Morality is unfortunately not a welcome or frequent word in the public discourse of our time. Morality speaks of basic standards of right conduct, with special reference to virtue in sexual conduct. But morality is the word deliberately chosen by Father Hill to give title and focus to the organization he founded and directed for twenty-three years. The title and focus remain in an organization grown to national stature. Morality in Media, Inc. has developed a central office in New York with a permanent staff. It hosts and sustains the National Obscenity Law Center as a full resource of expert reference in the critical area of legal controls of public obscenity.There are those who scoff at morality as alien to the liberties of a free people. Fr. Hill saw it otherwise and his vision carried the wisdom of that irreplaceable human dignity nourished in the integrity of family life, where the human life power is honored and served in an ambience of disciplined and generous love. Uncompromising conviction led him to confront promiscuity and perversion as the corruption of human dignity and the corrosion of family life. He saw clearly that morality was not merely private but also public -- a matter of community standards and controls over the marketplace, the promotion of a social environment conducive to decency in personal and family life.
He started as one small voice in an urban setting. With unswerving determination and by ceaseless labor, his voice grew to national resonance. He never sought nor did he get easy success in his unselfish campaign. Yet he gradually won the respect and support of thousands.
Worried mothers and fathers contributed from their small resources; leaders in business and finance responded to his constant appeals and gave from their abundance. Religious leaders across the spectrum of American life joined him in a campaign whose validity they could not deny, pushed by the alarming growth of moral septicemia in the national bloodstream.
Through it all he was primarily a man of God, serving a loved nation in its original character as a God-loving people, whose inalienable rights and dignity were solemnly recognized as God's gifts. For him and for the unnumbered many who joined him, God's moral law was not only an invitation to human dignity but the imperative of a civil society serving its citizens in the pursuit of the true measure of human happiness possible on earth.
and MORALITY IN MEDIA
THE ODYSSEY OF A CONCERNED AND DETERMINED LEADER
"Better look into this," the Jesuit pastor suggested to the parish priest late in 1962. "This" was a situation that had arisen in the parish elementary school, where a mother had discovered that sadomasochistic magazines were circulating among sixth grade boys.
"Looking into" the pornography traffic brought Fr. Morton A. Hill, S.J. to the White House in March of 1983, where, with a group of other concerned clergy and lay persons, he asked the President of the United States to look into it and direct the Department of Justice to enforce the federal obscenity laws which had been sitting on the books almost unused for seven years.
The original suggestion of the superior twenty three years ago eventuated in the mounting of a community campaign on the upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City, for which Fr. Hill recruited a Lutheran minister, Rev. Robert E. Wiltenburg, and Rabbi Julius G. Neumann.
Working out of a small office in St. Ignatius Loyola parish rectory on Park Avenue in Manhattan, and holding planning meetings in an East Side synagogue, the group called "Operation Yorkville" set about raising public consciousness about the type of pornographic material that was reaching children. They began to research the problem and the law. They shared what they learned with area church groups and organizations. They addressed meetings of those groups. They took to radio and television whenever possible, and they disseminated a mimeographed newsletter.
It soon became obvious they were filling a need, as requests for information and speakers came to them from every corner of New York City, then from New Jersey and Connecticut and beyond.
In 1966, with the small rectory office bulging with research and hardly able to accommodate the part-time typist for whom Fr. Hill scraped up $10 each day, the priest moved the office to commercial quarters on Lexington Avenue where he took on another part-time typist. At the same time, the United States Supreme Court handed down its Fanny Hill decision which was to give the pornographers an almost unqualified green light to move their wares. Three justices held that a work must be "utterly without redeeming social value" to be declared obscene. Under such a test, nothing would be obscene. But, even though the specious test was not a decision of the Court majority, but only of three justices, the pornographers' defenders took it, ran with it, and convinced lower courts time after time to declare not obscene material that was becoming increasingly depraved.
Fr. Hill enlisted the assistance of three volunteer lawyers who studied the decision and maintained that "utterly" was not the law of the land. Early in 1967, having built a board of directors to guide the three clergymen, he retained a professional writer to help spread that legal word; and late that year he had the fledgling group, now called Morality in Media, incorporated as a not-for-profit corporation in the State of New York.
Also late that year, word of Morality in Media and its work having spread through the country, Fr. Hill was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to a Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. The Commission had been created by Congress because the traffic in pornography had become "a matter of national concern."
However, any hope that the Commission's work would bring a slow-down to the accelerating pornography traffic was quickly dashed when news of its makeup emanated from the White House. Of the 18 appointed members, two-thirds were ideologues who held absolutist positions on the First Amendment, or represented vested interests. It was a sure bet the majority, operating from pre-conceived notions, would recommend repeal of obscenity laws. Even more certain was the fact that Morality in Media, Inc., which Fr. Hill had said from the beginning was "in business to go out of business," would not soon be going out of business.
