Advertising: One of the pillars of Commonweal’s financial semi-solidity is advertising. From time to time, we get complaints about specific ads we run, and from time to time we get out our policy and dust it off. Recent complaints about advertisements for conferences on homosexuality brought out the dust rag. We thought readers might be interested in knowing how we think about these matters.

Commonweal’s working policy is to sell ad space to those who request it. On the one hand, we consider advertisers innocent until proven guilty; on the other, we do not consider that publishing an ad constitutes an endorsement by us. We feel strongly about this policy when it comes to “idea” advertising-for books, tapes, and conferences. Our reasons are both practical and principled.

Practical: It would be unrealistic for us to try to evaluate all the ideas that are directly or indirectly promoted through proposed advertisements. Could we read ahead of time all the books we advertise? And if we started refusing ads for ideas we disagree with, will readers assume that we agree with the ideas promoted in the ads we do accept? This strikes us as an impossible and self-defeating route to pursue.

Principled: Our readers are adults. It seems to us condescending to protect you from ideas we reject, and all too reminiscent of past unhappy practices of the Catholic church. We have our editorial space and our choice of articles to make clear, forcefully in many cases, where we stand, and our readers, we believe, know the difference between that and paid ads. And readers too can make their views known in our correspondence columns.

Would we reject some ads? Yes, and we have: ads that are in themselves hopelessly tasteless or tawdry, regardless of the merits of the advertised products; ads that, insofar as we can tell, are fraudulent (it is not always easy to detect this sort of thing until readers alert us); ads that directly urge actions (not ideas) that we consider immoral. We would not run an ad recruiting mercenaries or raising funds for the contras during the Nicaraguan conflict; we would not run an ad for an abortion clinic; we would not run ads for organizations carrying out anticlinic violence; we would not run incendiary ads urging discrimination against blacks, immigrants, women, gays, workers, evangelicals, etc.

Finally, we would certainly reject some ads even for ideas when we find the ideas indisputably and overwhelmingly immoral, for example, books that are unquestionably racist or that blatantly deny the Holocaust or justify torture or are pornographic. But here we would be careful to draw a wide boundary of what can be debated. Do we strongly reject much of the thrust of Herrnstein and Murray ‘s The Bell Curve? Yes. Would we refuse to advertise it? No. Would we advertise a seriously argued prochoice book or a thoughtful case for assisted suicide? We believe we would.

Complaints we have received from both liberals and conservatives persuade us that in a world of political correctness, there are very few questions beyond debate. Often enough, these are the very questions that have raised more questions and are in search of further answers.