Women's Focus; Women's Focus; Anti-Obscenity Bill; Part 1

By 21 String Harp is played by the master musicians and keepers of the traditions of the Mandingo people. Don't miss for day Musasuso, 8 o'clock Saturday evening, January 28th at the chemo. Broadcast of this program is made possible in part by Jones Intercable, fulfilling the promise of quality television, with performing arts, documentary, news, and public affairs programming, and a supporter of KUNM. And you're tuned to listen or supported KUNM 90.1 FM Albuquerque. You are tuned to women's focus and that will be starting up right away today. We have two guests, representative Mary Thompson of Las Cruces, and former prosecutor Randy McGinn will be talking about the state anti-obscenity bill that's now in front of the state legislature. First we're going to hear a little bit of music. Music, this is something from Stone Soup. We're going to hear a little bit of music, and we're going to hear a little bit of

music. And the ground dances the same. And I touch each tree at the past, and I call each one by name. And something in this dude, and something falls asleep, fall around the shoreline, all around the shoreline, down beside the water, where the deer come to drink.

I thought she'd wait for me, and she was listening, I think. And her eyes were gray and green, and her legs were long and lean, all around the shoreline, all around the shoreline, somewhere between the earth and sky, where the pine needles lay, the light comes in like fingers at the end of every day, and something in this dude, and something falls asleep, fall around the shore, all around the shoreline, all around

the shoreline. And that's music from Stone Soup and your tune to listener supported KUNM 90.1 FM Albuquerque. The staff and management of KUNM would like to advise you that portions of the following program contain language which may be offensive to certain members of your family. listener discretion is advised. And good morning. My name is Chris Martina. I'm here with you on women's focus. And with me in the studio are two guests who will be discussing the state anti obscenity bill that's in front of the state legislature right now. First, we have Mary Thompson of Las Cruces, state representative who is sponsoring that bill.

Good morning, Mary. Oops. Let's see if we can get some sound out of you right now. Okay. How's that volume? Much better. Well, Randy McGinn who is a former prosecutor in Bernalillo County, she is now in private practice of doing criminal defense work and she also represents rape victims in civil suits. Good morning, Randy. Good morning. How are you? I'm fine. Good. Good. Okay. First, Representative Thompson, I'd like to ask you to give us a brief outline of your bill. I think the most important point of House Bill 118 is that it would place into state law statute that would parallel Supreme Court decisions relative to obscene pornography. I think that's pretty well condenses it. How do you define obscenity for the purposes of this bill? Can you just give us that outline of that? The first really important Supreme Court decision was in 1973 that was Miller versus California. And in that decision, the Supreme Court came up with what they called a three prong test of defining obscenity and that test, that three prong test has been modified a little bit

relative to a May of 87 Supreme Court decision. And if you'd like, I can read you that three prong test. Obscene means any material or performance presented through any medium that won. The average person applying contemporary adult community standards would find taken as a whole and that's very important taken as a whole, appeals to the perient interest to the average person applying contemporary adult community standards would find the picks or describes sexual conduct, say domestic sexual abuse, sexually explicit nudity or human expatory functions in a patently offensive way and three, a reasonable person would find taken as a whole, like serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value. And it's very important to remember that this is a three prong test and all conditions must be met, any only finding for one of these would not indicate that material was obscene. Okay, now what do you hope to accomplish by this having this bill passed?

Well, 44 other states have obscenity statutes. This is not new ground that we're plowing here. And I believe that it's important for community, county, and state officials to have this law available to them in order to address in a strong way the presence of obscene material in their community, if they choose to. Okay, Ms. McGinn, I'd like to turn to you and ask you, what do you base your opposition on? Several things. The bill is a very extensive, frightening, broad-based bill that covers all kinds of communication, under the definitions of the bill, it would involve any sexual acts or simulated sex acts that occurred on video, on radio, on television, or over the telephone. It would even include, under the definitions of this act, things like one person showing another person or giving another person something that was sexually explicit.

