Mahony Stirs Battle on Pornography : Archbishop Asks Catholics to Expand Targets of Social Activism

For the second time in two days, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony has told Southern California Roman Catholics to become social activists, urging them on Wednesday to get involved in a drive against pornography.

Mahony said he would “actively engage our people” by asking them to picket stores that sell Playboy, Penthouse and other sexually explicit literature, boycott products advertised on television that “demean human sexuality” and seek enforcement of zoning ordinances to eliminate adult theaters and bookstores.

The archbishop read an 800-word statement released by California’s 26 Catholic bishops that condemned pornography as a “perverse and sometimes vicious profanation” of the sacredness of human sexuality.

Mahony’s plan to fight pornography is characteristic of his emerging style of engaging parishioners in grass-roots community action. On Tuesday, he introduced a far-reaching program of social activism, involving thousands of volunteers, to help Latino Catholics. Today he will lead a group of Southland religious leaders in issuing a statement opposing a federal policy that threatens to evict thousands of illegal aliens from federally subsidized housing.

In the fight against pornography, Mahony said, he will personally visit the owners of stores that sell objectionable publications or producers of offensive television programs or movies to get them to clean up their operations.

Mahony said Playboy and Penthouse magazines were included in the attack on pornography because “people who start with Playboy are very quickly looking for more deviant” materials. “There is no such thing as safe and harmless pornography.”

Hugh Hefner, editor and publisher of Playboy, called Mahony’s statement “totally untrue.”

“Who can seriously believe that Playboy is pornographic?” Hefner exclaimed in a telephone interview. “It has never, anywhere, in 32 years of publication, been judged pornographic. If Playboy isn’t mainstream, what is? . . . We have been unfairly lumped together with pornographic publications. . . . The gap between Playboy and the other magazines is extraordinary.”

Hefner also criticized the so-called Meese report released on May 16 by the U.S. Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography, which the Catholic bishops cited to support their opposition to pornography.

The 211-page report urged a national campaign against sexually explicit material and said that most pornography is potentially harmful and can lead to violence. But a minority of three female commission members rejected the document’s key finding that linked most pornography to violence against women.

The statement by the California Catholic bishops cited “recent social science studies” that “document the damaging psychological and social effects of pornography.”

Pornography “creates a hunger for more violent, more deviant and more antisocial sexual materials,” the bishops said, “driving many who use it to engage in increasingly unusual and bizarre sex acts with a greater variety of partners. Child molesters, persons who commit incest, killers and rapists, often develop a fondness for pornography” and use it to arouse themselves before seeking out victims, the statement said.

“What you’ve got here is a very unholy alliance between church and state,” Hefner said. “What is reflected through the Meese commission is not social science. It is not the facts, but prejudiced views of a . . . right-wing group put together to carry on a series of public witch hunts.”

Hefner said it is “unfortunate” that “someone of Bishop Mahony’s stature has picked up in error perceptions that come from the fundamentalist right wing, channeled through right-wing members of the commission.”

The bishops’ action, Hefner said, is a return towards the “religious censorship” of movies that the Catholic Church exercised in the 1930s and a “very, very clear step towards (establishment of) a theocracy. . . . Pornography now is defined as anything sexual that somebody doesn’t approve of.”

Group Sues Meese

Playboy Enterprises, whose flagship publication has a circulation of 4.1 million, sued Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III and the 11-member pornography commission on the day its report was released. The suit, joined by the American Bookseller’s Assn. and a periodical distributors’ group, asks that the commission be kept from making public a “blacklist” letter that it alleges was sent by the commission to major drug and convenience store chains, advising them that they had been involved in the “sale or distribution” of “pornography.”

After the letter was sent out, the suit says, the parent company of the nation’s 7-Eleven chain announced that its 4,500 outlets would discontinue the sale of Playboy, Penthouse and Forum magazines after the May issues.

In their statement, the California bishops said they support the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of expression. But they said that they agree with Chief Justice Warren Burger’s opinion in a prominent 1973 case rejecting the notion that hard-core pornography is protected by the First Amendment.

Mahony said he is asking the three-county Archdiocese of Los Angeles to take a “strong and aggressive stance” against obscenity in films, magazines, books and on television because of the proliferation of pornography, which he said is an $8-billion business in Los Angeles alone.

‘Sick and Tired’

“Families and parents are getting sick and tired of the . . . increasingly deviant materials available to children,” Mahony said at a press conference in Los Angeles announcing the bishops’ statement. It was also read at a news conference in Sacramento by Archbishop John R. Quinn, president of the California Catholic Conference.

Mahony said that he and the other California bishops do not plan to join forces with fundamentalist religious leaders such as Jerry Falwell, but will work against pornography with agencies such as Morality in Media and the National Federation for Decency.

In addition to adult bookstores and theaters that run sexually explicit films, the archbishop singled out cable television “sitcom” programs “that make fun of basic family life and human sexuality” as targets for protest. He did not name any specific programs, but said he will use the diocesan newspaper to alert church members to programs whose sponsors should be boycotted.