Everyone knows that child pornography is against the law, and ought to be. But when it comes to hardcore pornography that depicts adults, even some who ought to know better are getting it wrong these days, like the FBI agent quoted in the Miami Herald recently as saying, flat out, "Pornography is not illegal. If it's child pornography, then we will investigate." Maybe it was a misquote.
The fact is that federal laws (and the laws of most states) prohibit distribution of pornography -- whether it involves adults or children -- that is obscene under the three-part obscenity test handed down by the U.S. Supreme Court in the landmark 1973 Miller v. California case. That test provides that pornography is unprotected by the First Amendment when, in broad terms, it is found by a jury or judge to include three elements: an appeal to lust, a patently offensive depiction of hardcore sexual conduct, and a lack of serious literary, artistic, scientific and political value.
The lobbying arm for many porn businesses in California’s San Fernando Valley calls itself the Free Speech Coalition, wrapping itself in the flag like America's founding patriots. But those patriots would have seen the Free Speech Coalition as a threat to all our freedoms. The real patriots said things like this:
"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious they have more need of masters." - Benjamin Franklin.
"Neither the wisest constitution nor the wisest laws will secure the liberty and happiness of a people whose manners are universally corrupt." - Samuel Adams.
In Miller, Chief Justice Warren Burger made the key point:
"This much has been categorically settled by the Court, that obscene material is unprotected by the First Amendment... To equate the free and robust exchange of ideas and political debate with commercial exploitation of obscene material demeans the grand conception of the First Amendment."
From 1993 to 2000, the United States Justice Department stopped enforcing the federal obscenity laws, which helps explain why we have prurient images all over the public media and why people, like that agent in Miami, looking at the boom in pornographic imagery, assume incorrectly that the so-called “adult” stuff must be legal.
There was so little obscenity law enforcement under the Clinton/Reno Justice Department that the porn business trade paper Adult Video News endorsed Bill Clinton for reelection in 1996, citing what the paper called his "hands-nearly-off porn policy." In March 1998, Adult Video News crowed, "The adult industry's numbers have increased nearly 100% in five years. With a more relaxed Justice Department, some retailers felt free not only to carry but also to market adult product." The story ran under this headline: "IT'S A GREAT TIME TO BE AN ADULT RETAILER."
That was then.
Attorney General John Ashcroft has made it clear that he intends to enforce the federal obscenity laws. In November 2001, when Mr. Ashcroft appointed career prosecutor Andrew Oosterbaan to serve as Chief of the Justice Department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS), he emphasized that the new Section Chief "will diligently investigate and prosecute child exploitation and obscenity crimes."
In April this year, Mr. Ashcroft revised the U.S. Attorneys' Manual to eliminate a "lockout provision" that had kept prosecutors from CEOS from investigating obscenity cases without first receiving permission from the local United States Attorney.
In May, Mr. Ashcroft described pornography as "steps down a path to the degradation and, too often, the real abuse of predominantly women and children." He said, "The Department of Justice is dedicated to prosecuting those who illegally distribute adult obscenity materials and child pornography. These prosecutions are a priority for this Department, and the Criminal Division's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section and the 94 United States Attorneys across the country stand committed to enforce the federal statutes in this area... Those who illegally distribute obscene material will be prosecuted aggressively."
In early June, the Attorney General met with all representatives from United States Attorneys's offices around the country in an "obscenity law enforcement symposium" to develop "a national obscenity strategy for aggressive federal prosecutions" in obscenity cases.
In October, the U.S. Justice Department conducted its first obscenity law enforcement training session for federal prosecutors and investigators in more than a decade.
Gary Farris, a 27-year-old from a place in southern Kentucky called Science Hill, operated an Internet porn business called "taboomovies.net" until November 5, when he was arrested on obscenity charges by a posse that included agents of the FBI and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the Kentucky State Police Electronic Crimes Section, the Kentucky State Police London (KY) Post, and the Pulaski County Sheriff's Office. Mr. Farris offered 180 videotapes for sale on his Web site, according to an announcement from the office of the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky, Gregory F. Van Tatenhove. One of these tapes is "#90 EXTREME UNDERGROUND," which, according to the announcement, "depicts the physical and sexual abuse and mutilation of several women."
And they call this "adult" entertainment. Amazing.
The question now: Shouldn't federal, state and local authorities also go after at least some of the people who provided Gary Farris with the 180 videotapes? If it's grounds for obscenity charges against Gary Farris, it ought to be grounds for obscenity charges against some one in the San Fernando Valley, where most hardcore pornographic videotapes are produced.
Federal, state and local cooperation, so evident in Kentucky in the Gary Farris case, was common in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles - home of the "adult" movie industry - during the Reagan and first Bush administrations.
