"The Report That Shocked the Nation" and Its Obscene Implications: The 1970 Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography Report and the New Conservative Sexual Politics

The libertarian 1970 report of the Presidential Commission on Obscenity and Pornography marked a decisive break in liberal control over the national discourse of obscenity and pornography, as the burgeoning New Right proved able to replace the language of freedom and empiricism with one of alarmist moral outrage. This paper examines the controversy over the report, first looking at the inability of liberals to accommodate the implications of their own position; as supporters of both free expression and "family values," liberals offered no effective response to the surge of hardcore pornography into American cities that accompanied the report. Conservatives, meanwhile, mobilized a tremendously effective counterattack on the report's "permissiveness," orchestrated by the Nixon administration's aggressive publicity machine. Conflating liberalism with libertinism, conservatives used the porn debate to position themselves as the true defenders of family values, a gesture the New Right would quickly institutionalize through its related opposition to feminism, reproductive rights, and gay rights. Ultimately, the paper argues, liberalism’s longtime tacit policing of normative sexual borders helped naturalize the very heteronormative, maritally-oriented vision of acceptable American sexuality that allowed the New Right to capitalize on the commission report’s implications for undermining that moral order. Liberalism's failure to resolve, or even acknowledge, its own sexual politics ceded “family values” to the New Right, ushering in a new era of conservative sexual politics and reshaping the national political landscape for decades to come.