Almost immediately after taking office in 1969, Nixon identified the political value of moralizing about porn. In response to a staff memorandum regarding postal efforts to control juvenile access to obscene materials, Nixon jotted a note highlighting his true interest: “What can we do to get some publicity on this?”

More significant than individual member bias, though, was the very existence of the effects panel, which sought to finally investigate the claims of pornography’s causal effects on everything from rape to “sexual deviancy.” Conservatives such as Morton Hill rejected the very social science framework in which the effects panel operated, preferring

Landau next invited Dr. James McClure to address the commission and explain the absence of evidence for a causal relationship between pornography and sex crimes.

The Warren Court, though, rejected clear and present danger for a “redeeming social importance” test, a unique burden foisted on no other form of expression. Because liberal notions of normalcy precluded arguments for prurience as itself containing social importance, or for graphic depictions of sexuality as inherently political forms of

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

This basic framework—the disavowal of censorship and a pseudoscientific rather than moralistic condemnation of obscenity, predicated on a nonsectarian membership led by middle-class men

In New Jersey the Commission to Study Obscenity and Depravity in Public Media issued a report in May 1970, several months before the Presidential Commission. It perfectly anticipated the later report, describing state obscenity laws as “obsolete … based on certain unexplained assumptions as to the ‘depraving and corrupting’ effect” of pornography.

This left “obscene” material without any significant defenders. While such conservative groups as the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Legion of Decency, and the Knights of Columbus had long fought to censor sexually explicit (and otherwise nonconformist) material, postwar liberals concurred in the suppression of that which fell

The Clinton administration exemplified this trend, consistently fleeing from controversy by acquiescing to its opponents while publicly claiming victory, as the Christian Right effectively revived a dormant moral panic involving pornographic menaces to children.