Word: ginzburgs
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Startling even Justice Department lawyers, the court voted 5 to 4 to up hold Publisher Ralph Ginzburg's $28,000 fine and five-year federal sentence for selling the now defunct magazine Eros and two other obscene publications through the mails. By a vote of 6 to 3, the court upheld Edward Mishkin's three-year New York sentence for planning and peddling 140 weird little "bondage" books (Screaming Flesh, House of Torture, etc.) devoted to sadism and masochism and typically spiced with scenes of naked girls whipping each other. By another 6-to-3 vote, the court...
Stiff Rule. The big news was the new obscenity standard laid down in the Ginzburg decision-which was based not so much on the content of his publications as on the way he peddled them. Speaking for the court in all three cases, Justice William J. Brennan said that Ginzburg's "titillating" advertising was so permeated with "the leer of the sensualist" that he was guilty of "the sordid business of pandering." Brennan took dead aim at "those who would make a business of pandering to the widespread weakness for titillation by pornography." The result: a stiff new rule...
Stewart was especially incensed by what he viewed as the court's decision to jail Ginzburg (who is also the publisher of a magazine called Fact) for reasons other than the charges against him. "Ginzburg was not charged with 'commercial exploitation,'" he said. "He was not charged with 'pandering'; he was not charged with 'titillation.' " Not only did the court thus "deny him due process of law," Stewart continued, but Ginzburg was going to prison for crimes that no federal statute condemns...
Conduct v. Thought. Having reached exactly that conclusion, Justice Brennan last week tried to push the Roth decision, which he also wrote, far closer to a manageable test of conduct rather than thought. At issue in the Ginzburg case were Eros, whose chef-d'oeuvre in the disputed edition was a color portfolio of a white woman and Negro man, both naked, in multiple embraces; Liaison, a sex-front "newsletter" that was a compendium of sex jokes; and The Housewife's Handbook on Selective Promiscuity, a Tucson woman's clinical account of her increased pleasure with unconventional...
...about a Baptist minister who had testified earlier that he used the Handbook in "counseling." The lower court, said Bender, "either found he was lying-or that he wasn't a typical minister." When pressed further, though, Bender conceded that while Liaison is "a collection of dirty jokes," Ginzburg's other works are "borderline material." In short, he was saying that the Justices must read them...