California Cleans

"If anyone showed that book to my daughters, I'd have strangled him with my own hands."

--Chief Justice Earl Warren,

commenting out of court on a

pornographic book.

Despite the fact that he led the U.S. Supreme Court to an unprecedented expansion of individual liberties, Earl Warren remained troubled by obscenity, a problem that his court wrestled with but did not solve. As pornography has proliferated in ever-ranker forms, an increasing number of people are demanding a return to some kind of censorship. Nowhere have they made this demand more insistently than in Warren's home state of California, where Sunset Strip in Hollywood flaunts all sorts of sex shows, with total nudity advertised on every block to the point of total boredom, and factory-like publishing firms flooding the rest of the country with glossy porno magazines and books. In a whirlwind campaign of only 17 days, sponsors of an antismut initiative gathered some 535,000 signatures. On Nov. 7, Californians will either vote into law or reject what, in the words of its backers, is the "most specific obscenity law ever devised."

That is probably not much of an exaggeration. As drafted by State Senator John Harmer, a Mormon and a Republican, Proposition 18 leaves no doubt as to what is considered obscene: any display in public of adult genitals, buttocks or female nipples; any explicit show of "sexual excitement," "sexual conduct" or "sadomasochistic abuse." Obscene words may not be used if they are descriptive, only if they are exclamations of shock or anger. Thus the dialogue of Andy Warhol movies would be forbidden, but George C. Scott could get away with his expletives in Patton.

Printed matter without pictures is left alone, but even that is vulnerable to attack. As sweeping as the initiative is, it also allows local communities to add to the law if they want to. Private citizens, if they are so inclined, are permitted to make citizen's arrests of pornographers and confiscate materials, though they face the risk of a civil suit if they go too far. An aide to Senator Harmer explains: "As a practical matter, we think the initiative covers everything. But we want to protect people five or ten years down the line. We don't know what the creative pornographers might think up."

Not just pornographers are objecting to the proposition. Most newspaper and TV stations are against it; they make the point that just about any publication could be banned or confiscated these days under the harsh terms of the proposed law. One innocent nipple could cost a publisher dearly. Theater owners and movie distributors have mounted a campaign to defeat the initiative. Even such stalwarts as John Wayne have been enlisted to appear on TV spots. Certainly no pornography addict, Wayne feels that the proposition would ban the good with the bad, including his own film True Grit. On the other side, law-enforcement agencies are supporting the initiative. So is Mr. Clean, Pat Boone, who will host a gala at Disneyland later this month to raise money for the proposition.

Jail. At the moment, it does not seem very likely to pass. But even if it fails, the proposition has to be taken seriously. It is a challenge to the laws of the land, which have made an incomprehensible muddle of obscenity. It rejects the notion enunciated by Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and used as guidelines by lower courts that material should not be censored unless it is "utterly without redeeming social value." This doctrine, critics argue, permits just about anything.

The Supreme Court has traditionally taken the position that it does not want to become the arbiter of the nation's morals. Justice Potter Stewart said that he could not define hard-core pornography, "but I know it when I see it." This makes good sense but not necessarily good law. If the Supreme Court does not act, lesser bodies will. One debatable notion is to let local communities cope with the problem, and proponents of local option argue that this might actually be a more liberal solution than trying to devise a single national standard that might have to accommodate the most conservative communities. On the other hand, if local governments begin to make their own rules about what constitutes pornography, nobody will know what he can say or exhibit from one city to the next. What might win a writer, an artist, an entertainer, a pornographer applause in Chicago might land him in jail in Racine.

In one way or another, the Supreme Court will have to face up to the issue, because several obscenity cases are awaiting its deliberation. One possibility: not an outright ban on pornography but an attempt to isolate it from the public that does not care for it. Pornographic material can be packaged, labeled and hidden away for those adults who seek it out. In particular, if it can be kept out of the reach of children, much of the public will be relieved. A more desirable, if far more difficult, way would be for the Supreme Court to find a new definition of obscenity that would strengthen the laws--not enough to satisfy the most outraged citizen and infringe free speech, but enough to satisfy the widespread feeling that something must be done about pornography's pandemic spread.

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