Anyone who knows me knows that I am passionately opposed to obscenity laws as a means of censoring any erotic content that is produced solely by consenting adults and soley for consenting adults. I’ve always argued that enforcing existing obscenity laws is comparable to posting and enforcing speed limit signs that display “Guess!” rather than a clearly defined numerical speed limit; why doesn’t the government just tell us what is and what isn’t illegal so that we can all be certain that we’re staying on the right side of the law? Frankly there’s just no justification for obscenity laws – they are nothing more than a clever work-around of the otherwise constitutionally protected right to Free Speech..Anyone who knows me knows that I am passionately opposed to obscenity laws as a means of censoring any erotic content that is produced solely by consenting adults and soley for consenting adults. I’ve always argued that enforcing existing obscenity laws is comparable to posting and enforcing speed limit signs that display “Guess!” rather than a clearly defined numerical speed limit; why doesn’t the government just tell us what is and what isn’t illegal so that we can all be certain that we’re staying on the right side of the law? Frankly there’s just no justification for obscenity laws – they are nothing more than a clever work-around of the otherwise constitutionally protected right to Free Speech.

Most of us who got into the porn business after the mainstream’s arrival to the Internet have never known a day in this business when the federal government has focused a large portion of its resources on attacking adult entertainment. That’s generally because by the time we arrived, Bill Clinton was in office, and reports now indicate that he wasn’t interested in prosecuting adult companies (more on this later), preferring to save his resources for attacking child porn, and rightly so. Before President Clinton, however, President Reagan and President Bush I used the United States Justice Department to enact relentless attacks on the adult video industry. Many of the government’s cases against pornographers were won, some were lost – but millions were spent on legal fees, and a good number of adult entertainment entrepreneurs spent time in jail for producing erotica that would generally be considered “plain vanilla” hardcore by today’s modern standards. This historical battle between Republican administrations and the pornography business is all a matter of public record – it happened, and it happened recently.

Of course one could always excuse the reason for the government’s past obscenity battles as a “morality” struggle – in other words, that the government was merely looking out for the moral fiber of the nation, and without that guidance us sinful, weak peasants would barely be able to control our evil impulses. If you asked the government why it prosecutes adult entertainment companies when it does, it would no doubt spew out a wonderfully moral-sounding speech about decency, protecting minors from harm, controlling criminal elements that are attracted to porn, protecting women from degradation – fine upstanding stuff like that. Of course if you believe that these are the true intentions behind the government’s prosecution of adult entertainment then you probably also believe that George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election fair and square. The anti-porn movement is merely a business, like any other business, but more on that later. First, a brief look at a small portion of the history of obscenity prosecutions in America, and a few of the key players for the bad guys.

EDWIN MEESE

For those of us who are familiar with the government’s last major crackdown on mainstream porn during the Reagan and Bush I administrations, the name Ed Meese is probably a familiar one. Meese was Reagan’s Attorney General, a job now held by the infamous John Ashcroft – Meese made it his personal mission to attack the adult entertainment business with the intention of wiping it out completely. Whether Meese was genuinely opposed to porn or just doing the bidding of his superior is unknown, but it’s a safe bet that Meese was one of the few true believers in the anti-porn crusade.

THE PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION ON OBSCENITY AND PORNOGRAPHY

Unfortunately for Meese and his anti-pornography crusaders, facts and reason weren’t on their side. Back before Meese began his porn crusade, in the year 1967, Congress enacted the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography – the Commission itself was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat. The following year, four subcommittees were formed, one of which was designed to get to the bottom of any potential harmful effects of human exposure to pornography. The commission spent approximately $2 million dollars summarizing previously-existing research and conducting its own research into the porn effect. It included eighty independent scientific studies that employed scientists both in the United States and in other countries; The Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography remains today the most thorough independent scientific effort ever undertaken as to the possible harmful effects of pornography.

The Presidential Commission reported its findings years later during the Nixon administration. It found:

No casual relationship between exposure to pornography and an increased likelihood of criminal behavior.

No empirical evidence that exposure to pornography is harmful to minors, but stated that there was not enough evidence to conclude with confidence either way since the experiments necessary to reach a conclusion would require underage participants and would therefore be considered unethical.