He quickly enlisted the services of Paul J. McGeady, an astute lawyer who had served on a New York City pornography commission, and Victor B. Cline, a noted behavioral scientist from the University of Utah. At the end of the Commission's life in 1970, with the help of the two experts, Fr. Hill and a fellow clergyman on the Commission, Dr. Winfrey C. Link, issued the Hill-Link Minority Report. The Congress rejected the majority report which, as predicted, recommended repeal of the obscenity laws, and the Hill-Link Report was read into the record in both Houses.
Three years later in its landmark obscenity decisions, the United States Supreme Court was to cite the Hill-Link Report several times and completely ignore the majority report.
Shortly after the issuance of the report, Fr. Hill became an almost weekly commuter on the New York-Washington shuttle, working to obtain federal funding to activate one of the recommendations of his report that a clearinghouse of legal information on the law of obscenity be established to service overburdened, underpaid prosecutors so that they could become the equals of the highly paid, highly skilled defense attorneys in the courtroom.
While testifying as an expert witness for the government in a New Orleans trial, he met Homer Young, a retired FBI agent who was also testifying, and who was teaching courses in criminal justice at California Lutheran College. With the grant finally obtained after numerous meetings with Department of Justice officials, the recommended clearinghouse or center opened early in 1972 on the campus of Cal Lutheran, staffed by Homer Young and three former prosecutors.
Meanwhile, having observed that the work and propaganda of the American Civil Liberties Union, with its network of local organizations and cooperating attorneys, had had much to do with creating the tangled legal morass into which obscenity law had descended, Fr. Hill determined to organize a similar network to untangle the mess.
Early in 1970 Morality in Media conducted its first organizational meeting in Chicago, training attendees to structure state affiliates of the now-national organization. The first affiliate, Morality in Media of Massachusetts, was established by Fr. Paul J. Murphy, S.J., then teaching at Boston College.
In 1973, in Miller v. California, the nation's highest Court laid to rest once and for all the "utterly without redeeming social value" idea:
"We do not adopt as a constitutional standard the (utterly) test; that concept has never commanded the adherence of more than three justices at one time:'In a decision handed down the same day, the Court "categorically" disapproved the "consenting adults" concept, created in the late '60's by libertarian elements and defense attorneys. Citing the Hill-Link Report as indicating that there is at least an "arguable correlation between obscene material and crime:" the Court said,
"Rights and interests other than those of the advocates are involved...these include the interest of the public in the quality of life...the total community environment, the tone of commerce in the great city centers, and possibly the public safety itself:'The Court set up a new, workable test for obscenity (works which taken as a whole appeal to the prurient interest, are patently offensive, and which taken as a whole do not have serious value).
It appeared now that all that Fr. Hill and Morality in Media needed to do was see that all the states adopted the Court's test (which the Court construed into existing federal laws). New York was the first and was based on language Paul McGeady provided. But, the ACLU was omnipresent in state legislatures, and to this day there are still seven states with ineffective obscenity laws, and three states with no obscenity laws at all.
Meanwhile, a West Coast defense attorney, backed by a libertarian organization, began an attack, shortly after the landmark decisions, against the California clearinghouse which was thriving and had become an invaluable tool for prosecutors. They took the attack all the way into the office of Attorney General Edward Levi in 1975, maintaining that its presence on the campus of California Lutheran College violated separation of church and state. They succeeded in having federal funding cut off.
Fr. Hill took to the road again, and in 1976 re-opened the National Obscenity Law Center in New York with funding from the private sector. It now has Paul McGeady at the helm as Director, and is located in the Morality in Media's offices on Manhattan's Riverside Drive, near Columbia University. The Center is now considered the most authoritative source on obscenity law in the country.
It was also in the era of Edward Levi that federal obscenity prosecutions began to decline until they were at a mere trickle. Obscenity investigator Homer Young, an expert on the organized crime scene, (the mob controls 90 percent of the hardcore pornography traffic in the country) maintains that the back of the entire industry could be broken in 18 months with vigorous enforcement of existing laws.
With pornography spreading, Fr. Hill set off on a seven-month national Town Meeting Tour in October 1981 to alert the country to the illegal traffic in pornography and the emergence of cableporn. He was the first to warn, "Pornography is no longer just downtown, it's now downstairs" via cable television. Visiting 43 towns and cities from Wahoo, Nebraska to St. Paul, Minnesota, from Ft. Dodge, Iowa to St. Petersburg, Florida, Father Hill listened to the voice of the people and urged everyone to write to the U.S. Attorney General (at that point, William French Smith), urging vigorous enforcement of the federal obscenity laws.
