It is enough to make conservatives’ blood boil. Or maybe not. The commodity is pornography and other ““adult’’ entertainment. Hence the conservatives’ conundrum: Can they square their advocacy of smaller, less intrusive government with a more ambitious moral agenda for government?
New York City’s government is acting against the pollution of the social atmosphere, and in the name of such conservative causes as neighborhood preservation and family values. So the city’s new censoriousness provides an interesting coda to this political season. Many conservatives have been bewildered almost to the point of vertigo by the rapid reversal of their fortunes. Two years ago their blanket castigations of government seemed to be resonating with a national majority. Today the national mood about government’s uses seems more ambivalent, conflicted, nuanced. Conservatives seeking a small confrontation with their own ideological tangles can take a stroll down West 39th Street in Manhattan, to Richard Kunis’s store.
Large lettering on his front window announces YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD VIDEO STORE SINCE 1985. In the 1970s he sold office furniture. His inventory is all… what? ““Erotic’’ is not the word. Watching an ““adult’’ movie is an experience about as erotic as reading ““Gray’s Anatomy.’’ Suffice it to say that Kunis’s movies are energetically pornographic. Customers can rent them, buy them or view them in booths in the store. He is building a ““handicapped-accessible’’ booth.
Kunis thinks his transactions with consenting adults are private enterprise without any consequences that are the proper concern of public authorities. The city says: Just as smoking in confined public places is not a purely private matter because second-hand smoke is offensive to, and perhaps injurious to, other people, so, too, the activities of Kunis and the operators of about 180 other ““adult’’ businesses, in the dense living conditions of a city, have injurious secondary effects against which government can act.
The city says those effects include decreased property values, retarded economic development, damage to neighborhood character and to children. And when such businesses are clustered, there is increased illegal sexual activities and other crime, as well as loitering and littering and other nuisances. The new zoning law will disperse such businesses to designated manufacturing and commercial areas and will require buffer zones between them and places, such as residential areas, schools and churches, that are particularly vulnerable to the secondary effects.
The pornographers say that precisely proving the various secondary effects is problematic. However, precision should not be necessary. One does not need a moral micrometer to gauge the fact that the sex industry turned Times Square into a slum. And arcane arguments are not needed to establish the principle that residential neighborhoods merit some protection from forms of commerce that abrade the spirits of the residents.
Pornography merchants argue that the new law will put most of them out of business and relegate the remainder to inaccessible locales, thereby unconstitutionally burdening the exercise of a fundamental right, freedom of expression. They say the law patently discriminates against their form of expression because of its content, and therefore violates the constitutional requirement of content-neutrality. The city replies that pornography will still be available, and many laws regulate the ““time, place and manner’’ of expression (e.g., no loudspeakers near hospitals).
But the larger significance of the law is this: A course correction is underway in the capital of liberalism, where for decades the tension between individual rights and community values has been resolved too often in favor of the former. In liberal social analysis, the individual is the only reality, and the community is an abstraction without claims. No more. Panhandling is no longer invested with constitutional grandeur as (in the words of a liberal judge) ““informative and persuasive speech.’’ Instead, it is seen as a form of disorder. Graffiti is no longer regarded as a ““statement’’ by the voiceless and downtrodden, but as ominous evidence of an uncontrolled environment.
A substantial amount of the recent decline in the nation’s crime occurred in this city, which has not increased the number of police. What has increased is intolerance, which can be a virtue. The mayor understands that there simply is no such thing as a ““minor crime’’ because all crime breeds disorder, which is an infectious social disease. It atomizes communities, increases anxiety, wariness, avoidance and truculence and dissolves the sense of mutual regard and obligations of civility. Note that word.
Selling pornography is not a crime, but by catering to, and inflaming, vulgarians’ sensibilities, it contributes to the coarsening of the culture, which erodes civility. In its original meaning, ““civility’’ denoted the virtues requisite for civic life–the life of citizenship in a city. For too long now, the word ““civil’’ has appeared in American discourse almost exclusively as an adjective modifying the noun ““right.’’ New York’s decision to get judgmental, to stigmatize pornography by pushing it to the fringe of city life, rests on this recognition: the words ““civil,’’ ““civic,’’ ““citizen’’ and ““city’’ have a common root and are related in complex ways.
