Word: porn
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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After the Civil War young men flocked to the cities, and a porn business grew up to provide for this new market. Shocked by what he saw around him, a New York City clerk, Anthony Comstock, launched a national crusade. The results: stiffer laws, more prosecutions and a firm antiporn stance became the official American posture for nearly a century...
...liberal Warren Court went still further in 1966, restricting the definition of obscenity to material judged to be "utterly without redeeming social value." The "utterly" standard opened the floodgates of porn as an army of literary critics, psychologists, First Amendment libertarians and even clergymen testified at obscenity trials that they could detect a trace of social value in almost any erotica...
...after the decision, the office walls of Penthouse magazine were covered with x-ed out galleys of hastily killed articles, including one that explored a then new frontier of slick-paper porn: how to make love to your dog. The rest of the spectator-sex industry pulled back too, fearing simultaneous prosecutions in hundreds of different localities with varying "community standards...
...American views of sex. So at the very time the court was remanding to communities the right to judge pornography, "community standards" on such delicate matters were in more disarray than ever before. Few localities were in the mood or of the single mind required to take on the porn lords. Another factor was the growing tendency of police and prosecutors to argue that campaigns against "victimless crime" represented a misuse of limited resources that should be devoted to coping with the ever rising rates of murder, rape, robbery and mugging...
...Raids on porn establishments and arrests continue, but they are increasingly taking on the look of ragtag rear-guard actions against an onrushing horde. Says Seattle's King County prosecutor Christopher Bayley: "We filed case after case, but unfortunately, the juries' reactions were so disparate we were unable to come up with anything to guide police and law-enforcement agencies...