Not Smut, Just Trash

The kindest thing that can be said about the 2,000-page report of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography is that it’s a joke. Not funny, but a joke. The commission’s scholarship is ludicrous, its conclusions unsupported, its methodology zany.

In 1984 President Reagan declared, “It’s time to stop pretending that extreme pornography is a victimless crime.” Then Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III, no fool, carefully selected an 11-member commission that spent a year and $500,000 chasing around the country, listening to crackpot testimony and reaching the conclusion that the President had ordained. The report is a miasma of misplaced morality and prudishness masquerading as social science.

Henry E. Hudson, the commission’s chairman, was a county prosecutor in Virginia who made a name for himself waging war on adult businesses there. Just the right person to head this group. In releasing the report on Tuesday, Hudson disclosed his real agenda. “I, as well as all the other commissioners, believe that sexual promiscuity . . . is not something that should be socially condoned,” he said.

The commission’s “hearings” were scenes out of a Fellini movie. The majority of witnesses were cops, victims of sexual abuse and spokesmen for anti-pornography groups, who told the commissioners lurid tales of harm that started with pornography. There were also field trips to red-light districts and private screenings of X-rated films.

The commission’s main conclusion--based on the flimsiest of evidence, none of it original--is that sexually explicit material, whether violent or not, can cause violence and other social harm. Even Hudson acknowledged that the case had not been proved. “If we relied on scientific data for every one of our findings, I’m afraid that all of our conclusions, or all of our work, would be inconclusive,” he said Tuesday.

Fortunately, two of the commissioners would not go along with this. Ellen Levine, editor of Women’s Day magazine, and Judith Becker, a Columbia University psychologist, said that “efforts to tease the current data into proof of a casual relationship” between pornography and sex crimes “cannot be accepted.” They said that no “self-respecting investigator” could reach these conclusions.

Nonetheless, the panel recommends 92 tough steps that governments and citizens should take to quell the plague of pornography. For his part, Meese assured everyone that “there will be no censorship . . . in violation of the First Amendment.” Meese wouldn’t know a First Amendment violation if it bit him.

The commission has already done harm. In February it sent letters to two dozen retail chains encompassing 10,000 stores that sold Playboy and Penthouse magazines, telling them that they had been identified as smut peddlers. The letter threatened to name the retailers in the commission’s final report. Many stores have withdrawn the magazines. Last week U.S. District Judge John Garrett Penn in Washington ruled that such a blacklist would be unconstitutional.

Now that this silly episode is over, it should be quickly forgotten. The commission’s report should be consigned to the trash.