Tolerance of Pornography

The only real solution to the problem that Father Wood speaks of is to teach and practice the unification of spiritual and sexual energy--something that is outside the orthodoxy of most religions, including Christianity.

There is no solution in setting up a legal structure to enforce the censorship of pornography. If the legal approach centers on the question of the value of the alleged pornographic material, then who has the right to decide on whether value is present--or whether enough value is present?

To decide on value is a value judgment. It is inherently a subjective determination incompatible with any objective legal standard requiring facts and circumstances of a defined nature. Who is to say that some piece of “obvious smut” necessarily has no value for someone else? James Joyce was once banned for being smutty, not to mention Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence.

Does Father Wood want to institutionalize a board of smut experts who will spend their professional lives reviewing alleged smut and passing judgment on it in order to protect the rest of us from it?

Father Wood is saying that in the presence of pornographic material, people have no freedom and must submit to the evil acts suggested by that material. What he is calling for is the denial of the free marketplace of ideas, a vote of no confidence in the freedom of choice of the consumer, and return to censorship that echoes the Catholic system of banning theocratically objectionable literature.

PHILIP EVERSOUL

Los Angeles