EDITOR’S PAGE

Every once in a while an issue of D contains an unusually fiery mix of ideas that, in turn, invokes an inordinately impassioned reader response. Our June magazine was such an issue.

My ruminations on this page regarding the questionable image projected by Dallas women annoyed some, but soothed a good many others who admitted to having shared my perplexity. Chris Tucker’s “Parting Shot” in favor of gun control brought a few kudos from citizens concerned about the dangerous proliferation of handguns and more ugly salvos from the gun nuts (see Letters, page 12). Our cover story on DART was widely read and commented upon, mostly by people who found the article by Kit Bauman and Bill Bancroft to be tough, enlightening, and fair.

But it was a fifteen-line “Thumbs Down,” titled This is 7-Eleven Freedom?, that really drew the lightning. Many readers were galled by our criticism of the Southland Corporation for pulling Playboy magazines from its 7-Eleven stores. Our critics were adamant in their belief that Southland had acted with courage, not cowardice, as our editorial suggested. And we were warned that the issue of pornography would become even more volatile with the long-awaited publication of the report by the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, better known as the Meese Commission.

They were right. Since information in the commission report began to leak out late last spring (it was published in early July), tough questions concerning pornography have been debated in living rooms, on editorial pages, and on talk shows around the country. But as question leads to question, answers seem more elusive than ever.

At the core of the controversy is the question of whether pornography can be linked to a variety of social ills-from the degradation of women to the dissolution of the family to the escalation of sexual crimes. The commission heard a string of witnesses offer personal testimony linking porn and crime. For a majority of commissioners, the mostly anecdotal evidence (for instance, one ex-prostitute claimed her pimp made her watch porn movies to learn how to be a prostitute) was enough to conclude that “substantial exposure to sexually violent materials bears a causal relationship to antisocial acts of sexual violence.”

Most of us who were brought up to trust the opinion of a federally appointed panel would accept at face value, then, that Play-boy centerfolds have been proven to provoke abhorrent acts of violence on innocent women and children. Unfortunately, it’s not quite that clear cut.

A twenty-page dissent filed by two commissioners-behavioral scientist Dr. Judith Becker, who treats and evaluates victims and perpetrators of sexually violent crime, and Woman’s Day magazine editor Ellen Levine-offers a rare glimpse at the inner workings of a commission in which, according to Becker and Levine, “every member of the group brought suitcases full of prior bias.” The two reveal that members of the panel had trouble arriving at consensus definitions of such basic terms as pornography and antisocial behavior. They charge that the group was so severely restricted in time and money that the process of gathering fair and balanced data was crippled. Visual materials presented, according to the dissenters, were “heavily skewed to the very violent and extremely degrading” without an attempt to establish the proportion of such materials to pornography as a whole. According to magazine sales figures and skyrocketing profits from R- and X-rated video rentals, there are millions of apparently satisfied consumers of “pornography.” But very few came forward to defend its use.

The commission’s mandate was threefold: to assess the nature and scope of the pornography problem, to determine its relation to antisocial behavior, and to recommend to the attorney general ways of controlling the spread of pornography. It is the latter mission that has opened the panel to charges of censorship.

Any discussion of curbing the flow of ideas-even those that most of us find offensive and distasteful-leads to debate over First Amendment guarantees against censorship. “Deep down, everyone would like to censor something,” says Alan M. Dersho-witz, Harvard law professor who testified before the commission. “Many Jews believe that swastika-wearing Nazis should be prevented from marching through neighborhoods of concentration camp survivors. Some blacks would like to ban books, such as Little Black Sambo and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which present offensive racial stereotypes.” I, for one, wouldn’t protest the disappearance of violent films like Cobra. At least the sale of Playboy is restricted to adults, while these cinematic bloodbaths are designed to play to bulging theaters of impressionable youngsters. (I also see irreconcilable irony in the fact that the same president who abhors the degradation of human life he finds in pornography can openly court Sylvester Stallone, whose name is virtually synonymous with amoral slaughter.)

But like most Americans, I cherish the fact that ours is one of the few countries in which the freedom of others to say, think, read, and watch whatever they see fit is as valued today as it was when our forefathers wrote the Constitution. I agree with the Meese Commission and others who claim that some pornographic books and films cater to the basest elements of society. But is there not a distinction to be drawn between Playboy-which, in addition to photographs of nude women, offers fine journalism and prize-winning fiction-and the sleazy brand of sex-shop porn that makes unwilling victims of innocent children?

Many of the recommendations of the commission-as well as the recent anti-porn ordinance passed by the Dallas City Council-will make it more difficult for those operations to do business. Tougher penalties for those who violate obscenity laws and the segregation of porn peddlers are lawful and appropriate remedies. But I am bothered by government strong-arming that all but forces companies like Southland to acquiesce to a commission that, by its own admission, used “common sense” rather than valid research to buoy its bias. A highly questionable communique issued on U.S. Department of Justice letterhead was sent to Southland and other convenience store chains, drug stores, and publishing companies, threatening to “identify” them as distributors of porn. Who empowered the Meese panel to use its own loose definition of pornography to brand dozens of businesses as smut peddlers?

I don’t know where the majority of D readers stand on this difficult issue. But voters in Maine-hardly a liberal stronghold-recently rejected by a three-to-one margin a proposed statute that would ban pornography. What should the government do about pornography? Please let us hear from you.