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Bus One Seven
Porno for Politicians
by Roderick Armageddon

Sex in the bedroom, sex in the bathroom, sex in the White House … wherever you choose to partake of the goods, in whatever form that may be, breathe a sigh of relief that you have the right to think about it, stimulate those thoughts, purvey it and do it.

The question is how are you thinking about it and/or doing it? Is it wholesome fun or something I might find a little too bent for comfort? The difference between the two is still one of the most hotly debated issues of the day and nowhere more evident than fight surrounding pornography.

Unfortunately, the debate over the protection of sexually explicit materials has become muddied to the point that it’s now defined by completely opposing views with entirely different premises.

Those looking to eliminate sexually explicit materials are leading a movement that often dismisses the concept of individual responsibility. These people argue that pornography is intrinsically evil, based on moral and/or religious grounds.

For those standing behind the rock-solid wall known as the First Amendment, this position at times appears to be motivated more by a deep fear than any certainty that explicit materials are detrimental to our social fabric, not to mention to the subjects of the material.

Freedom truly is a burden. U.S. Justice Learned Hand (1872 — 1961) is quoted as saying, "Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women, and, when it dies there, no law, no court can save it." The problems of violence and sexual abuse of women and children need real solutions, as opposed to an overabundance of skewed analysis. This isn’t news — these issues have always needed solutions.

Instead, conservatives (whether Democrat or Republican) have for decades continued to point their fingers at pornography as the cause, as opposed to the effect. This is an extremely difficult issue as these materials can easily be viewed as both cause and effect. Looked at one way, pornography is the effect of poor perceptions toward sex and women. But it can just as easily (as Andrea Dworkin would argue) be thought a cause of the continued subjugation of women.

The U.S. government has on two different occasions within the past 32 years adopted the latter position, undertaking concerted efforts to restrict sexually explicit materials in the U.S. In spite of the Constitutional prohibition against restriction of freedom of religion or the press, members of the U. S. Congress, under heavy political pressure from a variety of political action committees (PACs), have — for better or worse - searched desperately for ways to restrict the proliferation of pornographic materials.

Regardless of your personal views on pornography, before you decide to stand on the stump preaching for or against the right to produce, distribute, and sell explicit materials, we at Anvil thought you might value an insightful recap of America’s past wars on porn. Arm yourself with history and you’ll arm yourself with perspective. Arm yourself with perspective and you’ll arm yourself for the next election.

WRONG ANSWER
In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that people could read and look at whatever they liked in the privacy of their own homes (Stanley v. Georgia). The U.S. Congress did not share this view and so authorized $2 million to fund the now infamous Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, a presidential commission to study pornography in the United States and recommend the proper course of action. The Commission’s poorly disguised mission was to reach a conclusion that would empower Congress to control and even eradicate these materials.

When finally completed, the Commission’s recommendations were divided into statutes relating to both adults and young people. Specifically, the legislation aimed at adults "should not seek to interfere with the right of adults who wish to read, obtain, or view explicit sexual materials."

Regarding the view that these materials should be restricted for all ages in order to protect young people from exposure to them, the Commission found that it is "inappropriate to adjust the level of adult communication to that considered suitable for children." The Supreme Court supported the Commission on this stance. The Commission then recommended legislation that, one, prohibited the sale of sexual materials to young persons and, two, protected anyone from unwanted exposure to sexual materials either through the mail or through open public display. These findings were far from popular.

On October 13, 1970 - just three weeks before a Congressional election - the Senate, with 35 abstentions, voted 60-5 to reject the findings and recommendations of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. The resolution to reject was sponsored by Senator John L. McClellan (D. Ark.), who said that Congress "might just as well have asked the pornographers to write this report." Congress might just as well have written its own report if all it wanted was a quasi-scientific confirmation of its own collective preconceptions.

As if to fully eradicate any misconception that Congress wanted the 1970 commission to be a truly objective investigation, longtime Christian activist Charles H. Keating Jr. said outright that the commission had a mandate from Congress to find ways of stopping pornography, and not to "analyze, ascertain, study, and make recommendations based on what it found to be the truth."

Keating was adamant in accusing the commission of being "dedicated to a position of complete moral anarchy," and assured his constituency that "One can consult all the experts he chooses, can write reports, make studies, etc., but the fact that obscenity corrupts lies within the common sense, the reason, and the logic of every man."

It’s intriguing to note that Keating - apparently representing the moral voice of America - has been the focus of numerous criminal investigations by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Internal Revenue Service, the Justice Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the House Banking Committee. In the late 1980s, the federal government filed a $1.1 billion suit against Keating and his associates on accusations of fraud and illegal loan activity. Government lawsuits aside, it would truly be a sad state of affairs if every investigation were to revert to "intuition," "common sense," and moral indignation.

In their final report, the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography made the following non-legislative recommendations:
(1) A massive sex education campaign should be initiated, encompassing biological, social, psychological and religious information; (2) There should be continued open discussion, based on facts, of issues relating to obscenity and pornography; (3) Additional factual information should be developed through long-term research; (4) Citizens should organize at local, regional, and national levels to aid the implementation of these recommendations (PCOP 47-49).

JUST SAY NO
More then a decade later, and in connection with the signing of the Child Protection Act, President Ronald Reagan announced his intention to set up another commission to study pornography, apparently with the goal of obtaining results more acceptable to his conservative supporters than the conclusions of the 1970 commission.

The result was the appointment by Attorney General Edwin Meese in the spring of 1985 to head an expert panel comprised of 11 members, the majority of whom had established anti-pornography records. As expressed in its charter, the mandate of the new commission was to "determine the nature, extent, and impact on society of pornography in the United States, and to make specific recommendations to the Attorney General concerning more effective ways in which the spread of pornography could be contained, consistent with constitutional guarantees."

