When is Congress going to take action against the epidemic disease of pornography which is corrupting and destroying millions of young people while the pushers rake in billions of obscene profits? The pornography business produces the most profitable return on the smallest investment, and the crime syndicate skims off the cream and uses it to fund other illegal activities.
The $6 billion a year pornography business is larger than the legitimate film and record business combined. The average porn magazine sells for $6 to $10 each; films range up to $10; the ones using children are priced even higher. |
Now the industry is on the crest of a massive expansion into the videotape market, so that pornography can be seen in living color in hotel and motels and on home TV sets. It will soon be as accessible in every teenage gathering as marijuana.
The vast majority of the American people who are not addicted to the vice of pornography have even less idea what it looks like than they have of what heroin or cocaine feel like. Most Americans think that pornography means a centerfold of a pretty nude in Playboy magazine or dirty words and offensive passages in a novel.
Modern pornography includes, in living color with zoom lens Close-ups, hetero and homosexual sadomasochism (with instruments), bondage porn (sadistic sex combined with beating and torturing chained or bound women), techniques of rape, kiddie porn (methods of seducing and molesting children), bestiality porn (women having intercourse with dogs and horses), sexual device porn for lesbian copulation, close-ups of aroused sex organs, live porn (sex acts performed by real people, not just pictures), gang porn (gang rapes of kidnapped and chained women), and “snuff film” porn (perverted sex acts culminating in murder).
Such stuff is shipped across state lines in interstate commerce, sent through the mails (sometimes at subsidized second class postage rates), and advertised in hundreds of magazines which also travel in interstate commerce at preferential postage rates. We are witnessing a national epidemic of a communicable disease which reduces the quality of life and endangers the safety of all, especially women and children.
Police vice squads report that 77 percent of child molesters of boys and 87 percent of child molesters of girls admitted trying out or imitating the sexual behavior modeled by pornography. In one group of rapists, 57 percent indicated they had tried out the sexual behavior they had seen in porn materials. A recent study made by Michigan | State police used a computer to classify 35,000 sex crimes committed in that state over 20 years. They found that 43 percent were pornography related.
In every city there are dozens of “adult bookstores”, mostly in major shopping and hotel areas, which deal in pornography. There are more than 260 monthly magazines catering to pedophiles (people who get their kicks looking at nude children under age eight in compromising poses). Private syndicates of hundreds of people trade pictures of such children through the mails, and some trade the children themselves.
Charles H. Keating, Jr., the lawyer who for 25 years has led the Citizens for Decency through Law and served a decade ago as a member of the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, charges that modern pornography is “barbaric in its debauchery and is a modern moral equivalent of the Black Death that decimated Europe in the 15th century.” He told the Senate Judiciary Committee that Congress has “a constitutional duty to protect the American people from this plague.”
Keating thinks that the proposed anti-pornography bills, S.1722. and $.1723, are a fraud in purporting to deal with this plague because the penalties are too soft and many sections make convictions practically impossible, such as the one which requires the child in a porn film to be located, identified, and proved to be a minor.
Law Professor William A. Stanmeyer agrees. He points out that the bill’s maximum fine for a criminal convicted of sex exploitation of children is $10,000, but federal law makes the punishment two and a half times greater for selling adulterated eggs, and five times greater for selling a power mower that is too noisy. Are those things really more evil than selling children into sex bondage and videotaping their acts to pander to the perverted passions of pedophiles?
