Too Much Sex! President Nixon Denounces Obscenity Commission Report
President Richard Nixon on this day denounced the recently released report by the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, calling it “morally bankrupt.”
Established by Congress in 1967, at the initiative of President Lyndon Johnson who wanted to pass a hot political issue over to Congress, the Commission delivered a fairly liberal report, opposing censorship of sexually oriented materials and recommending more progressive policies regarding sex education.
The report was very different from the report of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography (July 8, 1986), which reflected the conservative social agenda of President Ronald Reagan and Attorney General Edwin Meese.
Nixon: “So long as I am in the White House, there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life.”
Read: The Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography (1971)
Read Nixon’s statement about the report: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=2759
Learn more: Leigh Ann Wheeler, How Sex Became a Civil Liberty (2013)
Learn more about the myths and facts about pornography: Marcia Pally, Sense and Censorship: The Vanity of the Bonfires (1991), http://mediacoalition.org/files/Sense-and-Censorship.pdf