Panel asks if porn is freedom or blight
Utah’s porn czarina, Paula Houston, spoke at Utah State University Thursday as part of a panel addressing “the problem of porn.” Houston was joined on the panel by Stephen C. Clark, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Pastor Barry Neese, a founding minister of the Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Logan.
The panel, which took place in the Eccles Conference Center and featured a lively discussion fueled by a number of audience questions, was part of the Media & Society Lecture Series sponsored by USU’s department of Journalism and Communication.
In her opening statement, Houston said her official title is Obscenity and Pornography Complaints Ombudsman, though she’s unofficially known as “the porn czarina,” at the Utah Attorney General’s Office.
“Part of my job is educating the public,” she said,”helping citizens understand what pornography is, and things they can do to take action about material that is offensive to them. The other half of my job is working with local governments on training and education, case summaries, drafting model ordinances. They have to make decisions on what is right for their communities.”
Clark said he felt a special connection to Houston since they are the same age and are both devoted to an issue they feel passionately about, albeit on opposite sides of the issue.
Clark summed up his position by saying, “Pornography is really no different than other speech and should be protected just the same.”
He also said he worried about what Houston would do in her new role as porn czarina, and that he hoped she would honor her promise to educate the community.
He cited a student participant of a government-organized rally saying she viewed Michelangelo’s famous statue of a nude David as pornography.
Neese said in a perfect world, “we would all be sitting here unclothed.”
He went on to say that not everyone was able to appropriately enjoy “the beautiful gift of our bodies and our sexuality,” and therefore the ACLU, porn czars and religious leaders were needed by society.
One issue addressed by the panel was children’s access to pornographic materials. Houston said she wasn’t sure how to limit the Internet.
“We’re trying to protect minors from obscenity. About the Internet – I just don’t know. I’ve talked to a lot of people about it. I hope someone has some answers,” she said.
Professor Ted Pease, head of the Journalism and Communication department, who was the moderator for the event, asked of panelists whether parents or the government should be responsible for monitoring children on the Internet.
Clark said he did not generally support filters since they have been shown to filter out a large amount of unobjectionable material and occasionally miss obscene material. Houston said she knew of parents who used filters and vigilantly monitored their children’s use of the Internet, and those children still got pornographic material.
Another issue discussed by the panel was the current standard used by the Supreme Court to determine if material is obscene or not. The guidelines, set out in Miller v. California, ask “(a) whether the ‘average person applying contemporary community standards’ would find the work taken as a whole appeals to the prurient [lustful] 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.”
Clark said he did not support the Miller v. California decision.
“That’s a viewpoint- or content-based rationale for restricting speech,” he said. “Also, by using an ‘average person’ rationale, the majority in a community can decide the issue. Our basic civil rights are not up for a majority vote. That’s why we set them aside as a special category in the Constitution.”
Arguing in favor of the regulation of pornography, one audience member noted that Ted Bundy and other convicted serial killers were into pornography and had linked that interest to their later, homicidal activities.
Clark dismissed that argument.
“People always make that type of argument: ‘Pornography made him a killer.’ But Bundy was a pathological liar, a psychopath. He was also a graduate of the University of Utah law school. His literary tastes were wide-ranging. I don’t think you can say pornography made him who he was,” he said.
Another audience member questioned Clark’s assertion that pornography had not been conclusively shown to harm women.
She said she was in possession of specific studies that demonstrated the damage done to women, such as more callous public attitudes toward rape, by pornography.
Houston, who founded a Victim Advocate Program when she was a prosecutor in West Valley City and serves on the board of a domestic violence shelter, said both sides in the debate had statistics which proved they were right. She also said she was glad the ACLU was around.
“I’m glad the ACLU is there. It’s a balancing act. I think one problem we have in our society is that we tend to sit back and complain to our friends, but if we want things to change we need to speak out,” she said.
“The mission of the ACLU for me is to create the possibility for each of us to be and express who we are without other people imposing their beliefs on us,” Clark said.