re: #84 Anymouse 🌹🏡😷

Mine was vastly expanded after I got the job as a bodice-ripper Romance editor in 2007.

An interesting sidebar to the War on Porn: It primarily died out after the Comstock Acts were struck down … and stayed that way until a Supreme Court decision named Stanley v Georgia decided in 1969 established a right to privacy, and adults had the right to view whatever they wished in their homes, striking down Georgia’s anti-porn laws as unconstitutional.

Anti-porn movements in the past were not partisan; there were people in both parties and liberals and conservatives who were either concerned about “Teh Childrens” or free speech.

Lyndon B. Johnson then set up a commission (The Commission on Obscenity and Pornography) to study the deleterious effects of porn on adults or children, particularly as how porn might drive crime.

That commission was given large amounts of funding from both parties in Congress to fund original research into the subject.

They returned their report in 1970, finding no link whatsoever between porn and either child abuse or other crimes. The commission chair, originally opposed to the idea of access to porn, actually changed his mind about it when the studies were completed, noting that in a public speech.

That led the Catholic Church to lead a rebuttal to the Commission’s findings. The Church claimed the committee was stacked with pro-First Amendment proponents so their result would be biased. Their committee’s report, submitted as a formal rebuttal to the Commissions report, was rejected by both President Richard Nixon and both houses of Congress.

At that point, the Catholic Church (followed by Protestant churches) took up the anti-porn cause on behalf of Republicans, throwing their support behind Ronald Reagan for President, and later pushing for the Attorney General Edwin Meese’s commission on pornography.

The anti-porn movement since 1970 has been almost exclusively been linked with Christians and Republicans ever since (minus a few feminists such as Andrea Dworkin).

Yes, I spent my childhood and adolescence following various free speech and obscenity debates.

Were you stationed in Norfolk when the vice squad raided a midnight showing of “Taxi zum Klo” at the Naro Theater?