Twice within less than twenty years, a concerted effort was made to restrict sexually explicit materials in the United States for political reasons. In spite of the Constitutional prohibition against restriction of freedom of religion or the press, members of the U. S. Congress, under political pressure from conservative religious groups and non-libertarian elements of the women's movement, searched for ways to justify exactly those sorts of restrictions. The first occasion grew out of a period of war, civil turmoil, and a dominant liberal ideology, and the second came from a period of relative domestic stability, economic growth, and a dominant conservative ideology.

What these two historical episodes have in common is a desire to focus public concern on a target which could be easily attacked in order to divert attention from underlying social problems which are not amenable to politically innocuous solutions. The greatest damage engendered by these efforts has been to obscure the growing body of evidence stressing the formation of attitudes in early childhood and indicting portrayals of violence as the primary source of concern.

The President's Commission

In 1968, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Stanley v. Georgia that people could read and look at whatever they wished in the privacy of their own homes. The "deeply concerned" U.S. Congress, in hope of finding another approach to controlling what many considered to be a threat to traditional American values, authorized $2 million to fund a Presidential commission to study pornography in the United States and recommend what Congress should do about it. Of the original 18 members of the commission appointed by President Johnson, all served to the end of the commission's existence except Judge Kenneth Keating (no relation to his replacement, Charles H. Keating, Jr.), who was appointed Ambassador to India by President Nixon. According to Eli M. Oboler, "Certainly this is as 'representative' a group as could have been put together for such a difficult set of purposes as were those set forth for the Commission" (4226). When a preliminary draft of the report was leaked to a House subcommittee, they discovered "to their unconcealed horror" that the commission's findings were the opposite of what the Congressmen had expected ("Pornography and Politics").

Extremists from both ends of the political spectrum expressed their displeasure during the Commission's proceedings. Two anti-pornography ministers on the commission staged their own public hearings outside of Washington; and at one of the commission's regular sessions a young radical called the project a "blatant McCarthyesque witchhunt," and threw a whipped-cream pie in the face of his questioner ("Pornography and Politics"). Charles H. Keating, Jr., head of the Citizens for Decent Literature and President Nixon's only appointment to the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, requested and received a temporary restraining order from a Federal District Court in Washington, D. C. preventing publication of the Commission's final report ("Court Enjoins"). An out-of-court settlement was reached by the commission chairman and the dissenting members just weeks before the Commission's scheduled expiration date of September 30, 1970, clearing the way for publication of the report ("Porno Cleared" 58).

In the final report, the Commission made the following non-legislative recommendations:
(1) A massive sex education campaign should be initiated, encompassing biological, social, psychological and religious information; (2) There should be continued open discussion, based on facts, of issues relating to obscenity and pornography; (3) Additional factual information should be developed through long-term research; (4) Citizens should organize at local, regional, and national levels to aid the implementation of these recommendations (PCOP 47-49).

The Commission's legislative recommendations were divided into statutes relating to adults, and statutes relating to young persons. In general, with regard to adults, the Commission recommended that legislation "should not seek to interfere with the right of adults who wish to do so to read, obtain, or view explicit sexual materials." Regarding the view that these materials should be restricted for adults in order to protect young people from exposure to them, the Commission found that it is "inappropriate to adjust the level of adult communication to that considered suitable for children." The Supreme Court supported this view. The Commission recommended legislative action prohibiting the sale of sexual materials to young persons, and to protect any person from unwanted exposure to sexual materials either through the mails or through open public display (PCOP 51-64).

A large portion of the Commission's budget was applied to funding original research on the effects of sexually explicit materials. One experiment is described in which repeated exposure of male college students to pornography "caused decreased interest in it, less response to it and no lasting effect," although it appears that the satiation effect does wear off eventually ("Once more").

