George Carlin sent me a quick email* follow-up about my very brief comments from yesterday:
"The whole problem with this idea of obscenity and indecency, and all of these things — bad language and whatever — it’s all caused by one basic thing, and that is: religious superstition. … There’s an idea that the human body is somehow evil and bad and there are parts of it that are especially evil and bad, and we should be ashamed. Fear, guilt and shame are built into the attitude toward sex and the body. … It’s reflected in these prohibitions and these taboos that we have."
That pretty much sums my feelings up.
* It might be more accurate to say that I pulled it off a news site, but that would be less interesting.