And there is no prohibition for one family member giving it to another family member, for example, or a boyfriend and a girlfriend giving sexual material to each other. The second thing, besides the censorship question, is that it prohibits the sale of sexual age that would include things like vibrators and other sexual age anywhere in the state of New Mexico. Third, it proposes to lock up juveniles under 18 for a high court misdemeanor, which is up to a year in jail, if they pretend or lie and say they are under, they are actually 18 in order to get sexual materials, and also, under the definitions and the broad sweep of this act, could cause one juvenile to be accused of a high court misdemeanor if he showed obscene material to another juvenile? But don't you think this would protect women from sexual assault in some way? At least make it kind of a less socially acceptable type of a thing to see obscene sex acts

or something. Doesn't that prompt men to rape women? That is the current argument of people who are for censorship. Certainly, the section on sexual AIDS has nothing to do with that, and there is no evidence that sexual AIDS cause rape. There is a big debate going on right now, and in particular with the latest statement by Ted Bundy, that in fact, violent pornography may cause men to go out and rape and accost women. I don't think the answer to that is censorship of any kind. I think we have statutes right now that address the conduct, the acts of people who do look at pornography and go out and abuse women or rape women, and we put them in jail, and we execute them in this country as we execute Ted Bundy. And that addresses the conduct.

The approach shouldn't be to address or censor the speech, but to address the conduct and the acts of people that would go out and do something like that. Representative Thompson, do you have a response to that? Well, I have a couple of things I'd like to respond to. Many parts of this bill are, in fact, existing law in New Mexico, and we are pulling them from scattered portions of the statutes and putting it into a central part of the central chapter. For example, their language about minors and harmful to minors as pornography, child porn, sex exploitation, those are existing laws. From one point, your question relative to the likelihood of this sort of material triggering abuse of women, the information that I have indicates that, in fact, everyone likes to say that in Denmark, when they legalize pornography, sex crimes dropped. The fact of the matter is that they redefined what a sex crime was, dropped many of the

categories that previously been offenses. And when you look at the rate of rape and the opening up of all of the kinds of pornography, in fact, the rape rate did climb in Denmark when this material became more veiled. I thought that the United States had one of the highest rates of rape in the world. Well, I'm not saying that we don't have the highest one. I'm just saying that this is an instance where there were records of having restrictions on pornography, the restrictions were removed and statistics indicating that, in fact, the rape rates did climb when this material was made available. A question I have kind of related to the censorship issue that Ms. McGinn brought up relates to the segments in the bill that it goes along with the three-pronged definition that you were talking about. And there was a segment towards the beginning of the bill where it said this was defined obviously, the community was defined as things that were in the jurisdiction of the court.

Correct. Okay. And there was, there's all the definitions about things about community standards, contemporary community standards. Now, something that, say a film, let's just take a film, for example, that is showing in a conservative part of the state, let's pick Hobbs because Hobbs is fairly conservative. It might shock the people in Hobbs, might be playing at, in part of an art festival at the Lenswick Theatre in Santa Fe and not be considered to be obscene, but to have artistic merit. But the people in Hobbs think it's a horrendous thing, so they decide to ban it in that part of the court system. How do you have uniform enforcement of something like this? The important fact, and I referred to the 87 Supreme Court decision, that third prong was, if you will, broadened so that it's intended to reflect a national philosophy, rather than a community philosophy.

So depending on your view of this type of law, it was either weak or strengthened because the first two standards, in your example, would indeed apply to Hobbs or apply to Santa Fe. But that third prong would no longer become a Hobbs standard, but in fact, a United States standard, so that you couldn't have this one community having that sort of impact. On the point of censorship, my understanding, for it to be censorship, there has to be prior restraint, and this bill calls for a trial and a jury and a judge so that you wouldn't have three or four people sitting around saying, this can be sold and this can be shown and this can't, and this can't. So we believe that this indeed is not censorship. And this begin? Oh, I think it absolutely is. Given the vague and ambiguous definition in the act, that is that it's going to be the community's standards applied to what appeals to the purine interest.

Not only will there be differences between Hobbs and Santa Fe, but there will be differences among juries in the same town. This act permits people to go after, as I've seen, even things that are rated G, PG, PG-13, and are by the movie administration. You can present evidence at your trial that it was in fact rated G by the Motion Picture Association, but that is not an absolute defense. So if I am a movie, a theater owner, no matter where I am in this state, I have to decide whether or not a movie like Carnal Knowledge, which in the 1970s was, one movie owner was brought up on criminal charges for showing the movie Carnal Knowledge, which in 1971 was one of the ten best films of the year. And his conviction was finally reversed, saying that that was not an obscene film. But he, in a vacuum, can't determine what a jury is going to say appeals to the purine interest or not.