With the release of the Commission's report, the political firestorm intensified. In an effort to discredit the report, Vice President Agnew associated the commission with the Johnson administration, and said, "As long as Richard Nixon is President, Main Street is not going to turn into smut alley" ("Porno Report Becomes" 34). President Nixon is quoted as saying, "So long as I am in the White House, there will be no relaxation of the national effort to control and eliminate smut from our national life" ("Critics: Censored!"). President Nixon's only appointment to the commission, Charles H. Keating Jr., asserting that he was the only "ordinary citizen" on the commission, said that the report points up the "'root cause of the trouble' on American campuses-namely, permissive professors" ("Porno Report Becomes" 34). Keating accused members of the Commission who supported the report of doing so out of economic self-interest ("Court Enjoins").

William B. Lockhart, Dean of the University of Minnesota Law School and chairman of the commission, said that before his work with the commission he had favored control of obscenity for both children and adults, but had changed his mind as a result of scientific studies done by commission researchers. In reference to dissenting commission members Keating and Rev. Morton Hill, Lockhart said, "When these men have been forgotten, the research developed by the commission will provide a factual basis for informed, intelligent policymaking by the legislators of tomorrow" ("Porno Report Becomes").

An article which appeared in the conservative National Review that October opened with a tongue-in-cheek conclusion drawn from the point made by the report that political conservatives are not as easily aroused by pornography as liberals, saying that this shows "conservatives are superior in taste and good sense." The article went on to accuse the commission of failing to confront the problem of how to protect the "quality of our public culture" ("That Porno" 1097).

On Oct. 13, just three weeks before a Congressional election, the Senate voted 60-5 (with 35 abstentions) to reject the findings and recommendations of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography. Senator Mondale of Minnesota, one of the minority voters, said the lawmakers were trying to deal "with an issue that perhaps cannot be grappled with in light of the current temperament of this country" (Oboler 4225). The resolution was sponsored by Sen. John L. McClellan (D. Ark.), who said that Congress "might just as well have asked the pornographers to write this report." To this statement, A. Plotnik replied, "Congress might just as well write its own reports, if all it wants is a scientific-sounding confirmation of its preconceptions and politically safe postures" (232). This would eventually turn out to be an eerily prophetic statement.

In his dissenting report, Charles H. Keating Jr. put forth the premise that the commission had a mandate from Congress to find ways of stopping pornography, and not to "analyze, ascertain, study, and make recommendations based on what it found to be the truth." Keating accused the Commission majority of being "dedicated to a position of complete moral anarchy," and assured the reader that "One can consult all the experts he chooses, can write reports, make studies, etc., but the fact that obscenity corrupts lies within the common sense, the reason, and the logic of every man." According to Plotnik, "It would be a sad state of affairs if each fact-finding body were to revert to 'intuition,' 'common sense,' and moral indignation, which to each citizen is something else and probably always will be" (332).

Sponsoring software- Snitch

Snitch is a drive cleaner tool created to help cleanup hard discs of offensive images, movies, internet history and other illicit files. Snitch can perform a hard drive picture search, identifying files that contain nudity, and then perform tasks such as deleting history, as well as other porn scan operations in the process of cleaning hard drives. Other disk cleaner tools do not offer all the functions of internet history cleaner and general system cleaner , and they therefore cannot clean disks and leave your computer with a completely clean drive.

Snitch uses 'intelligent', adaptive algorithms to search hard drive space and clean your computer of adult games, free adult movies and various other adult entertainment files. Skin color analysis along with other techniques make Snitch the porn scanner that is ideally suited to remove adult content.

Snitch is a software tool that is designed to cleanup disk drives and to cleanup computer storage devices of adult content. Snitch has deletion algorithms capable of deleting files, deleting internet history, deleting adult pornography and leaving you with a clean hard disk. This prevents the necessity of erasing the hard drive completely and reinstalling an operating system. Therefore a clean computer can be achieved without a full re-install. In this way Snitch performs the functions of porn eraser, hard drive cleaner, internet cleaner, and a general PC cleaner. Clean up your hard drives with Snitch software.

Snitch provides a free demo for users to test the software for themselves. This free porn remover demo allows users to try out Snitch before paying, to see if it performs as they expect it to.