Back in those days, a lawyer who represents pornographers had the shameless temerity to refer to the prosecutorial offensive as "a holocaust," appropriating for themselves a word that history has assigned to Hitler's genocidal slaughter of the Jews.
The hardcore porn producers have found the going much easier since 1993, and it threatens to keep getting easier in a circular dynamic that feeds upon itself: failure to prosecute leads to more hardcore pornography and more hardcore pornography makes some prosecutors think that it will be harder to convince juries that the smut offends community standards.
The City Attorney in Los Angeles, "Rocky" Delgadillo, had two obscenity cases ready to go to trial this year but let both defendants plead to "public nuisance" charges, "donate" $1,000 to the state's "victim restitution fund," and walk away, free to go on peddling porn instead of facing a trial that could have put them in jail and taken their porn out of circulation.
A county judge in Pennsylvania has ordered bankrupt telecommunications giant WorldCom to block access by Pennsylvania residents to five child pornography Web sites found to be accessible through WorldCom's Internet service. A new state law requires internet service providers that have customers in that state - regardless of where the ISP is located - to block access to child porn sites identified by the Pennsylvania Attorney General. AG Mike Fisher had notified WorldCom of the sites in July. Since the law went into effect in April, Internet service providers have blocked access to more than 200 Web sites containing child pornography. The WorldCom case was the first to involve court action.
Calvin Broadus, known to his fans as the rapper Snoop Dogg, told a Wall Street Journal reporter in September about all he's done to change his life style, most notably his decision to stop smoking marijuana as an example for his three children. The story that ran in the paper on September 16 included other career-related details, such as teaming up with Larry Flynt’s Hustler Video to make a “porno” movie (which won the Adult Video News Award for Top Selling Tape in 2001).
The Journal story also mentioned plans for Mr. Broadus to appear with Kermit the Frog and the Muppets in "A Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie," to be aired by NBC as a 2002 Christmas special. That's what caused the flap. Outraged Muppets fans wrote letters to the Journal -- and others, presumably -- and Mr. Broadus's part in the movie was eliminated.
A spokesperson for Jim Henson Company, producers of the holiday movie, explained it this way: "As commonly occurs during this stage of production, we have had to cut several scenes originally planned for the movie which did not advance the story line." Said it with a straight face, too, we understand.
One of those things "everyone knows" in some circles is that pornography is a personal choice, a private release, certainly harmless and not something to be outlawed. See if this sounds familiar: There are no victims... Haven't you heard of the First Amendment... We're talking about FREE SPEECH, for goodness sake.
What "everyone knows," of course, isn't always so. Here are a few contrary indicators.
The murders in California last summer of 7-year-old Danielle van Dam and 5-year-old Samantha Runnion are tragic cases in point. According to press reports, both David Westerfield, who was convicted in the van Dam case, and Alejandro Avila, charged in the Runnion killing, were porn users. Reuters reported that a psychiatrist who followed the Westerfield trial thought the porn and other evidence "suggested a man who wrestled with violent sexual fantasy [and] probably derived pleasure from the suffering of his victim."
The man charged with raping two nuns, killing one of them, in Klamath Falls, Oregon, one night in early September had just come from a strip club, according to police. It was a chance encounter and left the surviving nun to wonder why it happened. There's a fair chance that the proximate cause, at least, had something to do with the fact that this was a man who would spend leisure time in a strip club.
In Minneapolis, twelve librarians have filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the Minneapolis Public Library alleging that the library's policy of unrestricted Internet access creates a sexually hostile work environment in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. The complaint describes a situation in which the library's 50 computer terminals were taken over every day all day for almost three years by men, singly and in groups, who did little else but look at pornography and occasionally masturbate - under their trench coats, presumably - when they weren't going out of their way to expose the librarians and other library patrons to some piece of gross-out porn just for the nasty fun of it. The complaint convinced the Commission to decide in May 2001 that there is probable cause for a sexual harassment lawsuit. Only 7% of complaints to the EEOC result in probable cause findings, which suggests the librarians have a persuasive case.
Look in any direction and victims of the porn-driven lust for sex are sure to pop into view.
The United Nations Children Fund reported earlier this year that 1,000,000 children, most of them girls - and 325,000 of them from the United States - are enslaved annually in an epidemic of commercial sexual exploitation.
A horrible story came out of South Africa a few months ago, and it's worth remembering because of what it says about victims. The story was that six men had been charged with raping a 10-month-old baby girl. The child was described as "one of" the youngest rape victims in the country. Is it possible any were younger? Police report there were 52,860 rapes in South Africa in 2000. A women's rights advocate said, "There is a civil war in this country and it's a war against women's bodies." Deputy President Jacob Zuma blamed it on the after-effects of Apartheid, which he said, "sowed the seeds for the breakdown of the institution of the family." There is also a big pornography problem in South Africa.
