There are rumblings that the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography may turn out to be an embarrassment to the Administration. It looks like it is heading in the opposite direction from what the President wanted and expected.
When the President signed the Child Protection Act in the Rose Garden in May 1984, he stressed that pornography is dangerous, and that the evidence since 1970 substantiates his concern. He said that his Administration considers pornography to be a public problem.
He noted bipartisan support for strong measures to deal with pornography, and he called upon Attorney General William French Smith to set up a Commission to deal with these concerns. The Commission on Pornography is the result.
The Commission’s mandate specifically requested it to review “the available empirical scientific evidence on the relationship between exposure to pornographic materials and anti-social behavior,” “the impact of the creation and dissemination of both adult and child pornography upon children,” and “the means of production and distribution of pornographic materials.” None of this has been adequately examined.
The transcript of the Commission’s meeting in Miami last November shows that the Commissioners appear to think that it is unclear, from the scientific studies they have reviewed, whether sexually-explicit and sexually-violent content in the media has actually significantly increased in the past 15 years. One wonders what kind of a cloistered world the Commissioners are living in!
The dramatic increase in the sexually-explicit and sexually-violent content is a self-evident fact to anyone who looks at television, particularly cable television, or who opens his eyes at a newsstand. If the Commissioners haven’t had “scientific studies” to demonstrate the obvious, they should hurry up and find them.
The principal problem is that the Commission started out assuming that pornography causes harm, and therefore neglected to call the expert witnesses who could document the clinical evidence that pornography causes harm. At their Los Angeles meeting last October, the Commissioners began to worry about this omission, but time and money were running out, and the proper calling and questioning of witnesses did not take place.
The Surgeon General was and is ready to undertake a serious study of the relevant social science and clinical literature, and especially a study of the harm caused by pornography. The Commission hasn’t requested him to do so or provided the funds.
By the time the Commissioners met in Miami in November, they discussed some tentative findings which are very disturbing. Incredibly, they vary little from the now-discredited conclusions of the 1970 Presidential Commission on Pornography which was repudiated by President Richard Nixon and by the overwhelming majority of the U.S. Senate.
These 1986 tentative findings suggest that exposure to pornography can have positive effects, and that there is no conclusive evidence that pornography causes deviance. They say evidence correlating pornography and rape rates is only suggested.
The Commission is pondering a new definition of obscenity in three tiers. This proposed definition would claim that pictures of homosexuality, sodomy, oral-genital and oral-anal contact are not within the definition of obscenity. That would mean that the obscenity for which a recent Miss America lost her crown would not be objectionable!
One of the silliest ideas that the Pornography Commission is playing around with is a recommendation for a national sex education curriculum with “value free” information about sexual relations, homosexuality, abortion, and contraceptives. If the Pornography Commission plunges the Administration into the thicket of a controversy about mandating a national sex curriculum, it could be a political bombshell.
If the Pornography Commissioners are looking for pornography, a good place to look would be in the sex education courses now in use in many public schools. Many are pornographic in words, pictures, and classroom discussions.
Some believe that the Commission has been intimidated by the pornography industry. Porn publishers and their lawyers, writers and photographers show up at every meeting to glare at the Commissioners and take photographs. Then they write about them in their porn magazines.
In any event, there seems to be confusion within the Commission itself about how it has drifted away from its mandate. The Commission had better get its act together soon lest it end up assisting the pornography profiteers and propagandists.
