Sex & Censors

Is sex necessary on newsstands? Most U.S. citizens are content to leave the problem to the courts. But many an outraged parent is not inclined to wait for the slow-grinding mills of the law to protect his children from cheap and easy smut. The result may be a well-intentioned pressure group that tries to boycott and bully all available reading matter down to a soap-opera level. Writing in the current issue of Harper's, Editor John Fischer thinks he has found just that in what he calls "a little band of Catholics . . . conducting a shocking attack on the rights of their fellow citizens. They are engaged in an un-American activity . . . harming their country, their Church, and the cause of freedom."

Fischer's target is the National Organization for Decent Literature, headed by Msgr. Thomas Fitzgerald, director of the Chicago Archdiocesan Council of Catholic Women. NODL's method, according to Fischer, is to put pressure on newsdealers, booksellers and drugstores to remove from their counters all books on a blacklist, which includes work of such literary mandarins as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, John Dos Passes, George Orwell, Emile Zola, Arthur Koestler and Joyce Gary. "In some places--notably Detroit, Peoria and the suburbs of Boston," Fischer writes, "the organization has enlisted the local police to threaten booksellers who are slow to 'cooperate.' "

In Chicago last week, Msgr. Fitzgerald retorted that Editor Fischer and NODL were really in "substantial agreement" on how to deal with the problem. Threats or boycotts should never be used, he said, but only "persuasion." NODL was no pressure group he insisted but merely a "clearinghouse for information, suggestions and current news for the men and women who generously devote their time and energy to the fight for decent literature."

But not all Catholics agree with Msgr. Fitzgerald, and many would not quarrel with Fischer's basic point: it is one thing for a minority to persuade readers not to read certain books, but it is quite another to in effect deprive all readers of books the minority declares unsuitable. Fischer quotes the eminent Roman Catholic moral theologian, Father John Courtney Murray, S.J., of Woodstock College, Md. "No minority group has the right to impose its own religious or moral views on other groups, through the use of methods of force, coercion or violence," says Father Murray. It is especially unwise for Catholics, he adds, "lest the Church itself be identified in the public mind as a power-association. The identification is injurious; it turns into hatred of the faith."

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