It does affect him as far as prior restraint is concerned, because he has to wait, he has to show the film first, be arrested, charged under the statute, have a jury trial, and then at the end of the case, the jury will say whether or not this falls within the definition of obscenity. And that is exactly what prior restraint is all about. Since the time that Carnal Knowledge was brought for review, there has never been an attempt to have designated as obscene any R-rated movie, that the ruling of the courts in that instance made it very clear that they didn't consider that obscene, that the prosecutor was ridiculous for even bringing the prosecution, and there has not even been an attempt since that time to bring that sort of a movie. And I think that there have been enough court actions, it's become much clear what indeed is in danger of being ruled obscene. So prosecutors have some guidelines, some ways, some materials to use as a standard in analyzing whether or not something, they would have a chance of success in bringing that sort of

charge against material, video magazine, whatever. Okay. I want to move this a little bit to a slightly different area, and I mean, we are talking about censorship, because that's the argument that I hear mostly against this bill of censorship. And what I hear for it is that it will protect women from sexual assault, protect neighborhoods from crime. It's a move toward doing that. What I'd like to ask you, Representative Thompson, is where do we draw the line on what's good and what's not, on what's acceptable and what is, and how do we really determine that in a sense of, for instance, in the bill, the segment on sexual devices, isn't that something that's a private matter between a couple? Well, at one point, I received a phone call from a very distraught woman who thought that it was wrong to have this because of some problems that she and her husband had.

She had need of one of these kind of things, and she indicated to me that in fact her, I don't remember now if she, her religion was, so I'll say priest, but maybe it was a minister. I don't not remember. But he gave her one of these devices, which in fact was not the right type, caused a great deal of problem. And it occurred to me that if this woman had instead approached a medical person with this problem, could have been afforded some remedy that would have been less stressful than this non-medical, non-psychiatrist, non-psychologist, tempting to get into a field where he was not qualified. And there are some other, I think, health issues, when a person has a dysfunction that might lead them to want to use some of these, that is sometimes an indication of a health problem. And that was what led me to leave this, although we're going to amend the definition of sexual device a little bit, to leave this in the bill because I thought there was an issue here

that the committee that's going to hear this bill, the first committee that's going to hear this bill, deserve to at least have a look at. And so we'll leave the decision of whether to leave that in the bill or not up to the committee. But I decided that there were some issues that we ought to at least talk about. One of the uses that these devices are put to, I hate to talk about some of this stuff, so I'm going to be a little vague and I hope that your audience will understand. These things are used often in abuse of children, in sexual abuse of children. They have a function in initiating that kind of abuse. And that's why also the use is that pornography is put to. It's shown to children to lower their inhibitions. So it's not just women that the attitudes toward women that can be hurt by obscene pornography. But it is generally used in the sexual abuse of children to lower their inhibitions.

Randy McGuin is popping here, so I have to say something, so I'll let her. You know, what is dirty to one person is erotic or sexy to other people. And in fact, many people use sexual aids, many couples use sexual aids to enhance their sexual relationship. What Representative Thompson is proposing by this bill is to say, no one can have these because some people misuse them. You should be able to say no one should have cars because some people misuse them. And the act says no one can sell them. There is an interesting provision in the act that says you cannot be prosecuted for using a sexual device in the privacy of your own home. However, no one can sell them to you, which is like saying you can eat hamburgers but you can't buy them. And creates a situation whereby it outlaws the selling of sexual devices, so those who have them now can save them and pass them on hand to hand to their children, but there aren't going to be any more if this act passes because you can't get them on the open market.

Well, let me represent it. I've got to challenge one part of that because we have language that indeed physicians, psychiatrists, if this has a medical purpose or there's a real need, there are provisions for a group of educated people, trained people to have access to these. So they are not gone, but who has a right to sell these is limited. Let me get back to Randy McGinn and what you were saying, Representative Thompson said something very important having to do with child abuse. Now we're trying to prevent our kids from child abuse. We are trying to cut down on social attitudes and cut down on things that lead to sexual violence. I mean, I think that's a strange word, rape is a crime of violence, it's not a sex crime, so let's make that real clear. But we are trying to cut down on sexual assault, eliminated entirely, it would be a really

good idea. Now if we're against regulating things that lead to and that actually are used for these things and literature and depictions of sexual violence against women, I would like to compare that to the civil rights movement, if we hadn't had the Supreme Court decide against segregation in the Brown versus the Board of Education back in the 50s, would we have had the Voting Rights Act passed in 1964, would we have had a whole bunch of things, a whole chain of legislation and things happen, wouldn't we still have people of color in this country still living under apartheid as they did in the 40s and 50s, and in some places probably still today. It's much, it's much better, shouldn't we start to raise people's consciousness by making some of these things so distasteful that you could be punished for doing it? And we have done that.

