Lawmakers Urged to Legislate Against Porn Proliferation

Pornographers have profited from the access that the Internet provides into the home, workplace and school, said Heritage Foundation fellow Jill Manning. People of all ages and circumstances have been “impacted in new and often devastating ways,” she said. Research show countless systemic effects of online porn, she argued. “What’s most disturbing is that the first Internet generation has not yet reached full maturity,” so porn’s full effect isn’t known, Manning said.

The Brigham Young U. sociologist linked porn use to 6 trends: Increased marital distress, reduced intimacy, infidelity, an appetite for more graphic content, devaluation of monogamy and marriage, and compulsive and addictive behavior. Children suffer when parents use porn, she told lawmakers. Problems include reduced parental time and attention, increased risk of kids encountering explicit material and increased risk of parental separation and divorce, Manning said.

Direct exposure to online porn can leave children with lasting negative or traumatic emotional responses, including an inclination to early sexual encounters and assumptions that marriage and family life are unattractive, Manning said. She urged creation of campaigns on the risks of porn use, akin to those against smoking and drug use.

In researching her book, Pornified, former Time magazine reporter Pamela Paul said, she interviewed men who told her they wasted countless hours watching porn and became callous to images of sexual acts they previously found offensive, like genital torture and bestiality. Paul said byproducts of porn include harm to sex lives, relationships and work. Some men even lost their jobs, spouses and children, she said. Many men consider their porn use private but it puts them at a distance from wives and girlfriends, she said: “It’s a whole new epidemic of people using porn to disconnect from their loved ones.” Anyone who cares about this issue can agree, regardless of politics or ideology, that “it wasn’t like this when we were kids,” Paul said. Neither Manning nor Paul provided data from rigorous study or citations to it.

Technical solutions and user empowerment can boost control over what appears on a person’s PC, said Center for Democracy & Technology Senior Consultant Leslie Harris. A recent National Academies study and related data show that the most effective way to protect children online is these means, not law and regulation, she said. “Technology can be part of the solution, not just part of the problem,” Harris said.

A new challenge has arisen from high-tech convergence as well, she said. The Internet, mp3 players, cellphones and other devices encourage the spread of cross-platform content. The good news is that blocking and filtering tools also are evolving, Harris said.

Senators weren’t shy with their opinions on the topic. Sen. Brownback (R-Kan.) called porn “morally repugnant and offensive.” He blamed courts’ laxity for a situation that taxes “our ability to protect our families and our children from gratuitous pornographic images.” Earlier this year, the U.S. Dist. Court, Pittsburgh threw out a 10-count indictment against purveyors of what Brownback called “the vilest sort of pornography,” depicting rape, torture and murder. In contrast to the federal judiciary, the Justice Dept. is fighting to protect families from porn, he said. During his confirmation hearings, Attorney Gen. Alberto Gonzales said he'd make prosecution of obscenity statute violators a priority.

Sen. Feingold (D-Wis.) said if Congress takes on porn, it must avoid previous errors. “We must do all we can to end the victimization of children by child pornographers and to keep children from viewing inappropriate materials, but we must also ensure that any law Congress passes to address these problems will withstand First Amendment scrutiny,” he said. Children deserve laws that work and last, not fail in court, Feingold said: “It is an enormous waste of time and resources to pass an unconstitutional law, and at the end of the day it does nothing to address the serious problems we are attempting to solve.”

Reining in pornography may not demand new laws but devoting more money and resources to local, state and federal prosecutorial efforts, U. of Richmond Law School Dean Rodney Smolla said. Regulators and law enforcement officials already can pursue smutmongers whose wares aren’t protected under Miller v Cal., the 1973 Supreme Court case that set the standard for protected obscenity under the First Amendment.

In Miller, the high court set 3 criteria for prosecution: (1) The average person must find the work as a whole appeals to prurient interests. (2) The work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable state law. (3) The work, as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. “Vast quantities” of Internet porn and material on cable and satellite TV could be prosecuted under Miller, Smolla said.

Congress and the states should encourage study of porn’s effect on those exposed to it and the govt. should encourage development of tools to protect Internet users, National Law Center for Children and Families Exec. Dir. Richard Whidden said. Legislation that would let parents hold pornography distributors responsible for harm to children is also part of the solution, he said. Another measure worth be keeping sex material from sexual predators “who use that to groom victims for abuse,” Whidden said.

At first blush, Smolla said such measures could be immune to opponents’ attacks if the content addressed isn’t constitutionally protected. But if the material in question is soft-core porn or other lawful content, “you'd have major First Amendment difficulties, similar to attempts to go after a rap group because an explicit lyric causes someone to engage in a drive by shooting,” he said. Courts have been almost entirely unwilling to accept similar attempts, he said.

The hearing clearly indicated that Sen. Brownback “wants to do something and he’s just not sure what,” ACLU Legislative Counsel Marv Johnson told us: “The closest thing to a germination of an idea is to provide some sort of civil liability. Republicans seem generally intent on trying to dismantle as much civil liability as they can for certain products,” he said. By holding the hearing, Brownback was trying to establish a compelling govt. interest in trying to regulate pornography, Johnson said, by coming up with harms and demonstrating what they are. “The fact of the matter is that everything that has a harm does not necessarily cry out for government regulation,” he said: “High fat content causes harm. Does that mean the government needs to step in and start regulating fat content of your food?”

One valid point that emerged at the hearing is that there’s a desperate need for educational efforts to make consumers more media savvy and able to look at information with “a certain discriminating taste,” Johnson said: “That doesn’t mean that the government needs to be controlling that taste.” If the govt. wants a hand in managing porn, the best course is to fund educational programs, not make new laws, he said. In the past, porn bills have eventually been found unconstitutional, as was the case with the 1996’s Communications Decency Act, which the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against, Johnson said. “If you ask ‘how can I stop porn,’ which is generally what Congress asks, you'll be led down a road to an unconstitutional solution in most cases,” he said: “When you talk about stopping porn, you are stopping speech.”