Faith & Spirit Quote by Dorothy Kilgallen

Kilgallen’s line has the crisp, daggered logic of a newsroom ambush: if the churches can read it aloud, why should a comedian be forbidden to mention it? The bait is “sodomy,” a word chosen to detonate in mid-century America’s moral soundscape. She’s not endorsing Lenny Bruce so much as exposing the hypocrisy of gatekeepers who treat “obscenity” as a property of performers, not institutions. By invoking the Bible, she drags the debate out of the smoky nightclub and into the sanctified center of public life, where explicitness is conveniently rebranded as scripture.

The subtext is a double trap. First, it reframes Bruce’s “dirty” material as commentary, not smut; commentary is a civic right, especially when the subject is already embedded in the culture’s foundational text. Second, it needles censors with their own favorite authority. If they object, they’re forced to admit either that the Bible contains language or acts unfit for public ears, or that “fitness” is a selective standard wielded against the wrong people.

Context matters: this lands in the era when obscenity trials and broadcast standards were busy drawing bright lines around what Americans were allowed to hear. Kilgallen, a famous columnist and television presence, performs a particular kind of respectable provocation: she can say the unsayable by attributing it to religion. The sentence sounds polite, even arch - “if he cares to comment on it” - while quietly detonating the premise that public decency is anything but a power play.