The difference between Brown versus Board of Education and this act is that Brown versus Board of Education was regulating conduct, you cannot segregate. It did not, Brown versus Board of Education did not say you can no longer call people racial names because that is speech, and as much as it's distasteful, as much as we hate it, people still are allowed to do that in this country. And I think we have taken very severe steps and things are getting better as far as rape victims are concerned, as far as regulating the conduct, and that's what you can regulate. You can increase the penalties for rape. You can, as our legislature has done, protect rape victims by not allowing their past sexual history to come up during a trial, and they've done those kind of things. And that again is a regulation of conduct, and that's perfectly permissible. I don't think anybody believes that vibrators cause child abuse or vibrators cause people to rape people. But the, you know, there's some of the pornography that you see. For instance, there's an infamous very well-known videotape that not only is sexually violent, but is also racist. I believe it's general custer tying up an Indian woman, a raping

her, and you get so many points for how fast you do it or something like, I don't know how they score the thing, but I mean, that's disgusting. And that, you get somebody with a Ted Bundy mentality, and they start watching this kind of thing. And not only do they think it's okay, they're going to maybe go and pick a woman of color like a double victimization of somebody. And if they do, they are punished for it. If they do the inappropriate thing, most people, you don't control something by doing away with a whole opinion. In fact, most people, when they see something like that, have the reaction you have, that they are appalled by it and offended by it. The way you combat that is not to eliminate that speech or that expression. The way you combat it is to put more information into the system, to exercise your own free speech rights, to protest that, to write letters to the manufacturer, to write letters to the

editors saying that this stuff is offensive. You put more speech into the system rather than eliminating speech. Okay, you're talking about conduct, too. Let me get into that. Also, you have some of these skin magazines and snuff films and that kind of stuff. That's conduct and being recorded. It's not being done in dark shadows somewhere where nobody can see it and sometimes it doesn't even appear to be consenting people who are doing it as in the instance of a snuff film. That's conduct. And again, our laws are set up to design, to deal with that. If there is a snuff film and someone has a snuff film, they can prosecute those people for murder. If they do a snuff film, if they grab some woman against her will and drag her in and film a rape scene, they can prosecute those people for rape. They can still, the laws are already there to prosecute those people for the conduct. The problem is not with the speech, the problem perhaps is with the unwillingness to go after and try to prosecute some of those things and that's what should be done. Those things should be prosecuted.

Okay, I'd like to move on to another point. In the bill, Representative Thompson, there's a segment in there talks about sexual deviant, or deviant sexual behavior, some such thing like that. What concerns me about that when I read that was, how is this going to affect gay people, lesbians, gay men? This won't affect their conduct. What this deals with is selling, wholesale, or retail, or performances. What two people are doing in a home or a motel or whatever is not of interest in this bill. I'm glad that you've, because I had made myself a note on this summer, I don't know if we've mentioned it yet, but the governor had a task force, an anti obscenity task force, had legislators and citizens on it. We had two people testify before our committee. One was a psychologist from Utah, a doctor client, another was a psychologist. I believe it's psychologists, maybe it's psychiatrists,

excuse me, but he has Dr. Doer from here. Michael Doer, Michael Doer. While the two gentlemen differed on their attitudes towards damage and so forth of pornography, there was one point that they agreed on, which I thought was very interesting. That is that deviant behavior is learned. If anyone looks at pornography, hardcore obscene pornography, I think you could say that that's a very good teaching tool for deviant behavior. How do you define deviant behavior? Maybe that's the first question in this. When I studied sociology a number of years ago, they considered homosexuality, deviant behavior, although now social attitudes have changed quite a bit. Does this mean that if, oh, that in places where they consider homosexuality to be deviant, that any literature aimed at homosexuals is going to be considered obscene? If it met three-pronged standard, who's deciding this? A jury, a local jury, people in the jurisdiction where the action is brought, where the trial

