I just love the recent posting implying an attack on free speech in the Obama sign issue.

Never mind that the sign in question implied a threat of violence.

As this author points out I guess some think free speech can or should be limited by those who think God is on their side.

Let's look at free speech, harm, porn, the political right and media.

Here's some nifty information on the subject I hope you will all enjoy from Nerve magazine on-line.

History of a Single Life: Ronald Reagan vs. the Birds, Bees
by Ken Mondschein

As we saw when looking at pornography, legal arguments about abortion and pornography in the U.S. hinged on the idea of "rights." But there are limits to our rights: despite the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, you can't shout "fire" in a public theater, whether it's showing dirty movies or no. So it wasn't surprising that the conservative strategy against porn and abortion in the post-Sexual Revolution world focused on the supposed harm done by smut.

Ronald Reagan's 1980 ascension to the White House — like an Old Testament patriarch preaching a doctrine of fiscal and social conservatism — marked the beginning of this new Comstockery. Behind the former actor's grandfatherly demeanor was a record that included siccing the National Guard on protesting Berkeley students in 1969, defending public prayer, denouncing abortion, and doubting Darwin's theories of evolution.

Edwin Meese III, who served as Reagan's campaign manager, and then Attorney General from 1985 to 1988, was also a pink-cheeked, grandfatherly sort. But behind his '80s aviator glasses, he epitomized the hypocrisy of an approach that trumpeted individual rights while trying to dictate private morality.


As the Reagan Administration's point man in the judicial system, Meese openly challenged the Supreme Court's broad interpretations of the law — at least wherever they conflicted with conservative social policy, most notably in the Roe v. Wade decision. Where the First Amendment was concerned, however, the Constitution could be thrown out the window. In May of 1984, Reagan called for a commission to investigate pornography. Its purpose was to question the findings of the 1970 Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which reported that there was no link between sexually explicit material and violence. (Citizens for Decent Literature founder Charles Keating, the sole Nixon appointee on the commission, was also the lone dissenter to its findings.)

The new Attorney General's attack on the Supreme Court was a tempest in a teapot. Bolstered by conservative Nixon appointees, the court had already been turning the fifties' and sixties' tolerance for smut on its ear for a decade. In 1973, Chief Justice Warren Burger, in his commentary on Miller v. California, created a new litmus test for the legality of porn.
You can't shout "fire" in a public theater, whether it's showing dirty movies or no.

Rather than the older "redeeming social importance" defense, the new criteria were "(a) whether the average person applying contemporary community standards would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."

The "community standards" guideline had teeth. In 1976, federal agents ordered copies of the New York-based tabloid Screw to be delivered to Wichita, Kansas, with the express intent of entrapping its foul-mouthed publisher, Al Goldstein. Not surprisingly, a conservative jury convicted Goldstein of obscenity. Similarly, in 1977 Hustler publisher Larry Flynt was convicted for obscenity in Keating's hometown of Cincinnati. Flynt, ever a mirror of the American psyche, conveniently became a born-again Christian while his lawyers lobbied for appeals. In June of 1978 — four months after Flynt was shot and paralyzed in what was likely a Mafia hit — long story — Hustler's cover showed a woman being fed through a meat grinder, with the headline, "We Will No Longer Hang Women Up Like Pieces of Meat — Larry Flynt." Though Flynt was later acquitted of the criminal charges, the June cover, with the headline deleted, became deadly ammunition in the war against pornography.

And so, with every confidence in their appointed destiny, the eleven-person Meese Commission convened on May 20, 1985. Six Commission members had strong anti-pornography track records. With its findings a foregone conclusion, the Meese Commission was in essence a highly amusing dog-and-pony show, by no means limited to sniffing out pictures of women having sex with dogs and ponies. As part of their "investigation," members visited peep shows, searched high and low for shocking material, and listened to an endless parade of witnesses describe themselves as victims. If the witnesses wouldn't claim victimhood, the Commission grilled them on the salacious details of their personal lives. A study by psychologist Edward Donnerstein had tentatively linked the viewing of sexual and violent material with a willingness to hurt others; the Meese Commission admitted the study as evidence, even though Donnerstein himself denounced the way his experimental results were taken out of context.

Giving new meaning to the Arabic maxim that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," the Commission allied itself with such groups as Women Against Pornography. Two of its star witnesses were feminist activists Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon, both well-known for seeking a ban on pornography as a civil-rights violation (the same tactic that the anti-abortion movement applied to unborn fetuses). Prodded by the Commission, Dworkin and MacKinnon argued that our sexist society maintained its values partly through pornography, which conditioned men to see women as sex objects. Results included everything from rape to sexual harassment to the corporate glass ceiling. Dworkin and MacKinnon brought forth numerous witnesses, notably the former Linda Lovelace (who testified under her married name, Linda Marchiano), to corroborate their position that women in pornography were not acting of their own free will.

The Meese Commission was a dog-and-pony show, by no means limited to sniffing out pictures of women having sex with dogs and ponies.
That women might have a measure of choice about participating in pornography, and that gay men and lesbians also enjoyed pornography, did not enter into the picture. Those who didn't agree, such as the lesbian BDSM group Samois and the editors of the lesbian porn magazine On Our Backs, for instance, were condemned as dildo-wielding heterosexual accomplices. There's no doubt that the Meese Commission dug up some harrowing stories from the porn world, but the ACLU's summary and critique of the Commission put it well: "It would not be possible to listen to the stories of many Commission witnesses and remain unmoved by their general sincerity and honesty. However, it is also difficult to imagine (in most cases) what immediate positive effect the removal of pornography would have had on the abusive relationships in which these witnesses were enmeshed. These were quite frankly not cases where but for pornography, life would have been a bed of roses."

Unsurprisingly, the Commission's final report came out against pornography, arguing that it did real and definite harm to women. According to the report, the First Amendment was not a valid defense against speech that does such definite harm: "Not every use of words, pictures, or a printing press automatically triggers protection by the First Amendment. For example, writing bad checks, lying under oath, or 'urging your brother to kill your father so that you can split the insurance money' are not constitutionally protected activities." And so, the eleven commissioners urged the reconsideration of pornography as "a subset of prostitution. . . a form of sex discrimination and. . . an invasion of performers' personal rights."

Even if many saw the Meese Commission as a kangaroo court, it had a definite chilling effect on free speech in America. Conservative groups were emboldened by the idea that God and Government were on their side. Added to this was the Commission's intimidation power: 7-Eleven and other national chains removed Playboy and Penthouse from their shelves in 1986, when the Meese Commission began sending letters threatening possible prosecution to distributors. The new Comstockery attacked that which was most vulnerable to government interference: the entertainment industry's profit margin. This strategy would continue up until the World Wide Web made policing the public morality next to impossible.