there was that predictable scapegoat, the popular media: smutty motion pictures, obscene newsstand magazines, and indecent Broadway plays like Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, about a pair of female schoolteachers accused of lesbianism—a particularly “degrading kind of unnatural sin,” as described by the Reverend James M. Gillis, editor of The Catholic World, in a speech on the shocking rise of sex crimes.[67]