is, where the judge is elected that decides whether or not to grant the injunction, where the district attorney is, or the city attorney, or the county attorney that decides to bring this. Sometimes people think that what I'm trying to do is pass a law that will be my standard. That is not my intent at all. There are a tremendous number of people in this state that believe that the sale of obscene pornography is wrong. This bill won't even say that what they think is obscene is what will be obscene. This bill only says that a local jury, a local judge will decide using the three-pronged test, what is obscene. Okay, let's get back to the definition of deviant, because I'd like you to define what that means. That's not included in the language of the bill. You use the term deviant in your lead into that, and I just thought it would be interesting to know that even people that disagree about whether or not pornography is bad, do agree that deviant behavior is learned.

Okay, and that's not a language. I don't believe that's even a term used. Has that been removed because the draft that I had had it in the definition, I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with that where that is in the bill. And that is in the definition of purient, it said, where the material or performance that's designed for and primarily disseminated or promoted to a clearly defined deviant sexual group. Okay, well that definition is different in this bill, I'm sorry, that's my mistake. You've got a new version there, and it's about the same page. Purient means, I'll read you the current definition. I'm sorry that I didn't get that straight with you. Purient means an unhealthy, lustful, erotic, lascivious, degrading, shameful, or morbid interest. In sexual conduct, sexually explicit human nudity, say don't have statistics, sexual abuse, mood exhibition of the genitals, or human excretory functions. Okay, so it's not in there anymore. All right, that was my mistake. We have this bill having a different draft. We have substantially improved over what we were looking at a year ago. Okay. Well, supposing that community decided that they were going to close their porn

shops. Okay, and nobody challenged that, that was fine, it was all out the door. Now somebody in that community decided that they would come to Albuquerque, or to some town where they could get it, what they wanted to see, and brought that home with them. That's fine. It is. That's fine. What you have in your home is fine. Now, there's also catalogs, and you know, and sometimes people order this stuff through the mail. Actually, they've made themselves liable to the federal law. That's an interstate transfer. That's right. But if somebody drove and somewhere else, some of their part of the state and brought stuff back, that's certainly their right. As long as they use it in their own home, if they brought it back and gave it to someone else under this act, I think they could be prosecuted. If they even gave it to them, not even sold it to them, just gave it to a friend. Under the definition of these acts, that person could be prosecuted. I don't believe it does that. We talk about retail and wholesale in this, and I don't believe that any district attorney or county attorney

is going to go after me if I brought something like that back and loan it to my neighbor. Who is going to go to the DA and say, Mary Thompson loaned a film that I think is obscene to her neighbor Rose. I just don't think any attorney, any prosecutor, is going to take action. I don't think we've ever seen 44 states have laws. Virtually the same as this one. I have not heard. No one has brought me any horror stories. All these what ifs, what ifs, what ifs come up. I have not had anyone bring me an actual example of charges being brought under the kind of situation that we just described here. I guess my concern is that the act allows that the definition of promoting prostitution means to issue, sell, give, provide, advertise, reproduce, reproduce, or lend in addition to another number of other things, deliver, transfer, transmit, etc.

Ms. Thompson keeps assuring us that none of these things will happen, but in fact, under this act, somebody can do it, but haven't. But let me ask you to finish the sentence in there to give, etc. What? It's just a definition of promoting. Oh, promoting. To promote prostitution, excuse me, promote pornography. You said prostitution. Confusing. Yeah, and pornography. Okay. Well, let's talk about crime for a minute. Since the word prostitution came up, we have neighborhoods here in Albuquerque where the citizens are very concerned about the kind of traffic that prostitution, or that the porn shops, the presence of the porn shops, brings to their neighborhoods. It brings prostitution. It brings, which brings with it drugs and which brings with it residential burglary and sexual assault many times among the members of that neighborhood, women getting a cost at all the time, whether it's just for a just quote unquote, to get picked up or whether it is actually an assault. And there's

