Saturday Night Wheeze from Topeka, Kansas • 14

ffJiw 11- Parents Case Against Porn hiiUm a cfnmArAi A. By William Stanmeyer PORNOGRAPHY exploits Pornography is exploitation. Pornography teaches exploitation. Yet we have otherwise serious lawyers and writers urging that society have nolaws to protect its citizens from the harm that a vast majority of citizens correctly perceive will flow from the pornographic flood. Presumably this defense of moral pollution stems from misunderstanding what pornography is, or blindness Ti'vrnvM William A.

Stanmeyer is an associate professor of law at the Indiana University School of Law-lndianapdis, where his prime interest is Constitutional law. to the harm it does, or mistake as to ie impact control will have on freedom of speech, or confusion as to laws legitimate role in protecting lie morality. The public wants the law to restrain pomogra-. phy. Most intellectuals do not.

The purpose of this article is to remind the intellectuals why the public is right. In a Feb. 26 article about children in pornographic films, The Observer quoted a description of such a movie: The film shows the first communion of five girls. A motorcycle gang comes in and crucifies the priest a very bloody way, and then they rape the live girls This summary scarcely captures the films savagery or suggests its emotive impact. It does not give the blood and gore up close.

It omits the fright and shame of the children, the leer of the attackers, the details of violence against a tortured man and defiled little girls. Indeed, a detailed account of the film would doubtless be obscene; readers would be outraged, saying, He didnt have to say all that to make his point. Exactly. Neither did the film producer. For else not and even such harming and enjoying it.

Why would anyone' want to watch' a violent sacrilege such as the crucifixion of a priest and the rape of children? entertainment. Why want to watch someone performing sexual intercourse, save to plagiarize his pleasure through ones own autoerotic fantasy? A person, especially a minor, frequenting such self-debasing entertainments will learn that this is what Me is all about, that life is about anything of value. Civilized society cannot afford to be neutral toward such a perception of life. For education to civility is an effort to make of man something more than a creature of elemental passions and sensations. To civilize is to help people internalize respect for others, sharpen their sense of reality, grasp the difference between the decent the indecent, desire the noble and eschew the ignoble, control their passions, do what is right when it costs, stand in awe and wonder at ultimate mysteries as the utter uniqueness In defining obscenity, the Supreme Court has 0f every other person, love, sex, suffering, and 1.

ft. S'r )l; j. i i in 3 I 1 ii 1 1 An Attack on Civilization Because obscenity rejects each of these educational goals, it is an attack on civilization. By capitulating to obscenity, civilized society denies there is any difference between civilization and barbarism. It is reasonable to assume that a depraved moral outlook can translate into depraved conduct i.e., more crime.

Concern over excessive television violence is well-founded. The Founding Fathers were not absolutists. They upheld legal sanctions against libel, indecent speech and conduct, profanity, and other abuses of free speech. They knew the difference between liberty and license. They knew freedom can be abused.

They did not deem free speech to be solely a question of rights of the speaker. They also considered the purpose of speech, which was to foster the politically and morally Good It is not always easy to decide what conduct is reasonable, what process is due, what material is pornographic. But we must try. What must be balanced is not merely a publishers asserted rights against a prosecutors zeal, but also the harm to society from a few unwarranted obscenity convictions against the harm to society if every newsstand, TV screen, and even schoolbook panders a thousand pictures of perversion. The absolutists say we cannot draw any line anywhere.

This is patent nonsense. In a democracy, why should the minority who cannot distinguish between art and trash dictate the education through magazines, television, and schoolbooks of the children of the majority, who can tell the difference? To say the law has no business promoting morality is to exhibit amazing ignorance of Anglo-American history. Nearly every branch of. law assumes the existence of a standard of moral good and, evil. Besides physical crimes such as murder and theft, the law proscribes sharp business practices, unfair political campaign-racial discrimination.

Civil-law notions of racial discrimination, uvii-law notions ot said that the basic guidelines are (a) whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; (b) whether the work depicts or in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law'; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. This is a definition, a workable one, as precise as such phrases as due process, the public interest, or reasonable man standards the law uses daily. Some writers insist such a definition will bring repression of Shakespeare or the Bible. TTiis view suggests there is no difference between art and trash and it says a good deal about their critical faculties and disdain for the publics common sense, not to mention their unfamiliarity with Shakespeare and the Bible. A Degrading Picture Pornography debases sex.

It reduces the protagonist to a chemical urge and his foil to a function or an organ. She becomes a chattel, a robot, a toy for a moments fun. As D. H. Lawrence wrote in Sex, Literature, -and Censorship: Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it The insult to the human body, the insult to a vital human relationship! Ugly and cheap they make the human nudity, ugly and degraded they make the sexual act, trivial and cheap and nasty.

