Porn, Cable TV, and Censorship

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...In many ways more important than Miller, Slaton articulates the Court's rationale for its rejection of the argument that obscene films are constitutionally immune from state regulation if they are exhibited for consenting adults only...

...In one of the essays included in Mystery and Manners, having told the aspiring writers she is addressing that the kind of vision a writer needs is an anagogical one, Flannery O'Connor explains that this was one of the senses of Scripture the medieval exegete looked for, one "which had to do with the Divine Life and our participation in it...

...a woman writer in Millidgeville, Georgia as just plain common sense...

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...The laws of libel, copyright, and securities regulation are others which come readily to mind...

...10012 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 21 Carlin "Filthy Words" monologue one mid-afternoon using language usually associated with the gutter (although at the time...

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...That was conceded...

...One of the cases decided the same day as Miller was Paris Adult Theatre I v. Slaton...

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...Seventeen essays discuss virtually every aspect of crime, including the foundation of justice, psychiatric defense, criminaliration of sexual behavior, ethics of punishment and more...

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...In upholding the Commission's disciplinary measure against the station, the Court held that in their context (context being all important) the offending words occupied the same place in the hierarchy of First Amendment values as did legal obscenity, i.e., their value is clearly outweighed "by the social interest in order and morality...

...The next morning found cable company lawyers on the courthouse steps, waiting for its doors to open so they could rekindle the controversy in the courts...

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...As in the case of those instances of well-established censorship, it is to the courts we must turn to cut through the obfuscation thrown up against any form of censorship in the arts...

...ties Madison and the others at Philadelphia understood full well to be the traditional "republican morality" or "civic virtue," by which they meant, among other things, selfrestraint and piety...

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...Such a piece could be written, but this is not it...

...A writer must seek a vision of human life which sees the deeds of -creatures in relation to God...

...Now the last thing in the world we expect from Flannery O'Connor is a pious remark...

...Revisionist history from 1775 to 1970 documenting the patronage and scandals of the Post Office and its censorship of controversial political movements- Explores how the government has violated freedom of the press by restricting various types of mail...

...That the thought of Thomas Aquinas, gotten first-hand as well as through such intermediaries as Jacques Maritain, had a tremendous influence on Flannery O'Connor no sensitive reader could doubt...

...Absent a society possessing these qualities in some abundance, the Constitution he fa thered would fail...

...Slow your own aging while improving your current health, mental abilities, sexual function and pleasure...

...As to the second, the Court reaffirmed its earlier recognition of "the government's interest in the 'well-being of its youth' and in supporting 'parents' ' claim to authority in their households...

...Madison's famous passage in Number 55 speaks candidly of "a degree of depravity in manhood which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust...

...It would be wholly wrong to imagine that she took it as the purpose of literature to be edifying in some obvious sort of way...

...In other words, is there a level of radio programming not quite sinking to the level of legal obscenity (Miller definition) which admittedly would be protected by the First Amendment if it BEST SELLERS POLITICAL THEORY Bestiat, THE LAW,53.50 Bramsted & Mel...

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...and indistinct, but they are nonetheless real...

...15-95 Smith, NPIDSPELL.$13-95 Wade, WHEN YOU OWE THE IRS, $12-95 pope rbsckprice'hudcaw price appeared in print in a book, but which is immune from that protection because it comes over public airwaves and, as it were, is crammed down our ears...

...Many of these effects may be intangible...

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...These other quali David L. Wilkinson is Attorney General of the State of Utah...

...Further, many examples of universally approved censorship exist in the fabric of our law...

...More likely than not they would point to the opposition-and more particularly to the TV programming which this opposition benefits-as proof positive that they were dead right in taking the skeptical view of man they did...

...In June 1973 the U.S...

...Thus Morris Ernest, who as a renowned civil libertarian lawyer, once had defended Ulysses, recoiled from "sodomy on the stage or masturbation in the public arena," insisting (contrary to prior declamations) that he always had stated he "would hate to live in a world with utter freedom...

