Obscenity & Morals

Is pornography a mounting menace to U.S. youth? Church bodies and guardian groups, including the Roman Catholic National Organization for Decent Literature, the Protestant Churchmen's Committee for Decent Publications, and others, cite alarming statistics and urge various actions ranging from newsstand boycotts to congressional legislation. In last week's Christian Century, the managing director of the American Book Publishers Council, Unitarian Dan Lacy, presents a cool and collected analysis of a situation that normally collects more heat than light.

Author Lacy sees little reason to believe that there has been much relative growth in "hard-core," out-and-out pornography (sold under the counter), and is skeptical of some of the statistics bandied about semipornographic publications (sold openly). If the often-mentioned $1 billion figure were accurate, says Lacy, "every family in America would be spending on the average about $20 a year on pornography." Psychiatrists, sociologists and experts on juvenile delinquency disagree, too, on the effects of pornography on the young--"a very few even see possible indirect benefits from obscene materials that can divert into fantasy certain drives that might otherwise be expressed in anti-social acts."

Any group is within its rights to protest against a book, magazine or film, says Lacy, provided it limits itself to protesting and does not attempt coercion without due process of law, such as by boycott or the circulation of a blacklist under the "color of authority" provided by an attorney general or police official. Such extralegal activities inevitably open the door for doctrinal and political pressures: "The Legion of Decency warns against a film like Bette Davis' Storm Center because its heroine is a librarian who refuses to remove a Communist book from the shelves. Films like The Miracle or Martin Luther are banned or attacked for reasons that seem purely doctrinal."

More important than this danger of doctrinal coercion is the fact, according to Lacy, that most of the reform groups warn against pornography but do little or nothing to bring about good reading. Whatever corrupts youth, "it is not the reading of words by John O'Hara or D. H. Lawrence or Vladimir Nabokov or, for that matter, Grace Metalious." In fact, it is the youngsters' very "inability to do sustained reading, frustrating the youth at school and cutting off a major avenue of escape from the limits of what is usually a mean and sordid environment, that tends to breed rebellious delinquency." Concludes Lacy: "Life itself is often shocking, beset with temptation, surrounded with sordidness . . . Frightened ignorance is no good preparation" to meet these. But a youngster who has been prepared for these shocks with honesty will have "little to fear from his encounter with the pages of any book."

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