No link between pornography and an increase in rape – in fact, the Presidential Commission noted a decrease in crime in Kopenhagen after pornography was legalized there. (As a side note, and this was not included in the Commission’s report, similar subsequent studies in Japan have reached the conclusion that the legalization of pornography decreased rape crimes in that country.)

Rapists generally consume less pornography than non-rapists; rapists tend to have sexually repressive parents; rapists generally condemn premarital sex; rapists often have a very poor understanding of human sexuality.

Pornography consumers are not sexually repressed but are sexually liberal; they are generally comfortable with premarital sex, and have a much more accepting attitude towards homosexuals.

Based on these findings and others, the Presidential Commission recommended the removing of national laws that attacked the distribution of pornography. President Nixon, a Republican with a strongly conservative political base, immediately moved to bury the report. He started by demanding his anti-porn activists attach a “minority opinion” to the Presidential Commission’s findings. The minority opinion was authored by three individuals, including Morality in Media founder Father Morton A. Hill, who was a Catholic priest and devout pornography opponent, and Charles Keating, who was founder of Citizens for Decent Literature, which today is known as the National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families. More on Keating later. The minority opinion predictably found, not through scientific research but through the opinions of its authors, that pornography was indeed harmful – surprise, surprise!

NIXON FREAKS OUT

Nixon himself remained unmoved by the Presidential Commission’s scientific-based findings, claiming, “So long as I am in the White House there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life … I totally reject this report.” Of course shortly after making these statements Nixon resigned in shame over the Watergate scandal – draw your own conclusions as to his commitment to morality and ethical behavior. Despite Nixon’s departure, the results of the Presidential Commission had been essentially forgotten.

THE MEESE REPORT

Fast-forward to 1984: the Democrats had again been banished from the White House due to the wisdom of American voters, and President Ronald Reagan had Edwin Meese as his Attorney General of the United States – the same job now being held by the infamous religious zealot, John Ashcroft. Meese was a staunch opponent of pornography, as was Reagan, and his Justice Department quickly moved to undo the damage done to the anti-pornography business by the Presidential Commission. Their solution was the creative and infamous Meese Report, a new yet entirely fictional report on the effects of pornography which promised “new evidence that correlates porn and antisocial behavior.”

Unlike the previous Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, the Meese Report didn’t bother with troublesome scientific studies designed to produce facts – instead, the Meese Report relied solely on the opinions and testimonies of anti-pornography activists. Sound too absurd to be true? Welcome to the wonderful world of conservative politics! Six out of the eleven members appointed to produce the Meese Report had already been known as passionate anti-porn crusaders. The Meese Report didn’t pay for any scientific research and was poorly funded itself. When pressed, the members of this sham admitted that their conclusions weren’t based on scientific study but rather on “common sense, personal insights and intuition.” Comically, those were the same arguments used by our ancestors to justify their beliefs that the Earth was flat.

Would you be shocked to lean that the Meese Report concluded that pornography is indeed harmful to adults and causes an increase in crime? Unfortunately many people took the Meese Report seriously, and it was often cited by pornography opponents as justification for attacking adult entertainment. The Republicans had crafted the piece of anti-porn propaganda that they had set out to craft – mission accomplished magically through creative fiction.

In the wake of the Meese Report, the United States Justice Department, under the guidance of Attorney General Meese, opened the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Department – also known as the “God Squad” in First Amendment circles. Its goal? Why, the eradication of adult pornography from the America, of course. Obviously it has thus far failed, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t cause a lot of misery while trying.

JAILBIRD KEATING: A CONVICTED FELON

Remember Charles Keating, one of the authors of the “minority opinion” that was attached to the Presidential Commission’s findings at the insistence of President Nixon? Founder of that wonderful “family values” group demanding “decency” in America? He’s currently serving out a prison sentence for his involvement in the Lincoln Savings and Loan scandal – the same scandal that George W. Bush’s brother Neil was immersed in, although Neil never served prison time himself. Again, draw your own conclusions about how Neil Bush might have escaped punishment. So far for the anti-porn movement we have Nixon and Keating both involved with illegal activity – so is this an organized crime unit? It certainly seems like the “moral” right has assembled quite a cast of characters here. Yet I have yet to reveal the God Squad’s secret weapon. We’ll get to know him next.

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK…

Connor Young is Editor in Chief of YNOT News.