Page 325 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

0 | Obscen ty and Indecency

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both the federal and state
governments passed laws to stop the flow of material considered to be obscene
or indecent. In 1842 Congress passed the first antiobscenity statutes, barring
the “importation of all indecent and obscene prints, paintings, lithographs, en-
gravings and transparencies.” This statute was amended numerous times to in-
clude photographs, films, and phonograph records. The Comstock Act of 1873
made it illegal to use the U.S. postal system to distribute obscenity. At that time,
“obscenity” was defined as material that has a “tendency to deprave and corrupt
those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.” This broad defini-
tion was used by both the U.S. Customs office and U.S. Postal Service to ban
such works as Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Ernest
Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls.
With the arrival of cinema in the early twentieth century, efforts to stop the
flow of erotic imagery in this country intensified. City and state censorship
boards sprung up around the country to prohibit the exhibition of films con-
taining sexually explicit scenes. In 1915, the Supreme Court upheld the practice
of these censorship boards, arguing that film was not covered under the First
Amendment. This gave the green light to film censorship all over America. In
response, the movie studios banded together in the 1930s to adopt the Hays
Code, a set of self-imposed decency standards designed to “clean up” Holly-
wood and protect the studios from the loss of revenue caused by local censor-
ship. These standards were later abandoned when the Supreme Court reversed
its original position on cinema, granting the medium First Amendment protec-
tion in 1952.
By the middle of the twentieth century, as sexual mores began to change, an
increasing number of court cases began to challenge the various antiobscenity
statutes around the country. Finally, in a series of rulings, the Supreme Court
developed a legal definition for the obscenity (see “Defining Obscenity” side-
bar). Once they had defined this category of speech, they ruled that any form
of communication meeting the criteria of obscenity is not protected by the First
Amendment. This means that federal or state laws banning obscenity do not
violate the First Amendment. Because of the great variety of sexual and moral
standards throughout our country, the Supreme Court left it up to the states to
determine if, and to what extent, they would ban obscene communication.
Ironically, the issue of obscenity is one of those rare topics that has the power
to unite political activists from both ends of the political spectrum. Conser-
vative voters often express concern about obscenity on the basis of the threat
that they feel it poses to the family. On the other hand, some liberals are also
concerned about obscenity, arguing that pornography contributes to violence
against women. Here we see that calls for censorship can come from both the
right and the left, sometimes on the very same issue, even if for very different
reasons.
The development of new communication technologies has greatly compli-
cated the issue of obscenity in our country. In 1957, when first defining ob-
scenity, the Supreme Court included the “contemporary community standards”
clause into the definition in an attempt to take into consideration the reality that