Word: smuts
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Proposition 16 is the product of CLEAN Inc. (California League Enlisting Action Now), a Los Angeles-based lobby founded by San Diego's conservative Republican State Assemblyman E. Richard Barnes, a retired Navy chaplain who argues that smut has brought about a U.S. "moral crisis." The organization's campaign director is William K. Shearer, a top tactician in putting across the now-voided housing initiative (Proposition 14). Says Shearer: "I always liked to think of myself as the most conservative man in San Diego County...
Blatant Display. Shearer & Co. not only claim that U.S. smut peddlers now gross $2 billion a year, but they calculate that "about 60% of the lewd paperbacks and magazines circulating today in the U.S. are published by California firms," three-quarters of whose products "fall into the hands of teenagers under 18." In January, for example, Los Angeles Publisher Milton J. Luros (estimated annual sales: $6 million) and eight associates were convicted on 147 counts of violating anti-obscenity laws by deluging Iowa with six smutty paperbacks and 14 nudist magazines. Although 250 obscenity cases are now pending in California...
Despite that disclaimer and the fact that police were unable to prove that he had ever before peddled smut, Klor was convicted of violating a state law banning the distribution of obscene matter. Had he actually done...
...Eager to rejoice in the Supreme Court's apparent step backward toward your own smug preference for guarding society from "smut peddlers," [April 1] you neglect to criticize the Ginzburg case for its deviation from the legal distinction between direct and hearsay evidence: is obscenity now to be defined by examining not the product itself but how the salesman touts it? If indeed Americans so desperately need guidance that censorship is necessary, let our mentors at least concern themselves with the contents of the allegedly pornographic package instead of its wrapping...
...third case, which cleared Fanny Hill, Brennan noted expert testimony in the Massachusetts trial that Fanny "belongs to the history of English literature rather than the history of smut." All the same, added Brennan, in an apparent invitation to further litigation, "evidence that the book was commercially exploited for the sake of prurient appeal, to the exclusion of all other values, might justify the conclusion that the book was utterly without redeeming social value...