Arnold Schwarzenegger's gubernatorial campaign raises a series of fascinating questions, the most perplexing of all being why an international star of his stature would ever want to run in the first place

You can put your TV in the garage, avoid movies altogether, and use earplugs to spare your hearing from the sounds of hip-hop or heavy metal, but these forms of entertainment will still change your life through their influence on everyone else in society. Though you may struggle to protect your own kids from music that encourages violence or drugs or irresponsible sex, you can't possibly protect them from all the other kids in your community who have received full exposure.

The distortions and insults about organized religion will continue unabated as long as our popular culture continues its overall campaign against judgment and values. A war against standards leads logically and inevitably to hostility to religion because it is religious faith that provides the ultimate basis for all standards.

The movie industry has ignored the success of films that look favorably on faith with the same sort of self-destructive stubbornness that has led to its continued sponsorship of antireligious-message movies.

Poor people in America today (people who are officially in poverty) have a higher standard of living - in terms of medical standards, in terms of going to college, in terms of the way people live - than middle class people did thirty years ago.

My objection is not that it's pro-gay but that it appears to be anti-marriage.

If we wait for the entertainment industry to change its fundamental values, we may be waiting a long time. But we don't have to wait another day to scale back our own private consumption of television.