Marilyn Chambers, who went from the “Ivory Snow” poster mom to star of the porn classic, “Behind the Green Door,” died on Easter Sunday. She was 56. A fulfilling life? She was a mother in ral life it seems, but never fulfilled her dream to crossover into “legit” roles. (She is shown at right in 2000.) 

But Francis Beckwith, former head of the Evangelical Theological Association who recently “re-converted” to Catholicism and now writes at a blog called “What’s Wrong with the World?” isn’t about to let Marilyn Chambers rest in peace.

In a post he derides Chambers as a kind of “community organizer” (he’s apparently referring to group sex scenes in her films, which he may be more familar with than I am) and criticized her obituary for having been written “as if she had actually accomplished something.”

Ms. Chambers, who died young (as is the case with virtually everyone in her “profession”), is portrayed as a cultural trailblazer who enlightened our culture to the “blessings” of anonymous, promiscuous, widely diverse, and videotaped, copulation. For this reason, you will hear no lamenting of the innumerable lives on which her example made chic the infliction of countless miseries. You will not hear of the unborn children killed, the addictions borne and nurtured, the marriages decimated, the offspring abandoned, the spouses betrayed, or even the diseases contracted–spiritual, mental and physical–that her “trailblazing” facilitated.

And he compares the obits about her to the insufficiently reverent treatments of the passing of the Rev. Jerry Falwell. I hadn’t know she died until I saw Beckwith’s post via the First Things blog, which has apparently removed the link.

Welcome back to the church, Professor Beckwith. Requiescat in pace, we like to say of the dead, but also, with the philosophers, de mortuis nil nisi bonum dicendum est.