ABC News reported in June that Dr. Ralph DiClemente of Emory University, has been given a $3 million grant by the National Institutes of Health to conduct a five-year study of the effect Internet pornography has on teenagers.
Dr. DiClemente, professor of behavioral science and health education in the School of Public Health, is to examine what he calls "an important but understudied public health issue" - adolescents' exposure to sexual content on the Internet and its effect on their sexual health.
Dr. DiClemente's earlier work has included a study of teenagers in which he found that less parental monitoring is associated with high-risk sexual behavior, the acquisition of sexually transmitted diseases, violence, antisocial behavior, and marijuana and alcohol use.
There have been other studies relating to Dr. DiClemente's inquiry. Researchers at the National Foundation for Family Research and Education (NFFRE) in Canada reported in March that their study of 12,000 individuals showed the use of pornographic materials leads to several behavioral, psychological and social problems. Dr. Claudio Violata, research director at the Foundation and a professor at the University of Calgary, said, "Our findings are very alarming. This is a very serious social problem since pornography is so widespread nowadays and easily accessible on the Internet, television, videos and printed materials... I can think of no beneficial effects of pornography whatsoever. As a society we need to move towards eradicating it."
Safer Internet, an online newsletter "for awareness raisers in the EU Safer Internet programme," carries a wealth of information on porn-related issues. The November report included these items:
With more than $8 billion in commitments to the six broadcast networks alone for the fall season, advertisers are spending lavishly to get their commercials on programs they believe will attract women who are 18 to 34 years old and viewers of either gender who are 18 to 49.
But a national poll by Family Circle magazine in June and July found that many top shows got high disapproval ratings from the public because the shows were too "racy, raunchy and violent." For network shows, the bad news included a 91% disapproval rating for sexual content on CSI and an 89% disapproval rating for sexual content on 24, Law & Order, and ER.
New York Times TV critic Craig Tomashoff thinks "The Mind of the Married Man" on cable is "an occasion for celebration" because of the way the show's lead character, Mickey Barnes, misbehaves. This, Mr. Tomashoff says, makes the show "more realistic" than family sitcoms of the past. We are to understand that "realism," no matter how ugly, is desirable. Why that should be so goes unexplained. And we are to understand that "Married Man" does, indeed, represent reality. Never mind that the assertion goes unsupported.
In his preview of the show's second season, published September 22, Mr. Tomashoff makes a point of noting how widely criticized the show has been ("... you'd think it was the greatest threat to American morality since Communism. Or at least Jerry Springer.") and wonders, "Could it be the way the show's protagonist spent last season openly lusting after his secretary before finally cheating on his wife with a masseuse? The way infidelity (or at least the thought of it) is as ubiquitous in the show's marriages as in-law jokes? The way female characters sometimes seem to serve no purpose other than to be slept with or cheated on?"
"Probably," he concedes, and then goes on to praise the show.
Mr. Tomashoff quotes David Steinberg ("who has directed husband characters in 'Newhart,' 'Mad About You' and the current HBO series 'Curb Your Enthusiasm'") as saying, "The show takes the premise that men are always horny. It's elevated it somewhat, but it's based on a truth."
And that conception of reality, folks, is one reason sitcoms have gotten to be the way they are.
TV executives ought to look at this story about a real father that was published in the online newsletter Illinois Leader.
Slaughter's Team is Slaughtered, but Character Wins
Wednesday, November 13, 2002
By Joyce Morrison, Southern IL News Correspondent
ALTON-This weekend, Marquette Catholic High School's Coach Mike Slaughter suspended the first stringers on his No. 1 division-ranked football team from playing in the all-important Anna-Jonesboro playoff game.
Slaughter's own son was among those suspended for violating an oath they took at the beginning of the season to abstain from alcohol consumption.
Thirty-three students (sixteen of whom were Marquette football players) were arrested by the Madison County Sheriff's Department over the weekend at a party held in honor of Slaughter's son's 18th birthday.
"It is not about winning at all," said one parent of a suspended player.
The suspensions certainly gave credence to that statement as No. 1 ranked Marquette Catholic High was crushed 63-0 by Anna-Jonesboro in this past Saturday's Class AAA playoff game.
Marquette spectators and fans cheered the second-stringers throughout. Parents said it was "the greatest loss their kids could have ever experienced."
According to the parents, their children learned the lesson of integrity and commitment through Coach Slaughter's example.