National Center on Sexual Exploitation
The National Center on Sexual Exploitation, formerly known as Morality in Media, is an American conservative non-profit known for its anti-pornography advocacy. The group has also campaigned against same-sex marriage, sex shops and sex toys, decriminalization of sex work, comprehensive sex education, and various works of literature or visual arts the organization has deemed obscene, profane or indecent. Part of the religious right, the group is primarily Catholic and its current president is Patrick A. Trueman. The organization describes its goal as "exposing the links between all forms of sexual exploitation".
The organization began as an interfaith group of three New York clergymen concerned about pornography and "salacious" magazines. The group became involved in several landmark court battles regarding obscenity laws and freedom of speech in the United States. The group's influence later declined due to the decreasing interest in the anti-obscenity cause among prosecutors, politicians and religious leaders. After modernizing its message from morality to exploitation, the group has stated that pornography constitutes a public health crisis, but this is not backed by any global health agency. The organization has been criticized for advancing medical claims that are false, misleading or unsupported.
History
The organization was founded by an interfaith group of three New York clergymen under the name Operation Yorkville in 1962. Father Morton A. Hill of St. Ignatius Loyola Roman Catholic Church, dubbed the "smut priest" by the press, became the public face of the group. The group connected exposure to different types of "salacious" magazines and pornography to atheism, homosexuality, juvenile delinquency, masturbation, murder, sexually transmitted diseases and "high school sex clubs", but did not provide evidence for its claims. Although the group's actions emphasized the protection of minors, First Amendment Law Review wrote that "at times the organization seemed to be using children as a pretext for a society-wide ban". The group maintained that they were fighting obscenities and not advocating censorship. In 1963, the organization began a long-running effort to ban John Cleland's erotic novel Fanny Hill, which ended with the 1966 Supreme Court decision Memoirs v. Massachusetts.Operation Yorkville was renamed to Morality in Media in 1968. Hill, president of MIM until his death in 1985, was appointed to serve on the 18-member President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography by President Lyndon B. Johnson. A report was submitted in 1970 that said all "adult" obscenity laws should be repealed. Hill called the Commission's report a "magna carta for the pornographers". After the four justices nominated by President Richard Nixon reshaped the Supreme Court, the Burger Court disregarded the Commission's report and upheld obscenity laws in 1973, citing the dissenting reports by Hill, minister Winfrey Link and Charles Keating, the leader of the Citizens for Decent Literature. In 1973, a member of the group complained to the Federal Communications Commission about George Carlin's anti-censorship routine "Seven Dirty Words", leading to the 1978 decision FCC v. Pacifica Foundation. In 1980, the organization launched an unsuccessful lawsuit over the New York premiere of the film Caligula. The group also condemned the Monty Python film Life of Brian as a "direct, aggressive, deliberate violation of the rights of believing persons". In 1983, MIM asked for federal action against pornography in a White House meeting with President Ronald Reagan.
In the 1990s, the organization attacked the National Endowment for the Arts for funding what it deemed as obscene and profane art. The group also pressured adult stores by picketing them, contacting landlords and prosecutors and by lobbying for changes in zoning laws. In 1992, the group called for a boycott of all Time Warner products due to the publication of Madonna's book Sex. In the mid-1990s, MIM was part of a religious boycott campaign against The Walt Disney Company. The organization was an active supporter of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, although the group stated that many of its proposals were not implemented. After the Supreme Court struck down the law as unconstitutional in Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union, MIM began advocating for internet filters. Primarily Catholic, the organization joined other groups in the religious right to criticize the Waxman report, which found that abstinence-only sex education programs were unscientific and contained false information. MIM has argued that safer-sex information is indecent.
Affiliated with the Christian Coalition, MIM has stated that it "strongly upholds traditional family values and Judeo-Christian precepts". The organization was part of the Coalition for Marriage, a religious right collective that sought a ban on the partner recognition of gay couples and opposed the anti-discrimination laws protecting LGBT people. After the 2009 Binghamton shootings happened on the same day as Iowa's Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, the organization released a statement titled "Connecting the Dots: The Line Between Gay Marriage and Mass Murders". The group's president Bob Peters said that the sexual revolution and the "decline of morality" were the underlying cause of mass murders. In 2010, MIM hoped that government officials would take action against adult stores and sex toys, which Peters likened to "a cancer, a slow-moving cancer". The organization's influence had declined due to the decreasing interest in the anti-obscenity cause among prosecutors, politicians and religious leaders. Peters conceded that "the war is over and we have lost".
The group's current CEO and president is Patrick A. Trueman, an attorney and a registered lobbyist. He served as Chief of the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, a United States Department of Justice Criminal Division, when the George H. W. Bush administration aggressively prosecuted obscenity cases against adult pornography. Morality in Media changed its name to the National Center on Sexual Exploitation in 2015. Sexuality Research and Social Policy writes that the name change reflects the group's modernization "from morality to exploitation". NCOSE's current campaigns include the White Ribbon Against Pornography week and the Dirty Dozen, an annual list of "leading porn facilitators". In 2015, the organization successfully pressured Walmart to remove Cosmopolitan from its checkout aisles. In 2016, NCOSE criticized Amnesty International after the human rights group joined Human Rights Watch and the World Health Organization in supporting the decriminalization of sex work. NCOSE said the policy was irresponsible and that decriminalization would encourage human trafficking. The group has also opposed the legalized prostitution in Nevada. In 2017, the organization was one of the principal supporters of the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown of Reason has criticized the group for promoting claims about sexuality and pornography that contradict the findings of peer-reviewed studies. Anti-Trafficking Review writes that NCOSE "uses misleading ‘research reports’ to fabricate a false medical consensus about the harms of pornography". Since the 2010s, the group has stated that pornography constitutes a public health crisis. NCOSE drafted much of the language when Utah passed a resolution labeling pornography, without evidence, a "public health hazard leading to a broad spectrum of individual and public health impacts and societal harms". The resolution called for action against "the pornography epidemic that is harming the citizens of Utah and the nation". The claims are not backed by any global health agency, and outside experts criticized the language for its unproven assertions. 15 other states replicated the resolution, using mostly identical language and also lacking evidence.
EBSCO controversy
In 2017, NCOSE placed EBSCO on its Dirty Dozen List because its databases, widely used in schools in the United States, "could be used to search for information about sexual terms." The group said that some articles from Men's Health and other publications indexed by EBSCO included articles with sexual content, and that other articles in the database linked to websites that included pornography. EBSCO responded by saying that it took the complaint seriously, but was unaware of any case "of students using its databases to access pornography or other explicit materials" and that "the searches NCOSE was concerned about had been conducted by adults actively searching for graphic materials, often on home computers that don't have the kinds of controls and filters common on school computers."James LaRue, the director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, said that students have a right to receive information, even about topics that some groups deem inappropriate. He said that NCOSE's goal seems to be to get rid of any content "that will offend any parent in America." "NCOSE has the right to advocate for greater restrictions on access to sexual content", said LaRue, "but they often do this by suppressing content. When they try to impose their standards on other families, the American Library Association would call that censorship." NCOSE also put the American Library Association on their Dirty Dozen List, along with Amazon.com.