 Welcome to How to Defeat a Conservative, Part 11, but before I read, by the way the title is Mies Porn Commission by William J. Eisenman, Ph.D., but before I read the Mies Porn Commission, I'd like to read a letter sent to one of our local newspapers here, the Community News of August 13, 2015. New Jersey has a program that pays the Medicare Part B premium for the poor. The program is called the Specified Low-Income Medicare Beneficiary Program, or SLMB. Of course, to qualify for the program, one has to jump through many hoops. One hoop, however, is crass and uncalled for. It seems that if a low-income applicant has whole life insurance, the cash surrender value on that policy is treated as income. This is mind-blowing. If the cash surrender value on a life insurance policy is income, then so is capital gains. And what if someone on welfare finds $850 on the street? Is that income? Only these as income is a bookkeeping trick, much like Social Security's kid-a-law, which claims that if one can work, one is not disabled. One United States Supreme Court justice claims that if one can brush his teeth, he's not disabled. Then there is the problem that if one surrenders his life insurance policy, he will have no bond money to take care of his final expenses. He will have robbed himself of security. Life insurance surrender value is not income, and New Jersey needs to admit this and stop punishing low-income individuals with this hocus-pocus bookkeeping trick. And of course, that was written by William J. Eisen. Now to how to defeat a conservative, Part 11. In May of 1985, President Ronald Reagan's attorney general, Edwin Mies, set up a commission to study the effects of pornography. Mies said the formation of the committee was related to the achievement of the good life and the good society. Every political conservative who had problems with pornography wanted to be on the committee. Henry Hudson, chief prosecutor of Arlington County, Virginia, a rabid opponent of porn, was appointed chairman, Alan Sears, a federal prosecutor for Kentucky, was appointed the commission's executive director. In 1983, Alan Sears prosecuted the sovereign news company for obscenity. Yet Sears said he was coming at this with a very open mind. I do not believe the commission is coming in with a bias. Also included in the 12-member panel were James Dobson, host of a radio program called Focus on the Family, and former assistant attorney general, Tex Lazar, who structured the panel and became its commissioner. Although the majority of the committee members tried to play down their biases, it was blatantly clear from the start that the Mies commission was on a witch hunt. The committee was determined to bring in a negative verdict. The hidden agenda of the committee was to find new ways to control or eliminate pornography, even before the committee brought in its final results. It gave the nod to major changes in obscenity laws. When executive director Alan Sears was asked to comment on this unorthodox behavior, he said, if the commission doesn't find any harms, we'll throw the whole thing out. The Mies commission proved to be inept and neurotic. It sought testimony only from police, prosecutors, and so-called victims of porn. The commission did not want to hear from authors, booksellers, actors, or those in favor of porn. The so-called victims of porn testified from behind a screen and were not allowed to be cross-examined. The evidence presented by the so-called victims of porn was skewed, artificial, and some of it was not true. One of the so-called victims of porn was Linda Lovelace, the star of the X-rated movie Deep Throat. She claimed that when she worked in the porn industry she did nothing of her own free will. She said she was beaten, coerced, and was forced to perform at gunpoint. For years she denied making an eight-millimeter X-rated film with a dog. She said the dog was a puppet. Finally, in her book Ordeal, she admitted that she made the film. But said she was forced to do it. It was this kind of unproven evidence that the commissioners chose to believe to strengthen their prejudices. Linda Lovelace claimed that many women lost their lives while starring in pornographic films. But the facts are that there was no credible evidence that any actor was killed as part of a plot in an X-rated movie. The Mies Commission was a pseudo-scientific investigative body convened as a justification for repression. It was a sham. It was another example of the conservative character's inability to govern living reality. In true conservative style, the Mies Commission captured the moral high ground which was truly hypocritical to those who knew of Edwin Mies's less than pristine ethics. Under Governor Reagan, Ronald Reagan in California, Edwin Mies, as liaison to law enforcement allowed infiltration of civil rights and anti-Vietnam War groups. Mies treated these people like criminals. Even though they were only exercising their constitutional right to free speech. As special aide to Governor Ronald Reagan in charge of police intelligence on political activities in California, Mies took part in the planning of arrest procedures later found to be unconstitutional, including the holding of traffic and parking warrants on targeted individuals for use before major demonstrations in order to neutralize the subjects. All this from a man who assured us he knew what the founding fathers meant when they wrote to the Constitution. It was also a Mies plan to take pictures of demonstrators for future targeting and harassment. History makes it clear that politically conservative people like Edwin Mies really don't care about the Constitution or the First Amendment. People like Mies are merely petty despots and social pests. The Mies Commission teamed with these qualities. Our society is ignorant of the dangers to freedom and individual liberty that can occur when like-minded conservatives conspire to chart social policy. Some researchers who worked on the Mies Commission's report said it drew conclusions that were not supported by the research. Some commissioners were not allowed to see the galley proofs of the report and were unaware of last-minute changes made by the staff. There were also dissenting opinions offered. The rigid conservatives on the commission were unable to face the fact that pornography might have positive effects, that it could be therapeutic, and might lead to less sexual crimes. They closed their eyes to the fact. There is no relationship between pornography and crime. They didn't want to admit that there is a relationship between crime and poverty and between alcohol consumption and crime. Rape is the most popular form of pornography in Japan. Yet Japan's rape rate is 116, that of America's. Since the sexist sin ploy doesn't play well anymore, the new breed of censors claim that pornography causes violence. To get across their message, these modern-day censors misuse the work of social scientists and psychologists. Modern-day censors claim that Edward Donnerstein's work done at the University of Wisconsin shows that sexually explicit films incite violence in viewers. But Donnerstein said that the R-rated slasher films may do this. And they are not sexually explicit at all. The Mies Commission heard testimony that pornography was an $8 billion a year business that the business was controlled by organized crime. Left out of the record was that organized crime was involved in restaurants, pizza joints, laundromats, and sanitation hauling. No new research was ordered by the commission. Yet present-day research showing no relationship between pornography and violence was ignored. A majority of commissioners did not understand the difference between masturbation with guilt and guiltless, healthy masturbation. One victim of porn testified that as a child he latched on to a deck of sexy playing cards and they ruined his life. He said he always masturbated with guilt. But one commissioner understood that it was his masturbation with guilt that ruined his life and not the sexy deck of playing cards. Wilhelm Reich's work regarding the function of the orgasm revealed that periodic release of sexual tension prevented neurosis. Commissioner Henry Hudson claimed he could not find one beneficiary of pornography. Police from Kentucky showed the commission what they called a pornographic film. When one commissioner asked what was pornographic about it, the cops were confused. Well, can't you see it? The cops asked, sex should be private and between married people. These are the types of people who once censored Romeo and Juliet and Alice in Wonderland. Ellen Levine, a dissenting member of the Meese Commission, stated that the commission failed to collect enough evidence to support its major finding that there is a link between pornography and sex crimes. Dr. Judith Becker, another dissenting member of the commission, said that the social science research has not been designed that can evaluate the relationship between exposure to pornography and the commission of sex crimes. She added that the commission's efforts to conclude that the current data proved a link between pornography and sex crimes cannot be accepted. These dissenters were on the right track, but they too had a problem with the eroticization of violence. They did not possess the knowledge that would have enabled them to understand that violence and genitality are mutually exclusive. The Meese Commission was stacked with mystics, and mystics make bad social policy. Mysticism is based on faith, not reality. Mysticism cannot answer the hard questions of life. Mysticism cannot guide living reality. This claim poured made them do it in relation to the issue of violence. End of Part 11.