...Her quite Thomistic insistence, for example, on perception as cognitively primary for us...

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...In one such state (Utah), a cable TV programming decency act became law after the Legislature one evening overrode a gubernatorial veto amidst bitter public controversy...

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...A fortiori, her conception of the vision 22 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983...

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...The argument the Founders would feel more compelling is the more fundamental one that "the social interest in order and morality" outweighs any value found in much of what today invades the lives, assaults the "sensibilities of unwilling recipients," and helps form the values of adults and children alike...

...Justice Holmes's hypo thetical case of a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and thus causing a panic is only the most famous...

...The Court decided there is such a level of programming, in a decision with far-reaching implications for cable and other subscription television...

...and that such activity is entitled to no outpouring of constitutional protection...

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...A man who heard the broadcast while driving with his young son complained to the FCC...

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...To be sure, many thoughtful defenders of First Amendment and academic-freedom principles concede that neither the polity nor the arts benefit from the explicit portrayal of copulation on a movie screen...

...Although this was a method applied to biblical exegesis, it was also an attitude toward all creation, and a way of reading nature which included many possibilities, and I think it is this enlarged view of the human scene that the fiction writer has to cultivate if he is ever going to write stories that have any chance of becoming a permanent part of our literature...

...Supreme Court decided a landmark series of six cases on the subject of censoring obscenity...

...The most famous of these opinions, Miller v. California, formulated the technical (and highly complex) legal definition of obscenity ("hard-core pornography") which 20 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1983 could be proscribed without offending First Amendment principles...

...The Founders no doubt would agree with the unassailable argument that cable TV should be subject to the same content restrictions as the FCC imposes on commercial TV (and commercial radio as in Pacifica...

...This notion, indeed, was an essential part of the thinking of Rousseau, Madison, and such different Founders as the believer Samuel Adams and the skeptic Franklin...

...It brushed aside the fact that before the Carlin program there had been an advisory caution...

...And there would be other things...

...Anyone reading The Federalist papers today, for example, might well be struck by the way their authors matter-of-factly discuss the frailties of mankind...

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...The deepest sense of life is religious...

...A corollary of this notion was that the law should attempt to promote and maintain that good character, if only by safeguarding the efforts of other institutions, particularly the church and family, to promote and maintain it...

...To counterbalance this, Madison taught, certain "other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence" were essential to the character of those making up the society to which the Constitutioil was to be carefully tailored...

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...Quoting from a 1942 case, the Court reaffirmed that obscene utterances "are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality" [emphasis mine...

...In Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation (popu larly, "The Seven Dirty Words Case"), the issue was not whether society could regulate the broadcasting of material which was obscene...

...The issue was whether society, in the form of the FCC, could constitutionally regulate a radio broadcast admittedly not within the Miller definition of obscenity but nevertheless "indecent...

...Not surprisingly, public discourse on this subject-as filtered by local and national media-has been overwhelmingly weighted in favor of those opposing any form of regulation...

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...and the well nigh universal belief that good books, plays, and art lift the spirit, improve the mind, enrich the human personality, and develop character, can we then say that a state legislature may not act on the corollary assumption that commerce in obscene books, or public exhibitions focused on obscene conduct, have a tendency to exert a corrupting and debasing impact leading to antisocial behavior...

...Ralph Mclnerny FLANNERY O' CONNOR, HILLBILLY THOMIST Why the...

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...One wonders how the Founding Fathers would react to this discourse if, indeed, they would consider it such...

...Then, after recalling that the giant Cardozo once said all laws in Western civilization are "guided by a robust common sense," the Slaton opinion firmly and finally disposes of the there's-no-evidence argument: The sum of experience, including that of the past two decades, affords an ample basis for legislatures to conclude that a sensitive, key relationship of human existence, central to family life, community welfare, and the development of human personality, can be debased and distorted by crass commercial exploitation of sex...

