The battle over decency

By COREY TAULE

ctaule@postregister.com

John Harmer plans to use the tobacco approach to curb the spread of pornography. He wants to sue the pornographers into submission.

But Harmer, lieutenant governor of California under Gov. Ronald Reagan and co-founder of the anti-porn group the Lighted Candle Society, won't limit his efforts to the producers or porn. He plans to go after corporations that bring porn into people's lives, either through their cable television packages or when they rent a motel room to a consumer.

"We intend to go after them all," Harmer said.

Obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment, but anti-porn advocates have repeatedly failed in efforts to shut down those who produce and distribute adult content.

The difficulty has always been in defining the word. In 1973, the Supreme Court took a shot. Materials are obscene, the court ruled in Miller v. California, when:

n The average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work appeals to prurient interest.

n That work depicts or describes in a patently offensive way, measured by community standards, sexual conduct specifically defined by law.

n That a reasonable person would find that the work lacks serious artistic, literary, political or scientific value.

Harmer

The Supreme Court has in the past decade shot down two Congressional efforts to limit children's online access to porn.

In overturning the Children's Online Protection Act, the court ruled the bill's use of the Miller standard in defining material harmful to minors was unconstitutional. In other words, Congress can't use the old "community standards" definition with something like the Internet, which knows no borders.

That leads Harmer and others to believe that a new definition is needed. It's also left lawmakers unsure where to turn next.

"Courts often rule that attempts to regulate Internet pornography are overly broad and place an undue burden on tech industries," the CP80 Foundation, a Utah-based anti-porn group, wrote on its Web site. "As a result, Congress has become tentative about making any further attempts to directly address this issue."

But Harmer and Dr. Judith Reisman, who has studied the impact of graphic images on the brain for years, believe the latest science supports their argument that porn is a harmful and addictive substance.

For years, the tobacco industry did everything possible to keep the public from knowing its product would damage their health. But eventually, cigarettes were scientifically proven to be detrimental and the tobacco companies continue to pay the price -- $24 million a year to Idaho alone.

Harmer believes his group can now prove in court that porn harms people. Tobacco eats your lungs. Porn screws up your brain. Cause and effect.

"It is ultimately abusive to make it available to people and ignore the ramifications in the name of what, freedom of speech or freedom of expression," said Janet Allen, clinical director of Creekside Counseling in Idaho Falls.

Reisman

Civil libertarians, naturally, worry about where one draws the line. What is porn? How do we differentiate between porn and erotica? Is that even possible?

Stephen Yagielowicz, a California man who designed adult Web sites for a decade, said even within his industry the debate exists. Some, such as the Free Speech Coalition, a group formed in 1991 to fend off government attacks on the porn industry, will defend even the raunchiest porn: abuse, human feces and animals, the worst of the worst, as defined by the FBI.

"And I'm one of the guys going, 'No way,'" Yagielowicz said. "What they're doing is abusive to women. It's wrong."

But while Yagielowicz regrets the fervency of what he calls the "San Francisco element" of his industry, he's wary of further government intervention into what he sees as a person's right to choose.

Also, Yagielowicz argues that good intentions often go astray.

Many American pornographers, he said, have been driven out of the business because the federal government has begun enforcing a law that compels them to keep detailed records of adult performers.

One paperwork slip, Yagielowicz said, can result in huge fines and jail time.

But while the feds are impacting the supply, Yagielowicz said, they can do nothing about the demand. While Harmer and Reisman use the cigarette analogy, Yagielowicz brings up another example: prohibition. Making booze illegal didn't force people to quit drinking. It enriched the mobsters who provided black-market booze.

And where there is a demand, someone will step up and provide a product, in this case, foreign pornographers not in any way under the control of the U.S. government.

And foreign producers, Yagielowicz said, don't care what gets placed online, just so that they can make a buck off it.

"Congressional incompetency has done more harm than good," he said.

Harmer, however, isn't letting up.

The Lighted Candle Society has asked the Supreme Court to revisit its 1973 obscenity definition, saying that because they limit a person's ability to reason, pornographic images don't deserve the same constitutional protection as speech or writing.

"They are no longer speech," Reisman said. "In fact, they are subversive of speech."