Skipping Towards Gomorrah Read Online Free

home is doing himself and society less harm than a man who drinks himself drunk every night in public. The man who goes to a prostitute doesn’t seek to harm the man who doesn’t go to a prostitute; the man who goes to a gay pride parade in a lime-green thong doesn’t seek to harm the man who goes to church fully clothed.
    Indeed, it has long been my belief that the “bad” are frequently more virtuous in their private pursuit of vice than the good are in the public pursuit of compulsory virtue. Sinners, unlike the virtuous, do not attempt to impose their definition of happiness on others. I’ve never met an adult dope smoker who wanted to force a non-dope-smoking adult to smoke dope against his will. Yet our nation crawls with non-dope-smoking adults who want to force dope-smoking adults to stop smoking dope. Likewise, I’ve never met a homosexual who wanted to make a straight person into a gay person, but straight church groups take out full-page ads in newspapers trying to convince gay people to become straight people. Prostitutes don’t force anyone to patronize them; the virtuous, however, seek to throw prostitutes in jail for tending to the needs of their clients.
    There are millions of ethical, fully moral sinners in America, and I’ve grown sick of listening to the right wing bitch and moan about them while the left wing refuses to defend them. No one sticks up for the sinners—not even the sinners themselves. Some of the best Americans I know are sinners, but they lack the necessary conviction to defend themselves, their sins, and their right to be sinners. Meanwhile, the worst—the Bennetts, Borks, and Buchanans—are filled with a passionate intensity. Some sinners are no doubt scared. They worry that speaking up for themselves will prompt Bill Bennett to call them names in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal . Sinners are bullied and coerced into remaining silent, and as a result, only the self-proclaimed “virtuous” are heard from in public. How much longer can American sinners sit by and say nothing while the vices we enjoy and know to be perfectly harmless are maligned?
    To explore the lives of virtuous sinners, I decided to leave home and walk up and down in the United States, committing in turn all the seven deadly sins, except one, which, try as I might, I simply couldn’t do. I wanted to meet and sin with other virtuous sinners. I write in praise and defense of the American sinner—those wonderful, freedom-loving, fun-seeking adulterers, gamblers, and gluttons I met during my travels through the moral sewers of the United States of America: through the Gomorrahs of Los Angeles; New York; San Francisco; Seattle; Dubuque, Iowa; Plano, Texas; and Buffalo Grove, Illinois. Part travelogue, part memoir, part Bork-and-Bennett bitch slap, this book is a love letter to Thomas Jefferson, American freedom, and American sinners.

A Quick Note on the Seven Deadly Sins
    Why the seven deadly sins?
    Well, why not the seven deadlies? The sins themselves—greed, lust, sloth, gluttony, anger, pride, and envy—are conveniently vague, which afforded me a wide variety of representative sins from which to choose. I might have focused on the Ten Commandments, I suppose, but, Christ, who hasn’t taken the Lord’s name in vain? Or dishonored their stupid parents? (Dr. Laura doesn’t even speak to her mother!) And there are ten of them, which would’ve meant more work for me, and I’m a slothful kind of guy. What’s more, I wanted to commit the sins I was writing about, and while bearing false witness is something I’d happily do (“Yes, your honor, I saw Robert Bork smoke dope with a male prostitute in a casino before he ate a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts. . . .”), I couldn’t see killing someone to sell a few books, as I don’t wish physical harm on anyone. I’d even brake for Bill