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The Supreme Court and Pornography: A Forty-Year Perspective
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# : |
10372 |
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Section : |
Modern Thought
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1986 |
4,629 Words |
| Author
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Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk is the author of more than thirty books,
including The Conservative Mind, now available in its seventh
revised edition. |
Once upon a time, responsibility for restraining pornographic publications lay within the police powers of the several states. Not until after World War II did federal courts begin to intervene in such concerns, tending to restrain censors rather than pornographers. Soon the Supreme Court was handing down decisions that opened the sluices, in effect, to the flood of obscenity examined in the recent report of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography.
For four decades the Supreme Court has been backing and filling on such nasty matters. Chief Justice Earl Warren once declared that, should he find in his daughter's hands such foul materials as the pornography shown in evidence during one appeal to the Court, he would knock the pornographer down; nevertheless, as a justice he would not impair the pornographer's right to publish the trash.
The principal purpose of the law is to keep the peace, but when the question was pornography, Mr. Justice Warren seemed ready to return the country to the practice of private feud and personal vengeance--just what the law had grown up to avert. Over the years, the Supreme Court's major decisions on appeals of cases involving pornography have seemed no more consistent than Chief Justice Warren was.
Despite occasional expressions of distaste for dirty pictures and obscene phrases, most justices most of the time have been considerably more concerned for the integrity of the second provision of the First Amendment than for the public and private consequences of indecent publication. The course of the Supreme Court's intervention in the censorship of obscene publications and the reasoning or prejudices
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