Neighborhood effects.

Neighborhood Effects

THE SUPREME COURT has taken two small but worthy steps against pornography. The Court ruled 7 to 2 (Brennan and Marshall are still around) that communities can limit porn by zoning it away from residential areas, parks, churches, and schools. The Court also ruled, 6 to 3 (Stevens too this time), that police seizures of obscene video cassettes don't violate the First Amendment. But it struck down an Indianapolis ordinance that banned porn as discriminatory against women.

An encouraging sidelight is that the liberal editorialists are letting the ACLU shout alone. Even the New York Times has quietly dropped the argument that if you ban Hustler you will go on to ban Plato.

A Minneapolis law now under attack by "civillibertarians' requires the hard-core stuff to be sold in sealed wrappers or kept out of the reach of minors. A lawyer from the Minnesota Civil Liberties Union argues: "The problem is that retailers don't know how to comply. They ask, "How do I know what's going to be obscene to minors? Do I have to read every magazine and book I sell?'' Heaven forbid. Grocers don't have to taste every package of hamburger they sell either, but they'd better not give their customers rotten meat. And bad meat doesn't advertise itself as such. Porn does. Minneapolis isn't overtaxing the literacy skills of retailers.

The liberal community has finally begun to recognize, however tacitly, that pornography, like factories, has "neighborhood effects' and must therefore be subject to some regulation. The paradigm of "private acts between consenting adults' has created new, and foul, social realities. The entire liberal agenda has leaned on the insight that capitalist transactions have profound consequences for third parties; it's about time liberalism revoked the odd exemption it has extended to the entrepreneurs of obscenity.