Prior to the launch of the commission, all 11 members were well aware of the fact that in a handful of 1986 cases the courts did not disagree with the premise that pornography leads to the subordination of women, or to battery and rape. The main premise in these cases (apparently overlooked by many commission members) was the court’s decisiveness in likening pornography to speech, which is protected by the First Amendment.

In July 1986, the Meese Commission finally released its findings, only to be trumped by a National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) document titled "The Meese Commission Exposed." The NCAC document showcased a variety of articles from figures such as Colleen Dewhurst, Kurt Vonnegut and others, speaking out forcefully against what they perceived to be a tacit support of censorship. While the commission’s findings showed an "obvious cause and effect correlation between violence and pornography," The Meese Commission Exposed attacked the very premise of the commission, itself.

The most decisive rebuttal to the Meese Commission’s findings came in October of 1986, when the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress (CRSLC) released a legal analysis of the Meese Commission report. The article cited a 1973 case (Miller v. California), which provides the legal definition of obscenity.

That definition consists of three parts: "material is legally obscene only if (1) the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; (2) the work depicts or describes, in a patiently [sic] offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable law; and (3) the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."

Failure to satisfy any of these conditions means that the material is protected by the Constitution, except in some instances involving minors. "Materials depicting minors engaged in sexual activity may be regulated regardless of whether they are legally obscene." In addition, minors' access to pornographic materials can also be restricted.

According to the CRSLC’s article, even if the commission's controversial conclusions are accepted as valid, "they do not appear to approach the Brandenburg incitement standard which must currently be met before constitutionally protected materials may be regulated."

Derived from a 1969 case (Brandenburg v. Ohio), the Brandenburg standard states that every form of speech is protected from censorship unless there is likelihood it will incite imminent lawless action. Keep in mind, the First Amendment contains no requirement that the speech it protects be harmless. On the contrary, speech that somebody thinks is harmful is the only kind that needs protecting.

As if the spigot had been left on, a variety of reports cropped up, most analyzing the statistical methods used by the Meese Commission. Tom W. Smith, an expert in social survey research, stated that the commission's analysis of public opinion "is marred by several factors. The most serious of these are (1) inappropriate comparisons between variant samples and question wordings, (2) omitting statistical tests of significance when comparing survey results, and (3) failure to use the best available data." In a particular study of adult films, the authors stated that X-rated films contained more "egalitarian" and "mutual" sexual depictions than "Adult" (R-rated) films, as well as less violence.

In their dissenting report, two members of the commission noted, "Visual materials presented to the commissioners were heavily skewed toward the exceptionally violent and degrading." Two female members of the Meese Commission, Ellen Levine, editor of Woman's Day magazine and Judith Becker, director of the Sexual Behavior Clinic at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, objected to "efforts to tease this type of data into a ‘causal link’ between pornography and violence." The commission’s argument that viewing pornographic materials led to violence and rape was then systematically dismantled.

It’s now commonly accepted that rape is not so much an act of sexual expression as it is an act of violence and domination. This is a message that originated in the women’s movement long before the Meese Commission. Rape is the use of sex to express aggression.

To back up the argument that pornography does not lead to rape, Tom W. Smith argued that in none of the studies cited "has a measure of motivation such as 'likelihood to rape' ever changed as a result of exposure to pornography." Men who are already predisposed to violent attitudes toward women may be more sexually aroused by violent materials, "but there is no reason to think that exposure to violent pornography is the cause of these predispositions." These particular studies indicated that exposure to a very particular genre of pornography - violent pornography — may very well reinforce preexisting negative attitudes toward women, but in no way causes previously "normal" attitudes to shift.

On the other side of the coin, while pornography may not lead to rape it still could very well be rape and subsequently live on in infamy as a violent act. This argument stems from Linda Marchiano’s heavily-supported claim that her rape was filmed and distributed under the now well-known title, Deep Throat. As Andrea Dworkin states in her 1989 essay, "Pornography: Men Possessing Women," "Will the audience understand that as long as the pornography of her exists she is a captive of it, a fugitive from it? Will the audience be willing to fight for her freedom by fighting against the pornography of her, because, as Linda Marchiano said of Deep Throat, ‘every time someone watches that film, they are watching me being raped.’"

TODAY
Where have these commissions taken us? Unfortunately, the greatest effect has been in wiping out the buzz surrounding a growing body of evidence that stresses the influence of early childhood on our feelings about sexuality and especially violence and sexuality.

The Meese Commission's focus on sexual materials ignored overwhelming evidence that violence (not sex) is the main source of sexual abuse. In this way, the work of the commission resembles a mechanic, who, upon examining a car brought in with an exhaust problem, discovers it also has severed break lines, but then elects to fix only the exhaust problem as that is why the car was brought in initially..

Violence in popular culture is much more damaging to our civilization than pornography, and those who treat sexual material as a scapegoat are stopping their investigation short. Why not look at any of the bevy of potential social targets? I guarantee you’ll find that the deeper problem lies in faulty and/or non-existent parenting, relationship skills, teaching, health, etc., not sexually explicit materials. If you want to wipe out pornography, create an environment that wipes out the pornographer — not through prohibition but through education, parenting and love.

Most social scientists now believe that sexual attitudes are formed very early in life, and that pornography is a symptom of deviant sexuality rather than a cause of it. What both of the aforementioned government-sponsored investigations into pornography had in common was their underlying desire to focus public attention on a scapegoat in order to divert attention from larger underlying social diseases. As we should’ve learned long ago, in most public policy, Band-Aids cover scrapes but do little else, and America’s troubles lie far deeper than the scrape.