Busybody over obscenity

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Busybody over obscenity				February 8, 2010

I’m happy to report that while our state legislature is, like Sisyphus, futilely pushing the rocks of a state budget crunch, transportation woes and education funding up their respective unconquerable hills, my delegate, Brenda Pogge (R-96), has bypassed the rock push and cut to the essence of legislative nitty-gritty.

Besides initiating legislation that would allow gun owners to carry their weapons into just about every milieu other than the grave and extending the death penalty to include those who do in secondary officials, the Pogger has come up with a stunning piece de resistance that will assure the moral and psychic purification of state college and university campuses.

In what appears to be a none-too-subtle offensive maneuver against a repeat performance of the Sex Workers Art Show at William & Mary, Pogge, in HB 1296, proposes that on public college campuses no public money, including student activity fees, will be used for the display of art, literature, theater performances or movies that contain obscenity unless written permission is given by the college’s governing body.

Needless to say, if this legislation passes, cans will be falling off the table and their resident worms squiggling all over the floor.

The definition of obscenity aside, the fact is that current Virginia law exempts publicly endowed museums, libraries, theaters and colleges from prosecution on the basis of obscenity because of the Supreme Court’s decision that socially redeeming visual and performing arts cannot be considered obscene.

But the works will really be gummed up if a governing body, such as the college’s Board of Visitors, has to review every theater performance, every Muscarelle exhibit, every student-sponsored movie and every course outline to make sure that nothing they consider obscene is included.

Is a play like Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” obscene because of its overt sexual references? Or will the college ever be able to present “Equus” again if it includes nudity? Will the English department be able to teach the works of Swinburne or the sonnets of Shakespeare? Will students in archaeology and art courses be able to study Greek vase paintings that depict both homosexual and heterosexual acts of intimacy?

The answer could well be “no,” unless the Board of Visitors, which incidentally did, along with the president, sanction the last Sex Workers Art Show, reviews all this material and finds that it has redeeming social value and hence is not obscene.

In the end, the board will be forced to become an arbiter of both state and federal laws involving obscenity. It will also have to decide if college students are, under law, considered minors.

In a Supreme Court case known as Hazlewood School District vs. Kuhlmeier, the court allowed censorship that is “reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns” in the cases of “school sponsored publications, theatrical productions, and other expressive activities that students, parents and members of the public might reasonably perceive to bear the imprimatur of the school.”

Most courts subsequently have ruled that Hazlewood applies only to high schools and that censorship of similar college expressive endeavors is unconstitutional. Hence the current Virginia law.

On the other hand, in a case called Ginsburg v. New York Supreme Court, the high court ruled that obscenity standards are higher if such obscenities are directed at minors or if they appeal to the “prurient interests of minors and are utterly without redeeming social importance to minors.”

Why the Pogger would want to get the governing bodies of public colleges and universities mired in a morass of tervigersatory legal conundrums such as this is unknown. Clearly she hasn’t considered completely the horrendous ramifications of this unnecessary bill and the onus it will place on university faculties and students. Nor has she taken into account the legal repercussions that may well ensue from decisions made by the governing authorities of state colleges.

Where the real obscenity lies is with the antiquated moral standards of the 18^th and 19^th centuries that are so attractive to people like Pogge.

Their busybody approach to single-track morality and their insistence that their skewed standards be applied not only to an artistically motivated general public, but specifically to public colleges and universities is outrageously intrusive and quite beyond comprehension.

In this time of stringent budget cuts, colleges and their governing boards have more than enough to juggle without having to delve into the vagaries of obscenity laws. If the Pogger is this upset with the Sex Workers Art Show, let her fulminate against it as she usually does and then drop it. We and the colleges have little need of her cumbersome statute and all the termites it releases to make sawdust of our system of higher education.