BETHESDA, Md.--
Imagine that 19 pro-family and pro-decency groups such as the Family Research Council, Concerned Women for America, and Focus on the Family called a press conference to criticize the Bush administration. Wouldn't every network, news magazine, and major daily cover the event?No. None showed up at the National Press Club on a recent Monday. Why? The criticism of Bush was over his failure "to vigorously enforce federal obscenity laws." Yawn.
What could the press have covered? How about this blistering criticism of Bush's Justice Department by Robert Peters, president of Morality in Media, the event's organizer:
"In 2002 we created a Web site to give citizens a way to report violations of federal Internet obscenity laws. Before doing so, we discussed it with Justice Department, and they said, "Great!" By February 2008, 70,000 citizen complaints were filed.
"After six years and 70,000 complaints, the Justice Department has not acted on a single complaint," asserted Peters.
Janet Shaw Crouse, of Concerned Women for America, lamented: "Obscenity is not taken seriously even by those legally charged with prosecuting offenders. So while the Justice Department is not looking, our homes are being invaded by blatantly obscene so-called 'entertainment.'"
She cited FBI research of jailed sex offenders who possessed child pornography: Some 85 percent admit to abusing children. Crouse added, "Obscenity is also used to ensnare women and girls into prostitution and sex trafficking. So-called 'modeling agencies' or 'modeling agents' take nude photos of girls and women and then threaten them with exposing these photos if they are unwilling to prostitute themselves."
Pornography also has a horrific debasing impact on the culture. There are Academy-Award winning songs like "It's Hard Out Here for
The problem goes deeper. At a 2003 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, two-thirds of 350 divorce lawyers acknowledged that online porn contributed to more than half of the divorces they handled.
To put it bluntly, millions of men are self-gratifying to pictures of 18-year-olds having sex rather than having real sex with their 40-year-old wives. One of the Ten Commandments is "Thou shalt not commit adultery." How is this not adultery?
As president of Marriage Savers, I was invited to speak to the nonexistent press. I noted that I had covered the meetings of the 1986 Attorney General's Commission on Pornography, which voted at its next-to-last meeting, 5-4, that hard-core obscenity was "not harmful." Stunned, I published the names and addresses of the "libertarians" who pronounced porn benign.
Fellow commissioner Park Dietz, of the University of Virginia School of Law and Medicine, read a dozen letters asking that the commission "do something," often because hard-core pornography had destroyed a marriage. He said he was also moved by the law-enforcement people "who were almost unanimous in citing a link between porn and crime." He switched his vote, as did four liberals, making the commission unanimous.
However, Reagan Attorney General Edwin Meese ignored his own report. In my introduction to a commercially published version of the report, I wrote, "As of August [1986] both Attorney General Meese and the president have shied away from publicly endorsing the document."
However, Focus on the Family, Concerned Women for America, and others bought the book at a discount and distributed 70,000 copies. Those readers pressured Meese, and he began to enforce the law. Major pornographers went to jail and had their bank accounts seized. That continued for six years until Bill Clinton became president. He halted enforcement.
And George W. Bush, who promised enforcement, reneged when elected. Hence, the press conference.
I recommend that the presidential candidates and all candidates for Congress be asked if they'd support creation of a new Obscenity Commission that can document pornography's harm and call for specific reforms in a new report.
Michael McManus, president