Why People Don’t Fight Porn

Some 325 law enforcement authorities, legislators, church leaders, and others grappled with ways to combat pornography last month in the first national conference devoted to the subject. They met in Arizona under the sponsorship of the Phoenix-based Citizens for Decency through Law (CDL).

One thrust of the conference was to assist government prosecutors in dealing with what has become a specialized legal field. They were provided with a voluminous workbook of reference materials and technical workshops.

But conference spokesmen candidly acknowledged that prosecutors can only be effective when backed by citizen awareness and action. Citizens are either unaware that they can take strong action, or wrongly believe the courts have ruled in favor of pornography. Therefore, the main target has to be public complacency, the experts said.

Conference leaders attribute public lethargy to several factors:

• Ignorance of how vicious pornography has become. It bears little relation to the “naughty magazines” of the last generation with their skimpily clad or bare-breasted models. Today it is thousands of magazines, quickie films, and videotapes with close-ups of nothing but promiscuity, group sex, bestiality, masturbation, rape, sadomasochism, gang sexual assault, and fetishes. Even sex murders actually have been committed on film.

• Ignorance of the effects of continuing exposure to pornography. Victor Cline, a Salt Lake City psychologist and expert in the field, told the conference that pornography has an addicting effect, that it requires escalation (over a period of time, the consumer needs increasingly rough material), that it desensitizes (making one immune to that which originally shocked), and that there is a strong tendency for its users to act out what they have seen.

CDL’S founder Charles H. Keating, Jr., who recently retired as its president, cited evidence of this effect: Police vice squads, he said, report that 77 percent of child molesters of boys and 87 percent of child molesters of girls admitted imitating the sexual behavior they had seen modeled in pornography. He also referred to a report by Michigan State Police detective Darrel Pope on 38,000 reported sexual assault cases in that state during the years 1956 through 1979. In 41 percent of those cases, pornography was used “just prior to or during” the crime.

• Defensiveness about such oft-repeated assertions as, “You can’t legislate morality.” Laws are not intended to make people love what is right but to prevent them from giving vent to lust, greed, and hate in ways that harm society.

• Belief that “censorship is undemocratic.” Obscenity laws are not censorship. Censorship is the prior restraint of the communication of an idea. The public has a right to protect its quality of life through legislation.

• Belief that “victimless crimes among consenting adults are no concern of the public.” Both the participants and society are being victimized. This is to say nothing of the exploitation of children. There are between 260 and 280 monthly magazines catering to pedophiles—people who get their “kicks” by looking at the nude bodies of eight-year-olds and younger in compromising poses. There are nationwide clubs that trade in children.

The upshot of inaction by uninformed citizens is that law enforcement officials, sensing no public mandate, are not implementing existing antipornography laws.

Aside from ignorance and apathy, a main reason why the public is not applying pressure on law enforcement officials is confusion about Supreme Court rulings on obscene materials. Americans need to understand four aspects of what is and is not constitutional, according to spokesmen at the Phoenix conference:

• Belief that First Amendment free speech rights are not absolute. The free speech rights of tobacco companies to advertise cigarettes on television, for example, have been limited in FCC rulings in favor of the public’s right to protect its collective health. A Supreme Court opinion says that “a man has no more right to dispense obscenity in the name of free speech than he does to shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater—in the name of free speech.”

• The Supreme Court’s consistently held view that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment.

• The Supreme Court’s 1973 shifting of the burden of proof in obscenity cases from prosecutors, who previously had to prove that obscene works were “utterly without redeeming social value,” to the defense, who must now prove that a challenged work has “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.”

• The Supreme Court’s ruling, in effect, that if the defense cannot establish such value, and if the prosecution can establish that the material is offensive to the standards of that community, then it may be banned constitutionally.

While local efforts are scoring gains in cities and towns across the U.S. (see box), the conference participants agreed that, strategically, more focus has to be on law enforcement at the national level and on choking off the avalanche of pornography in new forms.

Homer Young, a former supervisor of FBI pornography investigators, put blame on U.S. Attorney General William French Smith, who told the 92 federal attorneys general not to prosecute pornography cases except for child pornography. If Smith decided to prosecute vigorously obscenity cases under existing law, he insisted, the traffic could be cleaned up in 18 months. He called for a nationwide campaign of letters and follow-up letters to the attorney general, asking him to fulfill his oath of office by prosecuting all laws, with priority given to obscenity laws.

The other urgent need, the conference concluded, is to appeal to the Reagan administration to have the Federal Communications Commission regulate cable television. The FCC has washed its hands of the issue, saying that cable TV is not broadcast over the airwaves and is therefore not under its jurisdiction. This ignores the fact that most such programming is transmitted from its originators to local cable companies by satellite.

Twenty-two percent of U.S. homes are now wired into cable. Communications experts predict that 50 percent or more will be hooked up in just 10 years. Unless the pornography explosion in cable television and in videotapes can be contained, closing down the smut theaters could prove a hollow victory.

Who Says You Can’T Beat Sleaze? These Communities Have

Despite what many people think, some communities have been able to rid themselves of pornography. These are communities that know pornography can be successfully prosecuted if local opposition to it materializes.

Here are some of the success stories:

• So-called adult bookstores have been entirely eliminated from Atlanta, Georgia (CT, Oct. 6, 1978, p. 46); Jacksonville, Florida; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Paducah, Kentucky.

• Citizens of Summit County, Ohio, obtained a conviction against a smut store in Tallmadge. The decision, affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court, has strengthened legal precedent in the area of community standards.

• Pittsburgh citizens, including churches and synagogues, succeeded in keeping a pornograhy wholesaler from setting up a warehouse in a suburb. They were instrumental in amending the state obscenity law to make it more effective.

• In Council Bluffs, Iowa, Citizens Concerned for Community Standards mobilized clubs and churches to press for antipornography legislation, and got it.

• Citizens in Colorado applied sufficient pressure that the legislature overrode the governor’s second veto of a criminal obscenity statute. They are currently pushing through a bill regulating the sale of harmful materials to minors.

• Buffalo police, with community support, reduced the number of smut stores to five, and those that remain no longer carry hard-core material.

• A group of San Antonio, Texas, citizens rallied to the defense of their district attorney when he was fined in federal court after taking action against the pornographic film Deep Throat. They paid the tab to bring in expert witnesses, and spearheaded a broad coalition that passed a Texas obscenity statute in 1980.

• Glendale, Arizona, closed down a pornographic theater and three bookstores. But this action has been challenged by local courts, and citizens are pressing for enforceable legislation. Phoenix CDL chapter members picketed some 30 smut bookstores with the eventual result that about 15 were shut down.

• Citizens of Louisville, Kentucky, and adjacent Jeffersonville, Indiana, led by an Episcopal clergyman, teamed up to drive the pornographic theater out of Jeffersonville, and have so far succeeded in having more than $50,000 in fines levied against it. They also stopped the showing of the pornographic film Caligula in local cinemas.

• In Mesa, Arizona, Church of the Redeemer pastor Vincent Strigas, Jr., has developed a decency coalition that includes representatives of the Mormon and Catholic churches. They have surveyed all the stores in the community and are urging those that carry no pornography to display colorful 11-by-14-inch decals that read “We Support Decency.” The group next plans to apply pressure to the convenience stores and others that carry smut to drop it or lose community business.

• Members of Westside Assemblies of God Church in Davenport, Iowa, launched a citizens’ drive to get pornography off the shelves in their city. Other churches joined, and the materials were off grocery store and barber shop shelves in two weeks. The group then picketed the smut stores and massage parlors, securing passage of an ordinance banning the massage parlors.

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