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Maury’s guests are not the sort of folks generally allowed to talk about sex on television. As a group, they represent the defiant nightmares of modern social engineering: poor, overweight, under-educated, incredibly fecund. They clearly find latex a laughable intervention in the mechanics of male-female intimacy (Maury, perhaps for his own job security but perhaps for deeper reasons, never counsels contraception). They have likely ignored strong incentives to terminate their pregnancies. For all this, they are hardly heroes. They lead dissolute lives, shaped by social codes so senseless that a daytime TV host seems their most reasonable hope for decency. The Maury Show reveals the havoc that trickle-down sexual liberation has wreaked in the working classes, but it also provides glimpses of the sound moral instinct that can linger on in spite of—or rather because of—a lack of academic and professional conditioning. Though he too is guilty of exploiting his guests’ misfortunes—his hefty salary is paid, after all, by those predatory lawyers and loan sharks—Maury devotes an hour each day to reminding us that sex is a fact of life for unimpressive people, rather than a mystery cult for celebrities, pornographers, and lifestyle enthusiasts.
Christian morality often finds its most reliable supports not in the orderly ambitions of the bourgeoisie but in the crude intuitions of the unsophisticated.
Well, I dunno if Maury Povich really upholds Christian morality. But the article has a point that the crude and uneducated have weaker filters when it comes to political correctness. They often don't have to keep up appearances to keep their jobs,