a lot of this incidence of these things going on in neighborhoods. Now, if we have a situation where somebody's taking drugs and the drugs are leading those people to steal for money to get the drugs, the crime is the burglaries and the robberies and that kind of stuff. So we make the drugs illegal. We make it illegal for people to do it because it lends their conduct a certain bad edge that infringes upon the rights of everybody else. Now, it seems to me that by that argument that we have pornography that leads to all these other things, why not try to protect neighborhoods and the people that live in them from the kind of crime that the presence of porn shops brings into that neighborhood. I think you're assuming that it is a foregone conclusion that pornography leads to crime. That is very much indisputable. I mean, even the things about there was testimony before the city commission when they were doing their obscenity ordinance about why there were

prostitutes on central in the vicinity of the same areas where the pornography shops were. And the testimony by the police, members of the police department were that they were there because of the cheap motels, not because of the pornography shops. And that's why they were there on central. And so you might as well eliminate the cheap motels as you do the pornography shops according to the police, the vice cops who deal with us on a daily basis. Well, isn't it kind of a chicken in the egg kind of thing? You got a porno shop and prostitutes running around and just reminds them that get a cheap motel to do what you're going to do. I only have one instant instance that I have information about that I can cite you relative to this concern. Cincinnati, Ohio had kept very detailed crime records and then began enforcing their anti obscenity laws. And there was in fact a reduction in crime following the beginning to enforce these laws. So we do in that one city have very detailed records of in fact a positive impact of reduction of crime coming following the enforcement of

vicinity statutes or ordinances. But in fact the study is done and there are very few scientific studies done in this issue, which is why we're sort of operating in a vacuum to say pornography causes this. There was one study done by one of the leading researchers in the area, a fellow named Dr. Donnerstein, who did, took three groups of college students, three study groups, tested their attitudes about women and then submitted them to three different things. One group of college students were submitted to films on literature depicting violence towards women. The second group was shown pornography plus violence, violent pornography towards women. And the third group was just shown pornography. The two first groups had their attitudes about women changed and began to have some of the feelings about degrading women. And the conclusion of Dr. Donnerstein at the end of that study was that it was not the pornography that was the problem. It was the violence. And that's what should be eliminated not the pornography. Most pornography that's available now is what we're calling

obscene hard core is, in fact, violent pornography. So I think, and one of the, I'm not an attorney or a medical person, so I'm having to struggle with words. But one of the effects that has been seen is that someone will start looking at soft core playboy. And in fact, in some individuals who are susceptible to this sort of material, they become, they get to get stimulated. They need more and more explicit, graphic, violent. So they move from what nobody regulates, except in regards to minors, to very damaging, very, well, isn't that kind of like the argument that if you smoke marijuana, you're going to end up a heroin addict? Well, I just said some people. Now, I didn't say everybody did. Okay. I said, and it's just and another parallel that folks might relate to better is an example of alcohol. You and

I can have a drink every night from now on and never want more than one drink at night or skip or quit. But some people have a drink and that's the trigger. And we have a lot of alcoholics. So I think people can recognize the alcoholic syndrome, maybe better than you can relate to the drug syndrome. And there's, and there is a parallel with some people just as some people become alcoholic, some people become addicted to pornography. But it doesn't mean you eliminate alcohol for everybody because some people, just like you don't eliminate pornography for everybody, which is what this does, because some people have problems with it and some people behave inappropriately with it. And that's my problem with this bill. So it censors it for all of us, for those of us who would look at, look at, look out of curiosity at something that was hardcore pornography and rejected as most people do and be turned off by it. It eliminates it for all of us because some people have problems. Well, the impacts of what happens to people that look at this is that so often they act out what they've looked at. And that happens in the, in the instance of child porn and

adult porn and everything, you know, sought. I think there's a difference. Well, it's interesting because it leads me to a question of a difference, a very, what I noticed is a marked difference between the state bill as you propose it. And the city, Albuquerque City, anti obscenity ordinance. And there's a fourth prong as I understand it in the city ordinance, which says it must be picked violent pornography. It must be violent as well as all the other three standards that you mentioned, the purine interest and free standards and what was the third one without without without, without artistic value exactly. And it must be violent. So therefore, something like the, like a depiction of customer raping the Indian would probably be banned. And it depicts violence. And we've all talked about how even Ted Bundy didn't just say pornography. He said violent pornography. Why is that missing from your bill?

