The bad news in the about-to-be-published report of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography is that the laws against obscenity are widely flouted by the hucksters of perverted and prurient materials. The good news in the report is that we can eliminate this glut of smut if prosecuting attorneys would merely enforce our current laws.
There is NO First Amendment right to distribute obscene materials. Laws prohibiting the distribution of obscenity are constitutional and have been upheld time and time again. It’s tragic that nonenforcement is so common.
Since President Reagan signed the Child Protection Law in 1984, child pornography has been practically eliminated from over-the-counter sales and exists only in the black market. We can do likewise for adult obscenity.
The eleven Pornography Commissioners are a very diverse group, professionally and ideologically. They include a psychologist, a psychiatrist, a judge, a lawyer, a couple of professors, and a couple of experts in child abuse.
It is remarkable that this mix of Commissioners was unanimous in urging that prosecution of obscenity “be treated as a matter of special urgency” and that such prosecutions “be placed at the top of both state and federal priorities.” Only one professor and one editor dissented from some of the other conclusions.
“The evidence is unquestionable,” the 500-page report says, “that with few exceptions the obscenity laws that are on the books go unenforced. Federal law enforcement is limited almost exclusively to child pornography and to a few major operations against large pornography production and distribution networks linked to organized crime.”
The Pornography Commission concluded that “substantial exposure” to pornography “bears some causal relationship to the level of sexual violence, sexual coercion, or unwanted sexual aggression.” The kind of pornography that this Commission examined and analyzed was not even available in the United States at the time of the 1970 Commission, and so that old Commission’s report is now completely obsolete.
The 1986 Commission found that the largest category of consumers is the adolescents, the 12-to-17-year-olds. The Commission found that the causes of the pornography problem are, in this order, organized crime (which controls the distribution of pornography), the failure of law enforcement at both the federal and the local levels (only 100 persons have been indicted on obscenity charges in the last eight years), and citizen apathy.
Citizen action can pick up where law enforcement leaves off. That’s what we have witnessed with the successful, months-long boycott of the 7-Eleven convenience stores by a coalition of anti-pornography groups led by the National Federation for Decency.
As the Commission report pointed out, “A citizen’s right to free speech means that he can organize and speak out even against those pornographic materials that are not proscribed by law but that he does not want to be in his community.” Suggested targets of protests are convenience stores, hotels that offer pornographic movies to guests, cable television networks with sexually explicit programming, and the FCC for permitting obscene TV programs.
When Southland Corporation, the nation’s largest convenience-store owner, announced that it will no longer sell Playboy, Penthouse and Forum at its 4,500 company-operated 7-Eleven stores, that was a tremendous achievement for the anti-pornography movement.
In recent months, 12,000 retail outlets have stopped selling pornography, and one-third of the porn magazines have dropped in circulation.
Playboy’s circulation has slumped nearly 20 percent in the last two years and will decline even further because the 7-Eleven stores account for one-fifth of Playboy’s over-the-counter sales.
Penthouse has produced a video for the Periodical & Book Association of America in order to encourage booksellers to continue to carry pornography despite public protests. The video claims that “while only 15% of all magazines sold are ‘adult’ titles — 40% of all magazine profits come from them.”
Porn magazines that cost 50¢ to produce can sell at retail for $10 or more. Porn video cassettes that dealers buy at $15 are priced to sell at retail for $80 to $95 each. That tells you why many stores are so eager to carry porn.
It’s time to raise community standards by aggressive law enforcement and organized citizen action.