Contrary to what its purveyors say, pornography is not telling the truth about sex. Just the opposite. It says: About sex there is nothing private, noble, or personal. It robs man of his dignity. Its message is: Man is garbage.

Obscenity presents a graphic, degrading picture of human life and invites the viewer to wallow in it. It plunges him into imaginative preoccupation with autoerotic fantasies wherein he entertains himself by violently andor sexually feeding, vicariously, on the helplessness or willing vulnerability of a no-longer-human, animal. Civil libertarians would have us believe the only real harm the law can guard against is direct, immediate, and physical. This unconscious positivism blinds them to other real harms psychological, attitudinal, moral that cannot be calibrated but do deeply affect individual lives and, collectively, can debase the citizenrys spiritual environment. To say tliat a book, magazine, or play never tVin hncira cniirfalinpe Jirp whptnpr National Council of Churches Takes Anti-Porno Stand Disturbed by the growing legiti-miation" of hard core sex films, the National Council of Churches has issued a four-point defensive plan for disgruntled patrons as well as a call for societal action against "the poison'of porno.

In general, the statement decries what is seen as a proliferation of porno in formerly "straight theaters and the open marketing by major distributors of soft core sex films. To confused patrons, the council offers some fundamental guidelines: 1. Dont trust film ads; 2. Dont expect more from the MPAA rating than it has been designed to provide; 3. Read the reviews; 4.

If by on-screen -sex, take pen in hand. "Letters should be sent to the theater, distiibutor, producer, and to the news media that profit from sexploitation The report continues, "The problem emerging today is the incursion of pornography into previously respectable movie theaters It used to be safe to go to a conventionally advertised film at the neighborhood Bijou but no longer. "Individuals and families and schools and churches must at least accept the burden of teaching discernment and of assisting in the development of valdes that do not compromise ones spiritual, moral, intellectual and even sexual integrity. The law guides future generations as they grow into its precursive patterns. The law expresses to the young their elders experienced judgment about right and wrong, a distillation of the mature communitys experience and history.

To remove all legal control of pornography is to teach the young that their elders do not know right from wrong; that we do not care how our young entertain-that is, educate themselves; that civilization and barbarism are the same. It is captious to object that some people will do it anyway, so that in moral matters, having to obtain 100 per cent compliance, the law should abdicate. This is also true of laws against shoplifting and speeding. The law expresses a standard that most, people respect. Without law, the marginal person would be adrift.

The fact that some people break the Ten Commandments is not a theological argument for their repeal. Nor is the fact that some people break laws that promote a basic moral standard a legal argument for their repeal. To the absurd assertion that laws proscribing the raunchiest of sex magazines will lead to censorship of Time and bonfires of National Geo-ing, graphic, I answer: This didnt happen in the fault in tort and "fiduciary obligations draw past, when there was more censorship. The Su-their substance from moral concepts. preme Court would not permit it.

The alternative The objection drawnlrom the Prohibition Era of anything goes is far more likely to lead to is not apt. The law should promote temperance, school-gate bookstores glutted with picture books not abstinence; decency, not sanctity. The law of homosexual rape and child torture, should notr-and certainly our laws against por- Some say, The best way to deal with pomog- nography do not try to make people be vir- raphy is to let it run its course; once sated, peo-tuous, but only make- it harder to be utterly vi- pla will get bored with it. This is somewhat like cious. saying the best way to deal with the filth in lake Society is more than an aggregate of individu- Erie is to let lake Erie fill up till it cant' take corrupted anyone is to say that reading or watch- als.

Besides the pomographers private right, any more. Why should parents have to let their ing a play never improved anyone. Irving Kristol there is the public right to a decent social envi- childrens moral environment get so corrupt that has pointed out what a curious position this is for ronment. As a parent of four little children, I jy comparison Sodom and Gomorrah resemble a college professors: Denying that education can have a Constitutional right-recognized by the Trappist monastery improve anyone, they deny the reason for-their Supreme Court since 192S-to train my children ownprofesJonai lives. to their higher obligations.

To rear teent chil- 71 issue is. May we draw a legal line PemoeraDhv educates It teaches- Human dren requires that public entertainments maga- sOTietehere. Or must we draw no lmes. Must we Fomograpny eaucaies. teacres.

numan 5nri derate everything, no matter how depraved, beings are mere animals the highest value is mes, roovies. i etc. not oe utterly maecent. DUKiics answer is We will dr4w a imrwriiate nleasure other DeoDle mav be used The pomographer arrogates the right to teach T' ine PUD1C answef we wiu araw a immediate pleasure otner people may De used line, because we have the nght to rear decent and then discarded. children in a decent society and children or no pomographers dictate the sociomoral environ- uuiuren or no, When mingled with violence, pornography de- of the children of nmom of decent adults have a nght to a decent society, picts the protagonist harming for the sake of And the public is nght.

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