It’s Just a Baby

Question: What’s wrong with this picture?

You’re right--nothing.

Next question: what’s wrong with people who think there’s something wrong with this picture?

Ah, now you’re on to something.

L.A. Parent, on whose February cover this picture appears, is a monthly magazine whose quarter-million or so copies are distributed free, at pediatricians’ offices, kids’ stores, preschools, day care centers and at private and a few public schools from L.A. to San Diego.

But henceforth, it will no longer be found at one Orange County parochial school that called to say the magazine will no longer be welcome. It seems kids were coming into the school office and sneaking a peek at the cover and giggling; “disruptive” was the word that was evidently used to describe it.

And now that I look at it again--well, I must have been an idiot not to see it before:

A grown man, holding a baby in his bare forearms. Disgusting. And a naked baby at that. And--where are my smelling salts?--it’s a boy baby! With the tiniest little bit of his tiny little thing showing. Oh, the filth. The sheer smuttiness of it.

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Given how tetchy people are, an editor at the magazine saw the photo before it was printed, and went to Jack Bierman, who is the editor, and said, “ ‘If it was me, I’d Photoshop that little puppy right out of there.’ ” And Bierman said, “And the artist who took the photo would never work for us again.”

This is where distribution manager George Waters, who took the call from Orange County, now adds, “Yeah, but then we’d have gotten complaints about the naked baby girl on the cover.”

This magazine is devoted to the care and feeding of children. Its advertisers, purveyors of educational toys and pool safety nets and wholesome food, would not support it otherwise.

Yet in the 18 years L.A. Parent has been published, enough harrumphing has gone on that you’d think Hustler was being airdropped over Flintridge Sacred Heart Academy.

At my alma mater, Occidental College, some women protested a different issue of L.A. Parent because the cover photo of a toddler had been hand-tinted to give her too grown-up rosy cheeks and lips. (And to think we only protested CIA recruiters on campus.)

A story about how gun owners can keep weapons safe and locked up in a household with children drew protests from anti-gun groups as far away as the Beltway.

And I won’t even get into the piece about parenting for homosexuals.

This magazine is not printed on cabbage leaves, any more than babies are found under them.

Little boys have penises. Some parents (like it or not, and I don’t) own handguns. Some parents are gay. In other words, get real.

Cro-Magnon pre-adolescents probably tittered at graphic cave drawings. Victorian England, where nice people delicately insisted that pianos and chickens came with limbs, not legs, had the highest concentrations of vice and prostitution in the world. L.A. Parent didn’t show little boys anything they can’t look down and see for themselves.

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Last month, the ACLU successfully challenged Kern County, which, to keep kids from scanning the Internet for porn, had installed on every public library computer a filter that kept out naughty words so effectively that even a significant court case with that really bad word in it was invisible.

In a world where people “see” Mother Teresa’s face in a cinnamon bun, the sickest mind can, at the other extreme, perceive the sickest context in the most innocent circumstances. Yet when we regulate our actions and tether our own behavior to the conduct of the worst among us, then we too become the worst.

Should hugging be disciplined at school, as it was recently in Orange County, because a few people go overboard? Let’s play out this string: Should shoe stores stop advertising because some fetishist gets a sexual frisson from Birkenstocks? Should parents stop taking that classic photo of the baby in the bathtub or bare on a fluffy rug, on the off chance that a pedophile might be working at the two-hour photo processor?

Of course it’s a dangerous world. What turned me to the death penalty was one Theodore Frank who, 20 years ago, was released from a hospital for the criminally insane and, six weeks later, kidnapped a 2-year-old Camarillo girl named Amy Sue Seitz. He tortured and mutilated and raped her and then he killed her, and he loved every minute of it. That he holds a low number in the Death Row lineup is just fine by me.

But hysteria is its own contagion and zealotry holds its own dangers. Up-ended priorities, for one. Lift your eyes from that baby’s infinitesimal fraction of a penis long enough to read about a case I have been keeping an eye on: the killing of a 3-year-old boy.

His mother’s boyfriend is going to be tried for murder. The cops say the man got mad when the little boy wet his pants, and killed him. The dead boy’s mother is only 18 even now, and pregnant once again.

Save your laments and your hand-wringing for the child lost, and for the child who is to come.