I was leaning against the wall of the auditorium, near the stage, beside a window. When I looked out the window I could see the Merrimack River break over some rapids and drop in a waterfall before it moved off toward Newburyport. I had heard that someone caught a salmon in it not long ago. Or maybe that was another river, and I was being optimistic. At least it hadn't caught fire like the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland.

"My friends, nearly eighty percent of the video cassettes now sold are pornographic," Alexander said.

Some kid in the back of the room said audibly, "Right on."

Tom Cambell was on stage, in the wings, and Fraser was at the back of the auditorium standing beside the campus security chief, who had a walkie-talkie.

"Nudity and sex are big business. Any small grocery store in the land will sell magazines that twenty years ago would have landed the seller in jail. Television sells jiggle, newspaper columnists routinely suggest that any form of sexual excess is acceptable, that abortion is simply a matter of personal preference-as if the slaughter of unborn children were no more significant than an upset stomach."

The audience was a mix of students and faculty, with a few citizens of Lowell who were interested. Outside the auditorium there were pickets representing gay liberation, NOW, NAACP, the Anti-Nuclear Coalition, Planned Parenthood, and everyone else to the left of Alexander. Since, as far as I could tell, there was no one to the right of Alexander, it made for a considerable turnout. They were quiet by the standards I had learned in the late sixties and early seventies, but campus and Lowell city police had kept them at passive bay.

"The family, the nucleus of civilization, is under attack from the spread of feminism, from those who council a form of rebellion under the deceitful rubric of 'children's rights,' from drug pushers who would poison us, from those who would urge homosexuals to marry, from an intrusive government whose social workers all too often violate the sacred web of family with their theories of social engineering."