about at least the legislative attempts to regulate that I feel have been advancing over the past few years.

Father RITTER. I think I would have to support Dr. Kirk almost entirely in his remarks and just point out to the committee that it has taken Congress, State and local authorities years to address the very-damaging-to-children issue of dial-a-porn.

Mr. GEKAS. Of what porn?
Father RITTER. Dial-a-porn.

Mr. GEKAS. Yes, dial-a-porn.

Father RITTER. Telephone porn. Millions of kids call those numbers all the time. And anyone who has listened to the content of those messages has to be convinced of the extraordinarily damaging quality of them.

Mr. GEKAS. I take it nobody has a good word to say about any efforts that we have made so far on this, and with that I am going to leave.

I have no more questions, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. MAZZOLI. The gentleman's time has expired.

The gentleman from Florida, Mr. Shaw.

Mr. SHAW. Mr. Chairman, I have no questions of these witnesses, except to thank them for their presence and their good work. Sometimes things move very painfully slow up here in Washington. We do end up getting the message occasionally and moving_forward. I think this is the type of legislation that we are working with. I think you know from the questions and comments from this subcommittee that you have our complete support and that we are in the process of fine-tuning some of the provisions that are in here. We want to be sure that-one-they are constitutional, and that is very important. We don't want to pass this just simply to make a political statement and then have it collapse under the weight of constitutional scrutiny at a later date.

I would like to particularly say hello to Father Ritter. I have worked some time with your group in Ft. Lauderdale, which is my home area. You are doing a good job down there. We need Covenant House and what it does for particularly the youngsters that are going in the wrong direction. So I would like to thank you for your involvement in my particular area.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. MAZZOLI. I thank the gentleman.

I have no questions. Chairman Hughes has a series of questions here, which I am sure he will ask of you and probably will request written responses to them. But I would join I am sure all of the panel in thanking all of you for coming forward. I would like to put it in a slightly different framework. I think it is particularly commendable because I am sure the pressures on you are quite remarkable and broad-based to lay off the subject and just do like most intelligent and well-mannered and well-schooled people, which is to say this is just part of society that we have to accept in order to have freedom in our country and in order to have dissemination of ideas. You gentlemen have stood up and your people have stood up to opprobrium, I am sure, to ridicule, and to a lot of abuse that people deliver to you in high-flown phrases and constitutional edicts as well as in street phrases for what you are doing, and I salute that. It takes a lot of guts-pure, honest-to-God guts to do

what you are doing, and I think you are serving the young people of this country and the people of this country very, very well in that thing. And I am sure that there has got to be a tremendous frustration on your part, those of you who work with the victims of child pornography and the victims of pornography on a day-to-day basis and see what depths people have descended to in order to infect and to pollute our society, and to see Congress having to wrestle with all the legalisms and the constitutional niceties in order to produce anything. And just as you have said, we are always one step behind the curve, and I am sure you get frustrated. But just as my friends have said, it is our effort to try to be sure that we do something that is done and not just something that then gets shot down or dropped off of the edge of the table later. So it is probably not anything that brings you joy that we do have to get involved in all of these things in the legalistic, but it is an effort to try to do the best job possible when we do it. But in the meantime, you are doing what is truly God's work and in a very heroic way, and I would like personally to extend my thanks to you for that.

Gentlemen, we appreciate it very much, and you now can stand aside and we will then call our second panel.

Dr. KIRK. Mr. Chairman, would it be possible for me to make a brief closing statement?

Mr. MAZZOLI. Sure. Certainly.

Dr. KIRK. I would appreciate that because I would like to clarify a couple of things. In my testimony I indicated that the Religious Alliance represented 140 million Americans in their constituency, and for the record I would like to merely clarify who is on our Executive Committee.

Archbishop Iakovos, Primate of the Greek Orthodox Church.
Mark Tanenbaum, head of the American Jewish Committee.
Rabbi Mordecai Waxman.

Bishop George Bashore, who represents the Council of Bishops of the United Methodist Church.

