WASHINGTON, DC – Citing an “explosion of pornography across this nation,” Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) has issued a call for a Meese Commission-style investigative commission to look into the negative impact of pornography, and renewed his assertion that more emphasis needs to be placed on obscenity prosecutions, nationwide.According to a press release issued by Christian media outlet The Agape Press, Brownback said that while the nation has had “some prosecutions of pornography in the country in some areas, particularly on child pornography,” the conservative Senator believes more needs to be done, including another official, Meese-style probe into the issue of porn’s impact on society.
“I think we need to update and look at that again, because there’s been an explosion since that period of time,” Brownback said of the period since the Meese Commission report was published in 1986. “And [to] look at its addictive impact, its negative impact on families, its coarsening of the culture, and to provide more information to local communities about that as well.”
Brownback contends that the best way to combat porn is at the local level and said he’d like to see communities “bow their backs” and stiffen their resolve to go after pornographers, according to the Agape Press.
While Brownback is ostensibly calling for an investigation, previous statements from the Senator clearly show that he has already come to a conclusion of his own.
“Most Americans know that pornography is bad,” Brownback said in a press release issued November 10th, 2005. “But most Americans don’t know how harmful pornography is to users and to their families. While sexually explicit material is often talked about in terms of ‘free speech,’ too little has been said about its devastating effects on families and children.”
“I fear Americans don’t fully know or appreciate the serious and imminent risks pornography poses to families,” Brownback added in the November 2005 statement, “and especially to children who could suffer from strained relationships – or even divorce between their parents.”
Interestingly, one of the conclusions drawn by the Meese Commission was that the question of “harm” posed by pornography, including some of the specific harms alleged by Brownback, was essentially unrelated to the question of whether sexually explicit materials can – or should – be restricted under the law.
In its report, the Meese Commission stated that the commissioners “categorically reject the idea that material cannot be constitutionally protected, and properly so, while still being harmful,” citing the constitutionally-protected speech of organizations like the Ku Klux Klan and American neo-Nazi groups.
“There is no reason whatsoever to suppose that such material is necessarily harmless just because it is and should remain protected by the First Amendment,” the 1986 report continues. “As a result, we reject the notion that an investigation of the question of harm must be restricted to material unprotected by the Constitution.”
The Meese Commission also held, however, that an opposing axiom should be instructive to the commission’s thinking; just because speech is not harmful, that doesn’t mean it is protected by the Constitution, or that such “harmless” speech cannot be restricted by the government.
As the commission put it in their report, “[J]ust as there is no necessary connection between the constitutionally protected and the harmless, so too is there no necessary connection between the constitutionally unprotected and the harmful.”
“We examine the harm question with respect to material that is legally obscene because even if material is therefore unprotected by the First Amendment, it does not follow that it is harmful,” the report continues. “That some sexually explicit material is constitutionally regulable [sic] does not answer the question of whether anything justifies its regulation. Accordingly, we do not take our acceptance of the current constitutional approach to obscenity as diminishing the need to examine the harms purportedly associated with the distribution or use of such material.”
In sum, the Meese Commission regarded “as substantially dissimilar the question of constitutional protection and the question of harm.”
Presumably, Brownback would like to see the commission he has proposed discard this line of thinking. Otherwise, what Brownback has called for is, in essence, another commission to investigate what a previous commission (a commission that he apparently wants to model the new commission on) already deemed to be essentially irrelevant.
