Time to Speak Out Against Censors

I just signed and mailed a coupon that was included in a full-page ad by the American Booksellers Assn. in The Times last week.

The coupon reads: “I agree: Americans have the right to buy, stores have the right to sell, authors have the right to write and publishers have the right to publish Constitutionally protected material. Period.”

As an act of defiance, I suppose it didn’t amount to much. But it made me feel good. And I especially liked that “period” at the end.

If ever we had any doubts about the relative dangers of censorship versus those of artistic freedom, they should have been dissipated last week in Fullerton. There, an Annie Leibovitz photograph of a nude John Lennon--a photograph that appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine some 10 years ago--had been arbitrarily removed from an exhibit at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center because several members of the board of trustees did not think it “was in keeping with the theme of the show.”

It is instructive to note that next to the story about the photograph’s being removed was one in which officials of a Christian fundamentalist group called the American Family Assn. admitted having doctored 13 photographs sent to political and church leaders throughout the country. They did this, the officials said, to show the socially destructive effect of what they regard as pornography.

These self-righteous people see nothing wrong with blowing up details of much larger works and otherwise tampering with them in order to impose their narrow visions on the rest of us. And right in the forefront of this movement is our own Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Lomita), who similarly used a doctored picture for one of his own mailings. Rohrabacher defended his action to a Times reporter, insisting that the cropping did not distort the meaning of the work.

The one positive result of this kind of bludgeoning is that it has finally aroused enough anger in the art community to foment a potent counterrevolution. And it’s about time.

Collectors who had lent their works to the Muckenthaler, outraged over the board’s action, withdrew almost a third of the exhibit. Leibovitz fired off an angry statement that said, in part, that “artists and cultural institutions are anticipating controversy and backing off from something they think might be criticized. This is no way to run a culture or a free country.”

The fuss persuaded the board to restore the Lennon photo.

Still, the issue needs to be addressed on a much larger scale.

New York theater producer Joseph Papp set the tone when he turned down a sizable grant from the National Endowment for the Arts because he found the anti-obscenity strings unacceptable.

Leaders of the nation’s art community met in Cincinnati last week to plan a counterattack against the explosion of efforts to control artistic expression. The choice of Cincinnati is significant because some officials of that city pressed for the indictment of the Contemporary Arts Center and its director, Dennis Barrie, on obscenity charges for a display of work by the late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

The formal anti-pornography movement got considerable impetus some 40 years ago in Cincinnati with the creation of an organization called Citizens for Decent Literature. Its founder was a young lawyer named Charles H. Keating Jr.--who is probably more familiar as the central figure in the Lincoln Savings & Loan scandal. One wonders about priorities that deem “The Catcher in the Rye” in a high school library as more offensive than cheating thousands of elderly people out of their life savings by selling them worthless and unprotected bonds.

All of this reminds me rather vividly of a magazine piece I wrote in 1971 about the work of the Commission on Pornography and Obscenity, which had been created by President Lyndon B. Johnson but which did not complete its work until Richard M. Nixon was in office. Keating was the only commission member appointed by Nixon, and neither he nor Nixon agreed with certain of the commission’s findings: It supported tough laws against pornographic mailings and legally protecting minors against sexually oriented materials, but it also came down four-square in favor of “effective programs of public school sex education” and against laws interfering with the right of adults to read, obtain or view sexually explicit materials.

This outraged Nixon who said: “Pornography is to freedom of expression what anarchy is to liberty; as free men willingly restrain a measure of their freedom to prevent anarchy, so much we draw the line against pornography to protect freedom of expression,” he said.

I was sent around the country to interview commission members and other interested parties. One of the people I talked to was Nixon Administration member John Dean, who told me: “Don’t you think a President should set a moral tone for the nation? There certainly should be no surprise that this President has done so”--a prophetic statement in light of the events of a few years later.

The commission chairman was William Lockhart, dean of the University of Minnesota Law School. His opinion of sex education: “By not offering proper sex education, we’re driving our kids to pornography, peers and wrong information. Our obligation is to see that these normal drives and curiosities are satisfied by good education, which will lessen kids’ interest in clandestine stuff and thus offset its effects.

“All of our studies pointed to the same conclusion: that adults are not changed by exposure. Sure, there’s a danger that kids will see more of it if adult restrictions are lifted, but that simply can’t be a standard for what adults can see, because it would break down all communication processes. We can’t let a child’s standard dictate an adult standard. Advocates of a total ban--and I’m convinced they’re a minority--are people who say: ‘I don’t want to receive it myself, and I don’t want anyone else to receive it either.’ ”

At the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kan., commission member and psychiatrist Edward Greenwood told me: “Sex is a beautiful part of the human being, and the more parents can concentrate on love and kindness and honesty rather than on inhibition and fear, the more children can understand the normality of sex--and the less they need to be concerned about pornography.”

And Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas said: “I have consistently dissented in obscenity cases not because . . . I relish obscenity but because I think the First Amendment bars all kinds of censorship. What can be done to literature under the banner of obscenity can be done to other parts of the spectrum of ideas when party or majoritarian demands mount and propagandists start declaiming the law.”

Perhaps the most profound comment of all came from newspaper columnist Sidney Harris, who wrote during the flap over the commission’s report: “Our periodic outbursts of civic indignation at pornography are as foolish as they are futile. They actually, I believe, prevent us from examining the ethical roots of our social order by focusing undue attention on a few rotted branches, giving us a false sense of righteousness when we lop them off and permitting us to ignore the deeper decay.”

Lockhart told me a little story about a student in his adult Sunday School class. Lockhart had been excoriated by Nixon in the press that week, and the next Sunday, an 85-year-old woman “with fire in her eye” approached him after the class, gripped his hand firmly, and said: “Stay with it. I don’t want anyone telling me what to read.”

I don’t either. I’d rather take my chances on Robert Mapplethorpe and Annie Leibovitz than on Dana Rohrabacher or Charles Keating.