"Lord Porn's" Report

"I was 65 years old before, as far as I can remember, the word pornography ever crossed my lips in public." But after seeing the London production of Oh! Calcutta!, the seventh Earl of Longford rose in the House of Lords last year to deliver an anti-obscenity speech so stirring that it stirred the Earl himself to action. Last week an unofficial, privately financed 52-man committee chosen and headed by Longford, completed 16 months of investigation by publishing a 520-page report on pornography. Unlike the President's commission in the U.S., Lord Longford's study found that pornography creates an addiction "leading to deviant obsessions and actions." He also recommended that Britain's anti-obscenity laws be strengthened and extended.

Such conclusions would perhaps not be surprising from a group organized by a former leader of the House of Lords, a Roman Catholic convert and one of 24 knights companions of the Order of the Garter (motto: "Evil to him who evil thinks"). But Lord Longford is also a longtime socialist who helped design the British welfare state, a self-styled "fellow-traveling member of Women's Lib" and the first member of the House of Lords to speak in favor of legalizing private adult homosexual acts. Longford and the bishops, social scientists, housewives, educators, pop stars and writers who made up the committee sampled pornography of every kink and kind. They interviewed purveyors, performers and police and sorted through the 5,000 letters that poured in to them.

In concluding that pornography is harmful, the Longford Committee was much impressed by the testimony of people who claimed to have been corrupted or made criminals by sexual material. One 17-year-old boy, for example, after seeing a sex film, "rushed round his home in a frenzy and then went out and sexually assaulted a girl of five." Longford, who was dubbed "Lord Porn" by the London press, agrees with critics of his methods that "it is not always or even often possible to produce conclusive evidence that any social factor leads to a particular result." However, he and the majority of his committee believe that the weight of evidence points to the clear and present danger of pornography.

The legal definition of obscenity in Great Britain is that which tends "to deprave and corrupt." Because this effect is difficult to prove, the committee would change the wording to that which would "outrage contemporary standards of decency or humanity accepted by the public at large." It would then be up to juries to decide on contemporary standards. "Justice may be fallible," Lord Longford admits. "But opinion does express itself to the times through the jury." The report also urged that heavier fines and jail sentences be meted out and that it "be illegal to show children under educational auspices any material which may not be shown in a public place."

Civil libertarians and writers immediately charged that the proposed definition of obscenity would "virtually outlaw any expression of nonconformity" and "inhibit the serious artist." The Times of London found the whole report effective "as a barrage in a campaign" but not thorough, coherent or detached enough to be useful in sparking new legislation.

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