the most absurd thing in the world, this Janet Jackson thing. It made no sense. And yet you can go in any museum, you can go anyplace and see nude women. Venus de Milo is known around the world. The point is, this thing got out of hand, it seems to me, that to have three, four seconds of a silicone breast and the country became ecstatic about it – I mean, it just doesn't make any sense."

If Valenti knew that Jackson's nipple was in fact exposed for less than half a second, he might have been even more outraged.

Go get 'em, Jack.