and thousands of our young people would be warped by the spread of pornography unless Federal laws were strengthened. Yet, though I was regrettably a good prophet, here the House (in S. 1723) comes up with a bill that parrots the Commission's recommendations, despite the fact that the Senate rejected those recommendations forcefully on October 13, 1970 in a formal vote of sixty to five. The Senate produces as bad a Bill (S. 1722) which falls far short of what is needed. Ten years ago, there was considerable evidence that the Commission's position was both empirically unsound and morally bankrupt; today the evidence is irrefutable. Today the evidence that the Nation needs strong Federal laws against pornography is overwhelming. I will demonstrate the truth of these claims later in this Statement. Here I will summarize the grim facts: **The pornographers in our country do a $4,000,000,000 per year business, more than the legitimate film and record industry combined. **The average porn magazine sells for between $6 and $10 each. Films range up to $50; the countless ones involving children bring even more. **In Los Angeles alone, the porno business does $100,000,000 a year in gross retail volume. **The Crime Syndicate skims off the "cream" of these profits and uses it to fund its other illegal activities; thus if pornography is not controlled effectively it will be virtually impossible for law enforcement to show significant success against gambling, prostitu tion or narcotics. **There is a torrent of porn spreading into every city in the country: There is heterosexual porn homosexual porn ... ... sexual devices porn (so-called "toys" including the double-ended penis for lesbian copulation, the "---k" pillow, etc.); there is porn depicting bestiality and even the porn "snuff film" (perverted sex acts culminating in actual murder of one participant), and there is live porn, massage parlors, ad infinitum. **Police vice squads report that 77% of child molesters of boys and 87% of child molesters of girls admitted trying out, or imitating, the sexual behavior modeled by pornography. In one group of rapists, 57% indicated they had tried out the sexual behavior they had seen depicted by pornography. **VD is pandemic. Gonorrhea of the throat is epidemic! Doctors are being advised to culture for gonorrhea in all persistent sore throats; it has been found in infants, as young as 18 months. **Most of the stuff is manufactured in the United States. In many cases it is imported. It is shipped across state lines, sent through the mails, advertised in hundreds of magazines, transmitted through the channels of Interstate Commerce. It is demonstrated and sold in thousands of stores--indeed, there are hundreds of magazines and movies showing scenes of unspeakable vileness right within five miles of the Senate Office Building, scenes so perverted that no Senator would want anyone, much less his own family, to look at them even once; so perverted that no Senator would dare tell his constituents what they contain and then tell them that he did not vote for strong laws against them. On October 15, 1979, Attorney James J. Clancy of California also submitted a statement--his is a brilliant statement--in opposition to the proposed laws. I trust his complete statement with documentation will be included in the Subcommittee's final written report. I urge its careful perusal. 1. SENATORS WHO WOULD VOTE FOR WEAK LAWS I proceed on the assumption that the members of both the Majority and the Minority would vote for strong laws against pornography, if they realized how widespread it is; how profoundly it perverts; and how terribly harmful it is to individuals and to the Nation as a whole. My assumption is that the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate as a whole have not yet looked carefully at the facts about the moral pollution that is contaminating the entire country. Certainly the Honorary CDL Committee members have not. Just as it took some decades of noxious gases piling up over our cities, of lethal fumes in and near our factories, of lethal pollutants corrupting our lungs as we drove to work, of growing reports by the public authorities on shortened lifespan and higher frequency of disease--before the Congress during the last decade would pass tough anti-pollution laws and create a strong Environmental Protec tion Agency so also it has taken two decades of moral pollution ... corrupting practically every city and town in the land to bring us to the point where Congress can no longer look the other way. But the Senate must first disabuse itself as to what modern pornography is all about. We are not talking about a few bawdy cartoons from a 1939 issue of ESQUIRE ... nor about parts of the nor about a few "dirty words" put nor even about the "centerfold" There is a "culture lag" here: We imagine the future, we judge the present, by our experience in the past. But the "dirty books" that one might have glanced at in his youth resemble today's pornographic magazines/videocasettes/films about as much as smoke from a cigarette resembles a forest fire out of control; or as much as shoplifting by a juvenile resembles murder-assassination by a Mafia "hit man." We have reached a qualitative watershed. We are now talking about something so hideous and barbaric that people who have not seen it cannot believe it exists, that people who have seen some of it grope for euphemisms to dilute its vileness, and that people who indulge their morbid fantasies with it do so furtively, keeping their private collection of perverted picture books so no one knows their lusts. In an article from THE CINCINNATI ENQUIRER (Feb. 11, 1979), Reo M. Christenson, the distinquished liberal political scientist, wrote: Those appalled by the prospect of censorship usually do not realize what they are protecting, or what, through postal subsidies, they help distribute with their tax ... It is imperative that the public know what is really in Hustler (It) is not a "girlie" magazine or another Playboy. Rather, it is full of pictures and descriptions of such gross sexual perversion, such bizarre forms of bestiality and such nauseating accounts of excretory activities that few if any newspapers feel free to explicitly inform their readers of what is in the magazine. --The Judgment on Hustler: Sanity, not Censorship The protean monster that is modern pornography takes many forms: --women having intercourse with dogs and horses; --lesbian masturbation and the devices enabling lesbian --techniques of rape; --heterosexual and homosexual sadomasochism, with instruments; --methods of seducing and/or molesting children; --"snuff films" in which the victim is attacked sexually and then actually murdered before the camera; --gang sex clubs in which, typically, à group of men kidnap a young woman, chain her to a post and then simultaneously have sex with her in groups of two or three or even more; --fetishistic ways to stimulate oneself autoerotically, e.g., demonstrations of how to hang oneself by a woman's stockings or slip, just long enough to become aroused; --close-ups of male and female sex organs in massively turgid arousal; --in all, the protagonist, whose only purpose of sexual activity and instant and continuous gratification, and usually the foil or victim, are shown in ecstasy-like transports of total animal pleasure (never, in the films or photo essays, is shown physical or psychic harm such as VD or neurosis). The Senate must face up to the extent of all this. In every city there are tens and sometimes hundreds of "adult bookstores," |