Nonetheless, only token enforcement of the obscenity laws persisted while the pornography traffic burgeoned, and it was this deteriorating situation that brought Fr. Hill to the White House. "The token enforcement mentality of the U.S. Department of Justice has become so entrenched that only intervention by the President himself can change it." he asserted.
 Fr. Hill meets President Reagan, March 1983 |
Fr. Hill brought together a coalition of concerned national leaders who met with White House staff and enforcement agency officials, and in March 1983, they met with the President himself and the heads of the agencies, and recommended a coordinator to pull the agencies together for aggressive enforcement. As a result of this meeting, a White House Working Group on Pornography was formed in June of 1983, and in December, President Reagan addressed the nation's U.S. Attorneys and called for tighter enforcement of the laws. |
Fr. Hill also had long advocated that obscenity be included in the crimes covered by the Federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Law (RICO). In January of 1984, he and Morality in Media suggested to Congress that such an amendment be added to the Crime Control bill then under consideration.
In October of 1984, President Reagan signed into law the 635-page Comprehensive Crime Control Act, which contains the amendment adding obscenity to the list of enumerated crimes covered by the Federal RICO Law. The inclusion of obscenity in RICO gives power to the Justice Department to confiscate the pornographer's business and assets related to the criminal enterprise.
In June 1984, under Fr. Hill's guidance, Morality in Media sponsored the National Catholic Conference on the Illegal Sex Industry in New York City, as step one in a five-year plan to increase denominational involvement in the pornography issue.
In the spring of 1985, Morality in Media sponsored the non-denominational Denver National Conference on Pornography which launched a year-long "People vs. Pornography" campaign. Features of that campaign are regional "People vs. Pornography" workshops throughout the country and the initiation of Fr. Hill's idea to blanket the United States with public information leaflets designed to inform the public and create a climate in which law enforcement may flourish.
His People vs. Pornography campaign is ongoing, as is the single minded goal of Father Morton A. Hill, S.J. to knock out the illegal porn industry to protect our children and society from the ravages of pornography. Morality in Media,, inspired by the example set by the beloved priest, will not "go out of business" until that goal is accomplished.
The national distribution of public information leaflets was a priority with him getting out to the public the straight facts on the pornography industry and obscenity law, to create a climate in which law enforcement will flourish. Each day he asked for a report, and exclaimed with delight when he would hear that another 20,000 had been ordered in one, not atypical, day. Father Hill was also feeding the staff new ideas for a second set of leaflets with which to blanket the grass roots of America.
| "In the next 12 months, all will pull together... when this happens, know it happened because of you:' wrote Father Hill to his staff on October 1st. "Your efforts will pay off rich dividends, perhaps not material, but spiritual." The letter ended, "With God, all things are possible. I love you all" The uneven handwriting indicated that Father's physical strength was waning. The message, however, indicated that his determination to defeat the porn industry was stronger than ever. It proved to be Father Hill's last letter to Morality in Media. |
 The genial face of Father Morton A. Hill, porn fighter |
On the day that Father Hill passed away, the MIM staff sat, stunned, long after "closing time:' There was a need to be together for solace and to exchange fond memories. "What was it about Father Hill that you loved?" became the question of the day The answers came spontaneously: "his gentleness:'"his holiness and piety '"the warm twinkle in his eyes," "his thoughtfulness and complete honesty in dealing with others ' "his perseverance." One MlM'er loved the way he bicycled enthusiastically to work in his clerical suit and a big, white helmet."
One staff member mentioned Father Hill's "thirst for knowledge," recalling how MlM's president earned a law degree by studying on airplanes, took courses in conservation and accounting and then became a licensed locksmith after deciding that he wanted to do something with his hands. Another member of the staff, recalling how she met Father Hill, said that while doing free lance work in the building, she was approached by the white-haired priest in the cafeteria one day. "You look like someone I ought to know," he said. "What do you do?" Vintage Morton A. Hill: An unflagging interest in people.
There could be no doubt, however, that what inspired everyone most of all about Father Hill was his unconquerable and indefatigable spirit in battling the illegal sex industry. His vision was pure and his commitment to decency contagious. The younger members of MlM's staff, in particular, spoke of how rare it is to find someone "with the courage to stand up for what's right."
During the eulogy at Father Hill's Mass of Christian Burial, the homilist noted that Father Hill had three families: his natural family, his Jesuit family and his Morality in Media family. That MIM family includes not just his staff, but also the thousands upon thousands of Americans from coast to coast who have supported him throughout the years. And when Father Hill ended his last letter with "l love you all," he meant all.
Father Hill's plans will be carried forward by his determined MIM staff and his extended family across the nation.
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