By 1988 the Justice Department possessed ninety-three trained “Obscenity / Child Exploitation Specialists,” whose very title indicated the department’s eagerness to conflate child pornography and abuse with the mainstream adult porn industry. The Justice Department also went well beyond the conclusions of the Meese Commission in its discussion of

LAPD Juvenile Division officer, Lloyd Martin, testified that the children sexually abused and used in pornography “make up our burglars and dope dealers and our robbers, and so forth.” Asked if he had any evidence to support this, Martin responded, “No. I don’t.” Such unfounded assertions in the guise of official statements facilitated the spread

Tim LaHaye rushed to blame social ills like divorce and illegitimacy on pornography, refusing to acknowledge factors such as the Reagan attack on the working class and its concomitant economically generated familial tensions or the underfunding of education.

The antiporn perspective numerically outweighed the free-speech one, and the ordinance passed with a resounding 65 percent of the vote, winning in every district but two adjoining the local university. An angry owner of a local adult store explained how evangelicals had set the terms of the debate: a “yes vote meant you were for God, while a no

This emphasis on youth disregarded the child-protective variable-obscenity framework already established by the 1968 Ginsberg decision, as well as Felix Frankfurter’s 1957 comment about “burning the house to roast the pig,” describing Michigan’s law prohibiting material for adults in order to protect children.

was exhibited for consenting adults only. Burger’s opinion disregarded the ten volumes of studies published by the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography to instead cite Hill, Link, and Keating’s dissenting reports, which “indicate that there is at least an arguable correlation between obscene material and crime.” Though Burger conceded the lack

As Newsweek concluded, obscenity prosecutions failed to address the basic fact that Americans “seem to want” pornography “just as they wanted alcoholic beverages during prohibition.”

The court wrote, “If the only reason for a prosecution is to protect an adult against his own moral standards which do harm to no one else, it cannot be tolerated.”

One major contribution to this movement came from Massachusetts federal judge Bailey Aldrich, who expanded Stanley’s protections in a later 1969 case. Whereas the Supreme Court had protected private possession of obscenity in an individual’s home, the question posed by Aldrich was, “How far does Stanley go?” In the judge’s view it extended to adult