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Introduction: Pornography: Against Love and Decency
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20066 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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12 / 1992 |
923 Words |
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There are times when human speech, otherwise rigorously protected by the First Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, crosses the line. At such times, it becomes a government-regulatable detriment to society.
Instances of such speech are well known: libel, slander, perjury, and false advertising, for example. It is widely agreed that these forms of speech have an adverse social effect and that it is proper for government to ban them and to prescribe penalties for them.
But what about hard-core pornography? Is it, too, a detriment to society on the order of libel, false advertising, and so on, and therefore deserving of government intervention to preserve society from its poisonous touch? Or is it legitimate speech that warrants the full protection of the First Amendment?
Often lost in this debate are two crucial points: (1) The courts have repeatedly found hard-core and child pornography illegal; and (2) social-science studies over the past ten years have discovered a strong link between consumption of pornography and harm to both psyche and society.
The position favoring porn is already widely known. Indeed, shibboleths such as "porn is a legal right," "a dirty book never hurt anyone" (the "victimless crime" idea), "if it's in my local video store, it must be legal," "it's innocent entertainment," and "you can't legislate morality" have become woven into the popular culture of the United States.
But the antipornography side, though it has won significant legal victories on the local, state, and federal levels, has largely received short shrift from the major media, which have boiled the debate down to an artificially simplistic face-off between censorship and free speech. While obscenity prosecutions have been dutifully noted on news pages and airwaves, the legal, psychological, and socio-cultural rationale against the widespread availability of prurient depictions seems to have been studiously ignored. This month, a series of articles strives to fill in some of the gaps that have been left by the media's failure to impartially inform the reading, listening, and viewing public about the illegal nature of hard-core pornography and recent clinical data that shed doubt on the alleged harmlessness of porn.
In "Pornography and the Law," H. Robert Showers shows how English common law and the U.S. Constitution were never interpreted as
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