Court Opinion

ID: 9842004
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-09-22 20:12:19.752346+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T09:09:00.221375
License: Public Domain

Mr. Justice Douglas,
dissenting.
In 1970 the President’s Commission on Obscenity and Pornography issued its report. Dean William D. Lock-hart was chairman. Eighteen others were members. It was a 646-page report. One member, Charles H. Keat-ing, Jr., filed a dissenting report of some 60 pages with at least as many pages of exhibits. The report contains many references to many facets of sex: e. g., petting, *141coitus, oral sexuality, masturbation, and homosexual activities.
What petitioners did was to supply the report with a glossary — not in dictionary terms but visually. Every item in the glossary depicted explicit sexual material within the meaning of that term as used in the report. Perhaps we should have no reports on obscenity. But imbedded in the First Amendment is the philosophy that the people have the right to know.* Sex is more important to some than to others but it is of some importance to all. If officials may constitutionally report on obscenity, I see nothing in the First Amendment that allows us to bar the use of a glossary factually to illustrate what the report discusses.

The Constitution of India (Mar. 1, 1963) provides in Art. 19 (1) that “[a]ll citizens shall have the right — (a) to freedom of speech and expression”; but Art. 19 (2) provides that nothing in that clause bars “reasonable restrictions on the exercise” of those rights “in the interests of . . . decency or morality.” Our First Amendment contains no such qualification and certainly when Jefferson and Madison drafted it, sex had as great a potential for vulgarity as for beauty. If they had wanted a federal censor to edit our publications, they certainly would have made it explicit.