Is Smut Good for You?

When they were leaked to the press two months ago, some of the more libertarian conclusions of the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography enraged those who fear that smut is polluting U.S. morals. Released officially and in full last week, the report of the panel's majority gave critics more to complain about than their wildest fantasies could have conjured up. Not only is pornography guiltless as a cause of crime, delinquency, deviance or emotional disturbance, said the majority, it can actually strengthen conjugal ties.

Of the group's 18 members, twelve viewed pornography positively. As evidence, they cited one study in which "substantial proportions" of people exposed to erotica believed that the effect on them had been "socially desirable." Participants in experiments that exposed married couples to films and literature traditionally reserved for stag parties claimed that the experience "lowered inhibitions" between husband and wife, increased "willingness to experiment" and heightened "satisfaction with marital sex life."

Shielding Children. Finding no specific social ailment for which pornography could be indicted, the 622-page majority report concluded that there was "no warrant for continued governmental interference with the full freedom of adults to read, obtain or view" sexually explicit materials. The report went on to advocate repeal of all laws curbing adults' access to pornography. It proposed, however, that children be shielded from commercially distributed materials. Further, it urged that certain public displays of pictures be banned from "public thoroughfares." But, said the commission, sex education should be expanded and improved while research on pornography continues.

Behind the recommendations lay the belief that enforcement of antismut laws is impossible, time-wasting, and a "threat to the free communication of ideas among Americans." Only a minority of Americans, said the commission members, favor censorship; a majority cherish the right to decide individually what books to read and what films to see.

Chairman William B. Lockhart, dean of the University of Minnesota Law School, said that he had undertaken his study with no preconceived ideas and had not tried to "brainwash" the rest of the panel. It was clear that the minority was not intimidated. Charles Keating Jr., the only Nixon appointee on the commission--the rest, as the Administration had stressed, were named by Lyndon Johnson--branded the report "a declaration of moral bankruptcy," "the epitome of government-gone-berserk," and "a travesty preordained by the . . . prejudice of its chairman."

Dirty Magna Carta. Anyone with common sense, said Keating, knows intuitively that "one who wallows in filth is going to get dirty" and that "those who will spend millions of dollars to tell us otherwise must be malicious or misguided or both." Keating charged that the report "flouts the underlying opinions and desires of the great mass of the American people."

To Commission Members Winfrey C. Link and Morton A. Hill, both clergymen, the majority report was "a Magna Carta for the pornographer," fraudulent because it was based on "scanty and manipulated evidence." Pornography, they contended, is "loveless, degrades the human being and reduces him to the level of animal."

Not Our Baby. In the Administration and on Capitol Hill, response was swift. Spiro Agnew asserted that "it's not our baby," and promised that "as long as Richard Nixon is President, Main Street is not going to turn into Smut Alley." Senator Thomas Dodd's Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency prepared to summon commission members for some sharp questioning about the panel's mandate. In the opinion of some angry Congressmen, the investigators had ignored their assigned tasks of defining obscenity and pornography, determining its effect on children, and proposing federal antismut laws. Other Congressmen began filling the hopper with the restrictive bills that had been held up awaiting completion of the panel's work. Already reported by the House Judiciary Committee: an Administration bill to ban use of the mails for delivery of unsolicited smut. Whatever the merits of the report, one thing is sure: Congress is not about to make the U.S. the second country in the world, after Denmark, to lift all restrictions on pornography.

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