Let’s Get Rid of the Porn Vermin : Courts Are Clear: Law Has a Right to Protect Public Morality

Sure. You can legislate morality. Most American citizens believe in, even if we do not practice, the Ten Commandments. Quite a bit of our legislation has been written from those stone tablets. We don’t quibble with what they say about murder, theft or lying. Sex-related offenses seem to be the major problem area.

Why stop pornography? Why interfere with sex on the stage, in the street, in the media? On and on . . . .

There is no legal reason for the debate. The courts in the United States are not confused. They are quite clear: For the public good, the law has a right to protect public morality. Intrinsic evil is present in obscenity, the courts reason. It is not necessary to show cause and effect. The common good permits the common sense of society to stop the pornographer. Thus it has been since our Founding Fathers and, before them, in English common law. So, too, in “natural law.”

That is where the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography has come down on the issue. The bottom line of its outstanding report is that the public morality is being assaulted by the pornographers in unprecedented ways and quantity. It must stop before the basic fabric of our society is shredded. Because we can no longer tie the merchants of filth to a millstone and toss them into the sea as they deserve, the report modestly suggests law enforcement against a background of public awareness.

A bungling court has temporarily thwarted the commission’s attempt to exercise its constitutional prerogative of free speech and to alert America to the porn peddlers’ identity. However, the facts will come out. The commission report will educate. We can expect the results to be vigorous enforcement of laws against obscenity. Rough times are ahead for the greed-ridden pornographers who pervert the minds, hearts and souls of our people, especially our children, to fill their Judas purses.

Critics of the report question whether obscenity can be proved to have an effect contrary to the public good. Good grief! What a preposterous suggestion! Pornography may be “educational,” yet utterly without redeeming social value.

Obscenity clearly affects society, for ideas rule the world. Civilization, or the lack of it, at any given period in history is molded from the transmission of ideas. Certainly there is a cause and effect. Whence venereal disease in epidemic proportion. Whence AIDS, rape, violence against women. Whence family dissolution. There are none so blind as those who will not see. Anyone with common sense can trace the floodtide of these problems in the United States to the unprecedented inundation of America by the river of filth pouring from the presses and cameras of the pornographers.

The sale of live sex, printed and filmed sex has produced enormous profits for the filth merchant. Society has suffered enormous damage, especially in our youth. A horrible effect, doom, we now dare hope to be corrected.

America has so much to love and to treasure. We need to protect it. To protect our values. Sometimes even in a free society it becomes necessary to stop excesses. The attorney general’s commission demonstrated that the time has come for the pornography industry to be stopped. To bring America back to moral health we need now to vomit these vermin out and let them roil down the gutters to the sewers where they belong with their evil merchandise.

God bless the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography. Go ahead. Legislate morality. Then enforce the laws.