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Many social scientists believe that an individual's sexual attitudes are determined long before he or she is exposed to pornography and that pornography is a symptom of deviant sexuality rather than a cause of it. Says A. Nicholas Groth, who runs the sex-offender program at the Connecticut Correctional Institution: "We've had men who were very much turned on by looking at the underwear ads of kids that appear in the Sears, Roebuck catalog, which doesn't make the Sears, Roebuck catalog a kiddie-porn magazine."
Even before the commission issued its report, the American Civil Liberties Union published a critique by Barry Lynn, a lawyer who attended meetings in each of the six cities where they occurred and obtained its internal papers under the Federal Advisory Committee Act. Lynn dismissed the report as "little more than prudishness and moralizing masquerading behind social- science jargon." He charged that the conclusions were precooked, and labeled the commissioners "quintessential censors," noting that six of the eleven were already committed to stamping out pornography before the hearings began. (Chairman Hudson, for example, is a U.S. Attorney in Virginia who made his name by clamping down on adult bookstores.) "They truly want to regulate everyone's sex life," Lynn says. "If they had their way, they'd like to crawl into your bedroom and tell you what is and is not appropriate."
Members of the commission emphasized that they had refrained from advocating any form of censorship. "Those people that anticipated a document supporting ^ censorship are going to be disappointed," said Hudson. Park Dietz, a sociologist who is a member of the panel, felt vindicated after the report was released: "The big news here is that . . . the report says exactly the opposite of what the A.C.L.U. claims. It says that 'slasher' films are bad, Playboy is O.K., and no books should be prosecuted."
But Lynn, paraphrasing Justice Potter Stewart's standard for obscenity, said he knew censorship when he saw it. "He can say that this is not about censorship. In fact, whenever you use the powers of the state or Federal Government to punish, to criminalize, to imprison people who sell certain kinds of sexually explicit material, that is censorship." Leanne Katz, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship, charges the approach is similar to ones used in the past: "I have been working in the anticensorship cause for about 30 years, and I have never encountered a censorship controversy in which the other side wasn't saying 'This isn't censorship.' They also always argue that they are talking about harm. It's always harm to women, harm to children, harm to somebody. In truth, however, it is harm to our precious idea that all of us are supposed to be able to decide for ourselves what we can see and read and think."