NYT: The Day Obscenity Became Art

[last_texas_dem]

by Fred Kaplan

>>>>TODAY is the 50th anniversary of the court ruling that overturned America’s obscenity laws, setting off an explosion of free speech — and also, in retrospect, splashing cold water on the idea, much discussed during Sonia Sotomayor’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, that judges are “umpires” rather than agents of social change.

The historic case began on May 15, 1959, when Barney Rosset, the publisher of Grove Press, sued the Post Office for confiscating copies of the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” which had long been banned for its graphic sex scenes.
Most lawyers of the time would have advised Mr. Rosset that he had a weak case. Back in 1873, Anthony Comstock, the former postal inspector who founded the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, had persuaded Congress to pass a law outlawing obscenity, which state and federal courts came to define over the decades as works that “community standards” would regard as “lustful,” “lewd,” “lascivious” or “prurient.”>>>> snip

>>>>Looking over the Roth decision, Rembar spotted a loophole. The opinion, written by Justice William J. Brennan, noted that the First Amendment’s purpose was “to assure unfettered interchange of ideas” and that “all ideas having even the slightest redeeming social importance — unorthodox ideas, controversial ideas, even ideas hateful to the prevailing climate of opinion — have the full protection of the guarantees.” But, Brennan went on, “implicit in the history of the First Amendment is the rejection of obscenity as utterly without redeeming social importance.”

Rembar mulled over a question that Brennan apparently hadn’t considered: What if a book met the standards of obscenity yet also presented ideas of “redeeming social importance”? By Brennan’s logic, wouldn’t it qualify for the First Amendment’s protection after all?>>>>

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/opinion/21kaplan.html?_r=4

[sui generis]

1. FUCK community standards

The "community" can't even define them. Obscenity is in the eye of the beholder - the law should get out of the business of policing vernacular language.

And, the "community" argument can't even define "community", which means our very precise laws are based on very subjective criteria, and that's bad law.

[Glorfindel]

2. I remember those days - I couldn't WAIT to read the forbidden

Lady Chatterly's Lover, Ulysses, Tropic of Cancer, Justine, Fanny Hill, etc. What a revelation they were.

[bemildred]

3. Sex is political, very political, and all things political have 1st Amendment protection.

Why is that so hard to understand?