When Voltaire said, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it,” he certainly did not add, “and I will defend your right to have what you say financed by the taxpayers.” But many people have confused the constitutional right of free speech with the right to be subsidized by the government.
All Americans have the right to send their views through the mails at regular rates. But some groups are given the privilege of sending their publications through the mails at a greatly reduced rate, which means a substantial subsidy from the U.S. taxpayers.
The second class mailing privilege is a very valuable “property” worth thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of dollars to those who have that status. It was frankly intended as a public subsidy to publications that provide information to the general public, such as newspapers, or high-quality magazines that, according to the statute, are “devoted to literature, the sciences, arts, or a special industry.”
The granting of the second class status is not a perpetual or lifetime privilege. It can be revoked for a variety of reasons and should be revoked whenever a magazine becomes indecent.
In 1955, when Playboy Magazine was decent compared to 1978, it was granted the second class mailing privilege. In the 23 years since then, the crudity of the vices sympathetically portrayed in Playboy and its imitators has steadily increased, as have their circulation and profits.
The huge December issues of Playboy and Penthouse contain hundreds of pictures of nude women in suggestive poses, plus many ads for illicit sex and contraceptives. Letters from readers praise and describe acts of illicit sex in explicit detail. There are no pictures of babies; children are a no-no to be avoided by every means possible. When children appear in cartoons, they are depicted as a calamity.
Why should the taxpayers continue to subsidize with second class mailing privileges the score or more of indecent magazines that encourage illicit sex? The immense fortunes amassed by pornographers prove that pandering to sexual appetite is probably the greatest low-investment-high-return business in the country.
The large size of indecent magazines (the December Playboy has 410 pages) is due principally to many pages of advertising from large corporations. Businesses do not usually place their advertising dollars to promote special-interest publications or points of view that offend many of their potential customers.
Yet the Playboy-Penthouse-type magazines frankly promote a particular ideology: the casting off of moral standards that sustain the family and marriage fidelity, and the substitution of the lifestyle of the “Me Generation” that demands sex without any prohibitions and without children. Playboy brags in its December issue that its purpose is to influence “socio-sexual changes” that overturn “our puritan heritage,” and that the magazine has become “a major force in what was termed the American sexual revolution.”
Indeed it has. One of the most far-reaching of the socio-sexual changes promoted by Playboy-Penthouse propaganda is the severe drop in the birth rate. The shortage of young workers is the reason why we all must pay steeply increased Social Security taxes.
Those who choose the “Me and Free Sex” lifestyle enjoy freedom of choice, plus freedom of the press to peddle their “sexual revolution.” But it does not follow that the U.S. taxpayers must subsidize publications that promote acts which most Americans believe are immoral, and which in most states are illegal. Nor does it follow that it is good business practice for corporations to advertise in such publications while conspicuously failing to advertise in religiously-oriented and morally-oriented publications that try to preserve marriage and the family.
