1 post tagged “first amendment”

June 25

In 1992, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the Pornography Victims’ Compensation Act, a bill that authorized the victim of a sexual attacks to sue the producers and distributors of any obscene material that might have "caused" the assault. However, the bill had been largely discredited. "Give us a break!" Joe Teller of the comedy team Penn and Teller wrote in the New York Times. "When one pays $7 to go into a theater to see big pictures moving on a wall, one does not have to be a mental giant to realize you are watching a movie. It makes you wonder how they explain the millions of people who saw ‘Psycho’ without stealing bankrolls or bumping off blondes.’"

June 24

Today is the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roth v. United States, upholding the right of the government to ban "obscene" material.  Although the decision was celebrated as a victory by anti-pornography activists, the majority opinion by Justice William Brennan also declared that sex and obscenity were not synonymous.  Works that dealt with sex that were not "utterly without redeeming social importance" were protected by the First Amendment, Brennan said.  Over the next decade, the Supreme Court would hand down a series of decisions narrowing the definition of obscenity to apply only to "hard-core pornography."

In 1961, Barney Rosset, publisher of Grove Press, published in the United States one of the most notorious works in the English language, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.  Officials in more than 60 communites filed obscenity charges in an effort to suppress the book.  Three years later, the Supreme Court reversed a decision by the Florida Supreme Court that had declared the book obscene.