National Review lauds Playboy.

When William F. Buckley started National Review magazine in 1955, he grandly described its mission as that of "stand[ing] athwart history, crying 'stop.'" Two years before Buckley created his journal, Hugh Hefner published the inaugural issue of Playboy, which would become the first mass-circulation porn magazine. National Review, the Establishment-designated flagship journal of the conservative movement, supposedly sought to preserve what Hefner eagerly sought to destroy. Yet Buckley would eventually consent to be interviewed by Playboy and write several essays for the smut magazine.

Thus it's oddly appropriate that National Review's web-based affiliate, National Review Online, published a brace of laudatory articles commemorating Playboy's 50th anniversary. A December 29, 2003 profile by NRO contributing editor Andrew Stuttaford described Hefner as "tatty, tacky, jaded, and, let's admit it, a touch laughable, but an American original nonetheless"--an "ancient satyr" surrounded by adoring starlets and centerfolds. "Yes, yes, it looks very empty and somewhat desperate, and Hefner's home life seems to leave little to be envied --if a lot to be desired--but, come on, the guy is 77. It's difficult not to cheer."

In her January 13 NRO essay "Living With Playboy," contributing writer Catherine Seipp went so far as to describe the success of Hefner's magazine as a validation of American freedom: "Playboy really does have something to do with freedom, and these days maybe that's worth remembering. A society that allows Playboy is not a society that allows women to be stoned to death for adultery."

Of course, America has never played host to a society in which stoning was condoned as punishment for adultery. However, thanks in large measure to Hefner and his comrades in the cultural revolution, we have become a society that has allowed children to be murdered in the process of being born.

"Playboy is one of the most important magazines in the world, in terms of the impact it's had not only on social mores but as a champion of individual rights," boasted Hefner in 1974. "We've supported countless civil liberties organizations, political reform, sex research and education, abortion reform before it became popular, prison reform, and the continuing campaign to reform our repressive sex and drug laws...."

Indeed, Hefner cut himself in for part of the credit for the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision abolishing state laws protecting unborn human beings from abortion. "The Playboy Foundation participated in a movement that won a major court victory," crowed the magazine's January 1974 issue. "The victory came with last January's Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion. This was especially gratifying because of the Foundation's long campaign for reform, which began in 1966."

The Playboy-abetted rise of the culture of death--pornography, promiscuity, sexually transmitted diseases, rampant divorce, abortion, infanticide and related evils--illustrates the tide of history National Review was supposedly intended to stop, rather than celebrate.