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US Constitution with quill
Previously Recorded by Phyllis Schlafly
One of the most famous comments made by Judge Robert Bork was this: “The suffocating vulgarity of popular culture is in large measure the work of the [Supreme] Court” because “it defeated [our] attempts … to … minimize vulgarity.” What the Supreme Court did was to give pornography greater First Amendment rights than political campaign speech, the Pledge of Allegiance, the Ten Commandments, and the Boy Scout oath combined. No single side of any issue has racked up as high a winning score in the Supreme Court as pornography.
The first time the question of pornography was “squarely presented” to the Supreme Court was in 1957. The Court ruled: “We hold that obscenity is not within the area of constitutionally protected speech or press.” The pornographers then plotted to overturn this decision. All of a sudden, the porn peddlers invested lavish funds for legal talent to carry dozens of cases to the Supreme Court. In October 1966, the Supreme Court was flooded with appeals from lower court convictions. This showed the great financial resources of the pornography industry, their determination to change our culture that had been in existence for hundreds of years, and their optimism that this could be accomplished by getting the Earl Warren court to adopt the pornographers’ most extreme arguments.
In the short space of 13 months, May 1967 to June 1968, the Warren Court handed down a series of 26 decisions that turned the law of obscenity upside down. The Court reversed dozens of judges, juries, and appellate courts in 15 states, making laws against obscenity impossible to enforce, and thereby drastically lowering community decency standards throughout America.
Hollywood got the message and the Motion Picture Association stopped enforcing its own Production Code. In 1965, the Academy Award Best Picture was The Sound of Music; in 1969, the Best Picture was Midnight Cowboy, an X-rated film about a homeless male hustler. The Supreme Court justices who changed our law on obscenity are gone now, but in Shakespeare’s words, 11The evil that men do lives after them.” The Supreme Court continues to treat pornography as a privileged industry.
