THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 16, 1994 TAG: 9410150103
SECTION: VIRGINIA BEACH BEACON PAGE: 06 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Beth Barber
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
You're a prude, he said.
Am not, I said.
Only a prude, he said, would even consider letting somebody in a community decide what is obscene and, therefore, what his neighbors can or can't see or use, buy or sell. You don't like adult bookstores, don't go in.
What adults do in private is their business, I said, but what's seen and sold in public is community business. To allow no community standard is still to set a standard - of anything goes. And citizens who dislike that standard have every right to protest.
Besides, I said, anything doesn't go, not with the courts, not even with you. Child pornography, for instance.
No, he said. But we're talking adults.
No, I said, we're talking adult bookstores and obscenity, which like Potter Stewart I know when I see.
Two days after this conversation I saw the merchandise seized from a local adult bookstore. I didn't see obscenity.
Some of this stuff is laughably unbelievable. Some is, um, inventive, if it works. Some is probably artful enough for a federal arts grant.
All of it is disgusting, terribly expensive and ultimately pathetic. But none of it, by itself, is obscene. Now, how it's used, well, that's another column which I will never write.
So say I, and so what? My personal opinion doesn't count, and neither did the personal opinions of the nine citizens the commonwealth's attorney's office tapped to view these items. They were selected for their knowledge of the community and its level of tolerance for merchandise of this sort.
Most of these citizens thought the community would consider the items obscene. That thought seems to have occurred to the proprietor of the bookstore from which they were seized: For a second time in his bookstore career, he didn't put the acceptability or obscenity of such items to the ultimate community test, a jury.
Two citizens decided otherwise, that the items are not obscene.
So who better reflects the standard of obscenity hereabouts: the seven who thought the items obscene or the two who thought they weren't?
Time, and the verdicts in the cases remaining, will help to tell. They will tell prosecutors what standard the community wants. They will tell merchants what in the traffic of ``marital aids'' this community will bear.
Is that important? Yes, because the record shows the traffic worsens unless and until somebody calls a halt.
That's why there's got to remain in place some means by which to gauge the community standard for public activity, a mechanism to detect its shifts and to give its enforcement the priority, high or low, the community decides is due.
We can argue about the means. One way is, as in these cases, citizen protest to law enforcement, and police, prosecutor and courts following through. It's an imperfect system, and testifiers hand-picked by a prosecutor are as imperfect as it comes.
But the end is worth seeking the means: Striking a balance between free-speech rights and community rights, between censorship and sleaze, between First Amendment purists and us prudes. by CNB