Raymond Carlson, who heads the Assemblies of God.

Bishop Bill Frey, Episcopal Bishop of Colorado, who represents the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church.

Dr. Eileen Lindner, Associate General Secretary of the National Council of Churches.

Dr. Billy Melvin, who is Executive Director of the National Association of Evangelicals.

We have hit the whole gamut.

Mr. Matt Parker.

Dr. Adrian Rogers.

Mrs. Fran Wolfley.
Cardinal Bernardin.
Dr. Richard Lindsay.
Dr. Ralph Bollman.
Dr. Mary Ross.
Rev. John Maracle.

As well as those of us here.

Why do I say 140 million Americans? When Mark Tanenbaum said to me, "Jerry, we represented over 150 million Americans the day we were born and 10 million have been added since then"? We

know from the Gallup Poll that there are about 4 percent of Americans who believe all of this kind of pornography ought to be protected. We decided to be conservative and to assume maybe some of those are in our churches, and so we have said we only represent 140 million Americans.

Cardinal O'Connor said this, in our birth: "This is an historic occasion. Never in history has such a broad coalition come against any social issue." And Eileen Lindner, of the National Council of Churches, said: "This is an unfolding miracle."

This last thought-it isn't hard for us to be here. We have seen the victims and they are worth it. Every one of those little children, every one of those young people, and women, and marriages, and families are worth it. It is a privilege to be here. And we thank God for you and for what you are doing and for what this is going to mean for America in the quality of life for our country.

Mr. MAZZOLI. We certainly thank you very much, all of you, and we commend you for your labors and we thank you for those labors.

Father Ritter, thank you. Good to see you again.

I would now like to call our second panel, please:

Mr. Barry Lynn, Legislative Counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, located here in Washington, is both a lawyer and an ordained minister.

Mr. Guy Moman, Jr., is Chairman of the Council for Periodical Distributors Associations. He is the President of GEMCO, a company based in Tuscaloosa, AL, which operates six magazine and paperback book distributing companies in the South.

Finally, Mr. Michael Bamberger, who is the General Counsel for the Media Coalition, based in New York, a coalition of booksellers, publishers, distributors of periodicals, and the National Association of College Stores.

On behalf of Chairman Hughes and the members of the subcommittee, gentlemen, you are welcome. We have received your prepared statements and they will, of course, be made a part of the record. If we could start with Mr. Lynn, and then work through the rest of the group.

TESTIMONY OF BARRY W. LYNN, LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL, AMERICAN CIVIL LIBERTIES UNION, WASHINGTON, DC; GUY E. MOMAN, JR., CHAIRMAN, COUNCIL FOR PERIODICAL DISTRIBUTORS ASSOCIATIONS, TUSCALOOSA, AL; MICHAEL BAMBERGER, GENERAL COUNSEL, MEDIA COALITION, NEW YORK

Mr. LYNN. Thank you very much.

It is no secret that the American Civil Liberties Union does not believe that obscenity laws in general are a good idea. Obscenity remains an elusive construct whose definition is so subjective that it has baffled American judges and juries all over the United States for many decades.

As I listened to the witnesses earlier this morning, it also became clear again that the Supreme Court was profoundly wrong when it suggested that obscenity is entitled to no First Amendment protection because it contains no ideas. To the contrary, it is precisely the ideas in it-for example, as Father Ritter so eloquently stated, that

sex should be divorced from marital relationships-that its opponents find it so offensive that they seek to ban it from American culture. If they were not concerned about its communicative power, they wouldn't be here urging the enactment of new laws to dispose of it.

My only regret is that they chose to enlist the power of government censorship to suppress the ideas they hate, rather than to rely on the institutions they represent to rebut the challenge and to persuade others to reject the values expressed in pornography. There are currently 32 Federal laws relating to sexual material. Most of them are rarely, if ever, enforced in most Federal jurisdictions and there has, in my judgment, been absolutely no demonstration that any more Federal laws are needed.