Well, the violence, our bill is constructed to follow Supreme Court decision. And Supreme Court decision is a three-pronged test. Well, now, did you have more to say that? No, that's made you rough. We're just following what we know has been enacted in other states and what the Supreme Court will support. And that's what we're going with. Kind of a follow-up to that with the idea of violence. If, I mean, we all, I think, pretty well, recognize that rape is not a sex crime. It is a violent crime. I think that's the accepted standard among prosecutors and among the court systems is that rape is recognized as a violent crime, a crime of violence. And if that's the case, and if it's the violent stuff that leads, and if it's violence that leads to these kind of horrendous acts, why are we not looking at curtailing the sale and display of things like Rambo movies that's off the top of my head, or Soldier of Fortune magazine, or violent stuff in general, why

are we not trying to change those attitudes rather than what people are debating as perhaps erotic on the one hand, erotic for some people, not obscene. Well, I think if we tried to draft a bill like that, it wouldn't make it to first base as, as, as defensible. You know, I think the Supreme Court's made it real clear what they're willing to identify as harmful and obscene. And, er, and I'm not interested in going out and, er, and plowing new ground on this, but I do think we need to provide to the state what we know are defendable, supportable standards. I think the response is that under the current state of affairs from the Supreme Court of violence, depictions of violence, and even subjugation of women is constitutionally protected speech, and the Supreme Court has said that obscenity that falls within this definition is not protected speech, and people can limit it. And the Court has said, er, in fact, there was a case in Indiana where they had a statute that specifically set out er, er, as obscene

things which showed the subjugation of women. And the, er, excuse me, it wasn't the Supreme Court, it was a seven-circuit Court of Appeals. Reverse that is unconstitutional. Said the act was unconstitutional, that that was constitutionally protected speech to show the subjugation of women and those kind of things. And it has been held by the seven-circuit Court of Appeals to be, er, protected speech. Before we go any further, I want to remind our listeners that you're tuned to KUNM 90.1 FM Albuquerque, this is Women's Focus. My name is Chris Martino, my guest this morning are State Representative Mary Thompson of Las Cruces, sponsor of the anti obscenity bill in the state legislature. And Randy McGinn, who is a former prosecutor and represents rape victims in civil cases. Um, Randy, I would like to ask you something kind of following up on what you just said about the constitution. Um, we have, er, what is it about the constitution that it should be so precious to me as a woman when my rights are not particularly, er,

protected as the special rights that I have to be left alone. Um, when the constitution was drafted, women were not mentioned at all. Blacks were mentioned as two thirds of a person. Indians didn't get the vote till 1948 in this state. Um, there's a whole bunch of stuff like that that makes the cons, kind of waters it down a little bit. And we still have, we have somebody, er, you know, the constitution who's getting, er, so worked up about the rights of the Ku Klux Klan, yet they have a case that the Supreme Court is reviewing right now. Uh, actually, they just ruled on a case that said that the city of Richmond Virginia was not practicing this group. I mean, it's like taking apart rights for women and people of color, but upholding the rights of the white male population. And don't let my listeners think that I'm being down on anybody or up on anybody. I think, but that is something that people think about. Well, and women have a lot of complaints, er, against the constitution. We have not been treated very well. Uh, and we have two things we can

do about that, either one we can say the constitution hasn't treated us well so that now that we have political power, we're going to use the constitution to not treat other people well. That's one approach you can take. Or because we have been abused, because we have been the people who at the turn of the century were exercising our right of free speech in trying to get the vote and being locked up and forced fed, because we understand how it can be abused. It seems to me we should be more protective of the rights in the constitution for everybody and fight for those rights ourselves. And that's the approach I would take. But where's the moral outrage that people see, you know, they don't want this stuff in Kansas City about free speech with, I think there was a cable TV program that the Ku Klux Klan was or the Nazi Party or somebody was going to broadcast and people were outraged that these people would would say something like this, but on the other hand outraged that they would dare to suppress that right. And where's the moral outrage when it comes to protecting people, protecting people from what that kind of speech and letting that

stuff out out there leads to. I mean, isn't there something about clear and present danger in the constitution? Certainly. But, but there is no clear and present danger that has ever been proven from pornography, even from violent pornography, that might Dr. Michael Durr from UNM who came and testified before the city commission, who deals with sex, his whole job is dealing with rehabilitating sex offenders. And he says, he said before the city commission, and I believe before the governor's task force, there is no connection between pornography and sexual abuse of children and women. Representative Thompson, you had, well, there's a couple, there's a couple of points, that's interesting.