Word: prurient
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...last week's decision the Supreme Court, after running a private screening of the picture, relied on Justice Brennan's opinion for a standard of obscenity: "Sex and obscenity are not synonymous. [Obscenity] deals with sex in a manner appealing to prurient interest." The court thus seemed to reach its conclusion on the evidence of the film's content alone, not on the fundamental question of prior restraint, i.e., the constitutionality of community and state censorship laws. It has yet to make its views known on that score...
...wrote U.S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, has "indisputably been a subject of absorbing interest to mankind through the ages." But sex and obscenity, he pointed out, are not synonymous-and there has been plenty of disagreement about when the subject of absorbing interest becomes one of prurient*interest. It was in a first major attempt to settle that issue that the Supreme Court, in a split decision, last week upheld U.S. and California criminal obscenity statutes...
...material to be judged merely by the effect of an isolated excerpt upon particularly susceptible persons." That standard was rejected, and the Supreme Court instead approved this test: "Whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interests." Justice Brennan quoted with approval a lower court's charge to the jury: "You and you alone are the exclusive judges of what the common conscience of the community...
...Kind of Ignorance. Alarmed at the Catholic tendency to judge a work of art according to prurient standards of "decency," says Kerr, professional critics tend to take an unreasoning position against any form of censorship; equally alarmed at this anarchic attitude, Catholics damn all critics as "artsakists" who are insensitive to sin and indifferent to its effects. Wise censorship simply means the exercise of prudence, says Kerr, but "the censor is not acting out of clear knowledge. He is acting in a kind of ignorance." And he should proceed with great caution for fear of destroying something good...
...moral, work of art. And yet, as the script continues, long after it has made its moral point, to fondle a variety of sexual symbols and to finger the anatomical aspects of its subject, the moviegoer can hardly help wondering if the sociological study has not degenerated into the prurient peep...