...It is, I think, a great tribute to Thomism as a philosophy of perennial import that it should have struck Ralph Mclnerny is Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies at the University of Notre Dame...

...Nothing in the Constitution prohibits a State from reaching such a conclusion and acting on it legislatively simply because there is no conclusive evidence or empirical data...

...Perhaps particularly, her allusion to such things as the anagogical sense of Scripture, a notion she must have picked up from reading the Summa theologiae, something she said she did a bit of every...

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...A s an old Thomist-as opposed to a Neothomist-I have often thought that one could do a sort of cheerleader piece on Flannery O'Connor beginning, say, with her description of herself as a hillbilly Thomist and going on to the use she made of the notion of art as a habit, gleaned from Maritain...

...The notion that self-government would not work without citizens of good character, as...

...As to the first, the Court stated that in the case of patently offensive, indecent material being broadcast in the privacy of the home, the "individual's right to be left alone plainly outweighs the First Amendment rights of an intruder...

...After all, did the Fathers not state the obvious: the liberty which the Constitution so boldly sought to safeguard could exist only in an ordered and moral society...

...quaint as it seems to our generation, was widely known among the political thinkers who contributed to the birth of modern democracies...

...In the last few months, some halfdozen state legislatures have considered measures to regulate the excessively sexual content of some cable TV programming...

...For example, Jefferson and John Adams agreed in the 1780s that the French, as a people, were then too "depraved" to embark upon the perilous waters of self-government (a judgment which, in retrospect, only the most incurable romantic could question...

...Surely this is one of the most remarkable statements by a twentiethcentury author one could possibly imagine...

...In contrast to current political orthodoxy, which accepts the mechanics of democracy as a form of religious dogma for all peoples, our Founders prescribed republican selfgovernment rather discriminately...

...The Founders clearly recognized the need not only to attend to the mechanics of their new nation (the "new science of government," as they called it), but also, more importantly, to nurture its spirit-the "republican virtue" of its people...

...In 1978, the Court grappled with offensive radio-programming...

...To the Founders, the question would not be why the reasoning of Pacifica should not apply with equal force to cable and other subscription TV but why the process of reasoning from legal precedent should be necessary to censor material like the visual counterpart of Carlin's seven dirty words...

...In countering the hackneyed argument that no hard scientific evidence exists to demonstrate conclusively that exposure to obscene material adversely affects men or women or their society, the Court continued: If we accept the unprovable assumption that a complete education requires the reading of certain books...

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...The Founding Fathers, while roundly applauding Slaton and Pacifica, would probably have wondered why the Supreme Court had to decide them...

...Although by the middle of the Eighteenth Century there was a larger percentage of "non-professing Christians" in the American colonies than in any state in Western Europe, men tike Franklin, John Adams, and Jefferson were indifferent to religions, as the late Clinton Rossiter puts it, but not to religion...

...Because today so many leaders in the media and the universities react violently to any suggestion of censorship of any form, it is difficult for us to grasp that not many decades ago in our society, censorship in the arts ( as opposed to other kinds of censorship) was common and, in most circles, quite respectable...

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...This second reason the Supreme Court again affirmed recently in the "Kiddie-Porn" case...

...The Court in Slaton identified the legitimate state interests in "stem ming the tide of commercialized obscenity" as "the interest of the public in the quality of life and the total community environment, the tone of commerce in the great city centers and, possibly, the public safety itself...

...It is important to note that Miller, Slaton, and the other opinions issued ten years ago dealt with the sale or exhibition of obscene movies, books, magazines, or pictures only, and that none dealt with radio or television...

...in 1973, it also was finding its way onto some presidential tapes...

...Still, we should direct our attention to the truths shared and the way they cast light on O'Connor the writer rather than to their pedigree or to the vagaries of transmission...

...Noting that of all forms of communication it is broadcasting which has received the most limited First Amendment protection, the Court emphasized two reasons for this: (1) radio has-" established a uniquely pervasive presence" in American society, and (2) broadcasting is uniquely accessible to children of all ages...