The sultans of smut. (The Last Word).

At the time of its 1953 release, the Doris Day musical By the Light of the Silvery Moon earned nostalgic chuckles for its depiction of Milburn, a mythical World War I-era Indiana town. So foreign are the Midwestern manners and mores displayed in that film that many contemporary viewers might doubt such a culture ever existed.

A key subplot in the movie involves the efforts of George Winfield to sanitize the script of a play. Acting on behalf of the town bank, which owns the local theater, Winfield asks the production's lead actress to delete a scene suggesting an extra-marital affair. The actress, a French faux-sophisticate, observes that the play had been performed in larger cities without complaint. With firm politeness Winfield points out that Milburn has its own standards, and he is expected to uphold them. Grudgingly, the actress relents.

"But that's censorship!" cries the typical viewer. To which the proper response is: "And your point would be...?" In the federalist system created through the Constitution, states and local communities retained the power to establish and enforce standards of decency.

In the early decades of the 20th century, the radical left -- as embodied in the ACLU and kindred organizations -- began undermining the ability of communities to protect their moral integrity. Invoking the threat to "freedom of expression" posed by community standards of decency, cultural subversives used the federal courts to strike down nearly all attempts to enforce those standards. One prominent participant in, and obvious beneficiary of, this assault on federalism is the pornography industry.

The blight George Winfield tried to contain was a single opaque reference to adultery. Today he couldn't visit a grocery store in Milburn without running a gauntlet of quasi-pornographic magazine covers. Inquiring further George might learn that most Milburn homes are connected to the porn industry by way of satellite dish, cable television, or the Internet. Should George voice outrage over this repellent spectacle, someone will patiently explain to him that nothing can be done -- it's the marketplace at work, servicing the needs of a diverse "community." But that word doesn't apply: A community is something more than a cluster of consumers defined by their appetites.

The key element of the "obscenity test" created by the Supreme Court's 1973 Miller v. California decision is the question of community standards; at least on paper, the High Court deigns to allow communities to outlaw materials that are patently perverse. But applying this test requires a compliant judiciary. In 1989, notes former California Lieutenant Governor John Harmer in his book A War We Must Win, "a Los Angeles Superior Court judge dismissed complaints against four pornographic films because 'he could not conclude that the films were patently offensive in an area as diverse as Los Angeles.'" In such fashion does perversity take refuge behind the sacred shibboleth "diversity."

The Miller decision was issued the same year as Roe v. Wade, and the porn industry awaits its own Roe decision -- a sweeping decree mowing down all local laws impeding the industry's ambitions. Speaking after the notorious 1998 "World Conference on Porn" at the University of Cal State-Northridge, ACLU commissarina Nadine Strossen criticized a federal court ruling declining to establish a single, national "community standard" for obscenity. Such a standard, Harmer observes, "would mean reducing every community standard to the lowest in the country" -- probably Los Angeles.

Pending a judicial breakthrough, the sultans of smut pursue a strategy of cultural envelopment. "In a wired world, who can say what offends the community standard of decency?" mused the narrator in the recent PBS Frontline documentary "American Porn." "Who can even define a community?" Bill Asher, the Dartmouth-educated president of Vivid Entertainment (a heavyweight in the porn industry), boasts that through the DirecTV satellite distribution network, owned by General Motors, "We're in 40 million [homes] cumulatively" across the nation.

AT&T has given the smut industry more of the credibility it craves by carrying the "Hot Network" -- which features explicit porn -- on its Broadband cable network. In-room pornography is also a profitable perquisite for major hotel chains such as Hilton and Marriott International. "The mainstream companies help legitimize what we're doing," gloats Asher. "They tell America that ... if this large company that you respect is distributing this, obviously, there's demand for it."

The obscenity trial of Larry Peterman, owner of a video store in Provo, Utah, illustrated the process Asher describes. Peterman's attorney, related the October 24, 2000 New York Times, sent an investigator to the local Marriott Hotel to tabulate the porn films available via pay-per-view. He also obtained documentation about the volume of porn rented locally via cable and satellite television.

As it turned out, residents of Utah County, a Milburn-esque community "that often boasts of being the most conservative area in the nation, were disproportionately large consumers of the very videos that prosecutors had labeled obscene and illegal," reported the Times. After deliberating for a few minutes, the jury -- applying the "community standards" test -- acquitted Peterman of all charges.