Pornography - the Longford Report

Book excerpt: After seeing the London production of Oh! Calcutta!, the seventh Earl of Longford rose in the House of Lords to deliver an anti-obscenity speech so stirring that it stirred the Earl himself to action. An unofficial, privately financed 52-man committee chosen and headed by Longford, completed 16 months of investigation by publishing this 520-page report on pornography. Unlike the President's commission in the U.S., Lord Longford's study found that pornography creates an addiction leading to deviant obsessions and actions. He also recommended that Britain's anti-obscenity laws be strengthened and extended. Such conclusions would perhaps not be surprising from a group organized by a former leader of the House of Lords, a Roman Catholic convert and one of 24 knights companions of the Order of the Garter (motto: Evil to him who evil thinks). But Lord Longford is also a longtime socialist who helped design the British welfare state, a self-styled fellow-traveling member of Women's Lib and the first member of the House of Lords to speak in favor of legalizing private adult homosexual acts. Longford and the bishops, social scientists, housewives, educators, pop stars and writers who made up the committee sampled pornography of every kink and kind. They interviewed purveyors, performers and police and sorted through the 5,000 letters that poured in to them.