Pornography Ruling Provokes Mixed Response

If Judge David V. Kenyon was looking for an example of the jumbled morals that make up Los Angeles, he might have walked over to Hollywood and Cahuenga boulevards Wednesday.

On Cahuenga, inside the darkly lit Casanova’s Adult World, he could have talked to the middle-aged woman who sat behind a high glass partition selling pornographic movies and plastic sex aids.

“It’s just a business,” she said, laconically. Beside her was a shelf of adult videos. Behind her was a television monitor that showed a couple in passionate embrace. It wasn’t a porno movie. It was “All My Children,” the TV soap.

A couple hundred feet away on Hollywood Boulevard, strewn with girls on roller skates, boys on skateboards and homeless men on their last legs, Kenyon could have talked to another clerk, Geraldine Lucas, who for the last six years has staffed a quiet Christian Science reading room that lies between the now-obscure stars of Ginny Simms and Alma Rubens on the Walk of Fame.

‘Out of Hand’

“It’s out of hand. The whole thing is out of hand,” Lucas said. “It’s so terrible. It’s been 15 years since I ever looked at a movie. I’d have to know all about it before I walked in.”

In dismissing racketeering charges Wednesday in U.S. District Court against a Woodland Hills video distributor accused of dealing in obscene videotapes, Kenyon concluded that he could not use the traditional litmus test of “community standards” to judge the tapes. The problem, he said, was that he found it impossible to determine whether a single moral standard could be applied to an area as sprawling and diverse as Los Angeles because he did not have “positive evidence of what the entire community believes.”

Since its historic 1973 ruling on obscenity, the Supreme Court has assumed that community standards are discernible. But then, nothing in Los Angeles is easily discernible.

Community Standard Question

The question of whether there is a community standard that can be used to judge obscenity bumps uncomfortably into the long-held complaint that there is no community here--period.

“There’s nothing everybody here has in common. Except sunshine,” said James O’Toole, a Venice resident who is a professor of management at USC.

“There are no prevailing community standards,” he said. “Of all the cities I’ve ever visited, you get less a sense of community here, probably even less than a place like New York, where at least they’re bound together by common pain and suffering of living together.”

Across town in Watts, Alice Harris, founder of a parents group that offers counseling to teen-age mothers and shelter for the homeless, insisted that “there is a moral standard.”

“If you don’t set one, you won’t get anyplace,” she said. “That’s basically what keeps us alive in the Watts area. Without them we wouldn’t survive.

“We should have something to say about whether or not a film can be shown. I find myself working with parents saying that they have to put the small children to bed at a certain time because something is coming on TV they don’t want them to see.”

A world apart from Watts, in the affluent West San Fernando Valley community of Calabasas, Bob Bleiweiss was fuming the same fumes.

Bleiweiss was in a hurry Wednesday. He had to get to a funeral. He was not familiar with the specifics of Kenyon’s ruling. Bleiweiss had not been in court, and had not heard Kenyon’s remarks from the bench, in which the judge had said, in effect, that his hands were tied--that he had to acquit the pornographic film distributor.

Yet Bleiweiss, who was once head of the Brandeis-Bardin Institute of Jewish Studies in Simi Valley and who still teaches religious classes on Saturdays, was convinced that no circumstance, no rationalization, could justify the societal harm that he inferred had been done by Kenyon’s ruling.

“I think the first sign of a society’s moral disintegration is when people are unable to determine for themselves what is moral and what is not moral,” he said. “The sign of civilization, the single most important sign, is to say this is beyond the pale and we draw the line here or we draw the line there.

“When a society cannot say that something so grossly evil is beyond the pale, that society is in deep yogurt.

“Are there standards in Los Angeles?” he asked rhetorically. “Absolutely. I can tell you what the vast majority of people would agree to. You shouldn’t steal, you shouldn’t kill, you shouldn’t envy your neighbor’s wife. Have you heard these before? I remember when these were called the Ten Commandments. Now they’re the Ten Suggestions.”