3 posts tagged “obscenity”

Justice Felix Frankfurter

February 22

In 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Michigan obscenity law that made it a crime to publish, print or sell any work containing " obscene, immoral, lewd or lascivious language....tending to incite minors to violent or depraved or immoral acts." Lawyers for Michigan argued that the state must have the power to ban works that were harmful to children, even if the law violated the First Amendments rights of adults. Speaking for a unanimous court, Justice Felix Frankfurter disagreed: "Surely, this is to burn the house to roast the pig...The incidence of this enactment is to reduce the adult population of Michigan to reading only what is fit for children. It thereby arbitrarily curtails one of those liberties of the individual....that history has attested as the indispensable conditions for the maintenance and progress of a free society."

James Joyce in 1926

February 21st

In 1921, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap are convicted of obscenity in New York for publishing an excerpt from James Joyce's novel Ulysses in their magazine, Little Review. The excerpt described indirectly but clearly a middle-aged man's thoughts as he secretly masturbated while observing a young girl. When a lawyer claimed that the language was too veiled to be obscene, the judge scoffed. "The man went off in his pants," he said. Anderson and Heap were fined $50, but not before Anderson tried to put the prosecutors on trial, including John Sumner, who had succeeded Anthony Comstock as the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. "It was the poet, the artist, who discovered love, created the lover, made sex everything that it is beyond a function," she said. "It is the Mr. Sumners who have made obscenity."

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.