In a first-century A.D. dialogue, the Stoic Epictetus tried to imagine a “city of Epicureans.” “Who will educate them?” he asked. “Who will manage the Gymnasia?” He feared that pleasure-seekers raising children in their mold would imperil the soul of youth. As far as David L. Tubbs is concerned, we are all Epicureans now. He wants to “document contemporary liberalism’s inattention” to the “interests of children.” His argument is that postwar courts, fortified by academia, have steadily enlarged individual “rights,” and that these rights intrude on the interests of children, interests often “adverse” to the freedoms of adults. Amoral freedom of expression manifesting itself in pornography or vicious films can corrupt the imaginations of the young. Invented rights to sexual privacy help produce unstable families or illegitimacy. Aggressive anti-religious rulings deny children the benevolent instruction of faith. Liberalism, in short, displays a “tendency to regard certain freedoms of adults as indisputably more important than the competing interests of children.”

There are two culprits: modern liberal theorists, such as John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin, and the leftmost wing of the Supreme Court, Warren era to present. Tubbs makes his case by examining their major works and landmark decisions. He finds that both groups believe that liberalism “entails both a commitment to rights and an attitude of indifference to the exercise of those rights.” Equivalence between, say, the centerfolds of Ansel Adams and Larry Flynt, at least as far as public policy is concerned, Tubbs calls “moral reticence.” In his