In Friday’s paper, we published a color photo of the cover of a magazine titled “Babytalk” that showed a baby suckling at its mother’s breast.

In Monday’s paper, we published a color photo of a Lebanese baby, covered with dust, killed in his home by Israeli missile fire.

Guess which photo we got complaints about?

It wasn’t the dead baby.

What does that say about us as human beings?

How can we be more outraged at the sight of a mother’s bare breast than at the sight of a dead child?

The complaints we received about the bare breast were clear: breasts – although the source of infants’ food – are sexually explicit.

So, why didn’t we get complaints about the color photo that ran in Sunday’s paper of an overly breasted and barely dressed Pamela Anderson?

For a nation that embraces a sexually explicit culture, why does breast-feeding – considered the optimum nourishment for infants – make us so uncomfortable?

Elsewhere in the world, breast-feeding is seen for what it is: a natural delivery of food from mother to child. Public nursing is commonplace and encouraged.

Here, there are still states that consider nursing in public to be an act of indecency. Fortunately, Maine is not among them. Better yet, Maine not only allows, but also “requires” courts – when deciding child custody cases and in the best interest of the child – to consider whether a child younger than 1 year old is being breast-fed and to make accommodations to encourage continued nursing.

Breast-feeding is recommended by the Department of Health and Human Services, the American Academy of Family Physicians, the American Dietetic Association. And, according to mamashealth.com, the American Academy of Pediatrics considers breast-feeding to be “the ideal method of feeding and nurturing infants.”

What’s to complain about?

Less than 30 percent of American women breast-feed their babies, for a variety of reasons, including they plain don’t like it or their jobs won’t allow them to pump milk or accommodate nursing schedules. In some cases, women are made to feel uncomfortable about nursing as folks complain about being exposed to bare breasts.

Breast-feeding is best for babies, but it takes acts of legislatures to protect women from charges of public indecency when doing so.

This week, while Americans complain about public nursing and criticize the sight of a bare breast on the cover of a magazine, somewhere in Lebanon or Israel or Darfur or Iraq a child is being buried.

What’s wrong with that picture?