Many of the earlier witnesses on the first panel seemed to treat the Report of the Attorney General's Commission on Pornography as if it were holy writ. But having observed that process, literally, from its genesis to its conclusion, I can assure you that it is not worthy of canonization. This Commission has largely polluted the debate about sexual material in our society, and has done so by drawing_unsupported conclusions from very limited social science data and by using an investigative methodology which was, quite frankly, irresponsible.

The so-called evidence collected by the Commission did not establish that pornography was a serious national problem. Indeed, for most Americans, in spite of some of the comments earlier this morning, pornography remains as irrelevant as it is invisible. Moreover, the characterization by the Justice Department in its memorandum supporting this bill that people who might sell pornography are major criminals is clearly a distorted construction.

This bill, however, does allow extraordinarily harsh law enforcement techniques to be used against booksellers and video dealers who sell sexual material to consenting adults, as if their crime was the same as that of arsonists, loan sharks and illegal arms merchants.

We do, in fact, object strenuously to several of the provisions in this legislation. Let me just highlight a few.

As Mr. McCollum pointed out, section 205 would make it a Federal crime for a Government employee to possess an obscene video in her desk drawer as she awaits lunch hour to return it to the video rental shop, or for a member of the United States Army to have a so-called obscene magazine in his car as he returns to the barracks. The danger of this is that it eviscerates the guarantee of privacy in regard to personal use of such material which has been established by the United States Supreme Court in Stanley v. Georgia. And frankly, it does not make me feel any better that at least three of the endorsers of this legislation on the first panel admitted that they hadn't even thought about this implication of the legislation that they had wholeheartedly endorsed.

Another section would actually permit the seizure of the entire inventory of a store and all of its fixtures upon conviction of the owner for selling a single obscene item. What would that include for the average, say, video shop in your district? First to go is all inventory purchased subsequent to the first rental of the obscene video, since that was in the words of the statute "traceable to other

proceeds obtained from such offense." In effect, if the "Erotic Adventures of Pinocchio" is obscene, then the FBI could seize the Walt Disney version of "Pinocchio" as well. All the fixtures are forfeited as used to commit or promote the offense. This includes the display racks and the lights which permit customers to read the box labels.

This forfeiture provision is so wildly disproportionate to the crime that it is hard to imagine a more chilling prospect for the average newstand dealer in New Jersey or Kentucky or Pennsylvania to know that this entire stock may be seized if he sells the wrong book to the wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. These forfeitures would represent a classic example of prior restraint because the purpose as well as the effect is to restrict future speech on the basis of some pass transgression.

A third section essentially federalizes all local and State obscenity violations and makes it extremely easy to prosecute distributors of obscenity under Federal law even in those States where the citizens of the State have chosen to permit distribution of sexual material to adults. This is a distortion of the idea of federalism made even more constitutionally suspect because the very heart of obscenity law under Miller is that the material violates local community standards, not the standards of some national bureaucrat in the Department of Justice.

This same section could make it a Federal crime, as Mr. McCollum also noted, for someone cleaning out his basement to give his neighbor his old adult magazine collection. Compounding that, the section has a presumption indicating that if there are more than five items in his collection, he can be presumed to be in the business of selling obscenity, with enhanced penalties.

The final objectionable section imposes burdensome recordkeeping requirements on anyone who produces depictions of actual sexually explicit conduct. Of course there is nothing unlawful about showing sexual activity as such, whether that is in a scientific treatise or in an adult video.

These requirements, then, are an unconstitutional content-based impediment to the production of what we must presume in our system to be constitutionally protected speech. If there is no Federal recordkeeping requirement for the people shown in Road & Track or in "Star Wars," then there can be no such requirement for Hustler or for “Debbie Does Dallas."

We urge you to reject these and other provisions that we have noted in our testimony as raising very serious privacy and First Amendment problems, and I hope we can all find a way in the future to wage war on those who would exploit children and those who would commit sexual assaults. But let us make sure always that the war is directed at the right enemies, and not at the scapegoated culprit of pornography.

Thank you.

[The statement of Mr. Lynn follows:]