Pennsylvania’s pornography scandal

Seriously, can I reach out here to the adults who read this column — both of you — for a mature discussion about pornography in the Internet age?

Nazi tool

Just about everyone is vulnerable and/or squeamish about sex and its illegitimate offspring, pornography. The mere hint of thigh or cleavage can reduce male captains of industry, school principals, priests, rabbis, and heads of state to quivering blobs of jelly. Consequently, pornography can become a potent tool for destroying and blackmailing the powerful or suppressing the powerless.

As Robert Darnton persuasively demonstrated in The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (1996), the downfall of France’s aristocracy owed less to the lofty ideas of Rousseau and Voltaire than to the pulp novels of the Marquis de Sade and other underground (and far more popular) pornographers. Conversely, during World War II, German officials used pornography to keep their conquered subjects quiescent. The Nazis recognized that pornography was both addictive and embarrassing and, consequently, would foster solitude rather than solidarity.

In those good old days, of course, pornography was not only illegal but also hard to find. You could access it only through personal effort — by finding and answering a tiny ad in the back of a pulp magazine, or by slipping into a sleazy bookstore in a raunchy neighborhood, or through the good offices of a high school classmate (every high school seemed to have one) who had a knowledgeable older brother.

The Internet has changed all that. Today even theologians find their in-boxes cluttered with pornographic come-ons. The temptation to take a peek can be damn near irresistible. It’s also easy to trace and consequently also easy to nail anyone who succumbs to the temptation. I know at least two accomplished and respected academics who lost their jobs for receiving — not sending — child pornography over the Internet.

Fourth-rate jurist

Which brings us to Seamus McCaffery, who retired from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court yesterday, one week after four of his fellow justices voted to suspend him from the bench for circulating pornographic emails, including naked images of a 100-year-old woman and other pictures of a woman having sex with a snake.

Let us stipulate, as lawyers like to say, that Justice McCaffery will never be confused with Oliver Wendell Holmes. He was a decidedly fourth-rate jurist on a decidedly third-rate court. This is a justice who was previously cited for meeting with convicted felons to have his wife's traffic ticket dismissed. McCaffery apparently authorized his wife, who served as his administrative assistant, to accept hundreds of thousands of dollars in referral fees from law firms while he voted on their clients’ cases — a practice that was surely unethical but apparently not illegal. McCaffery may have tried to influence a judicial assignment on the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas bench, another ethical breach. His greatest judicial achievement was his creation, as a Philadelphia Municipal Court Judge in 1993, of “Eagles Court” in the basement of Veterans Stadium, where he handed out fines and jail sentences to unruly football fans. Chief Justice Ron Castille, who himself will never be mistaken for the second coming of Louis Brandeis, characterized McCaffery as a “sociopath” and said that no other justice “has done as much to bring the Supreme Court into disrepute” — which is saying a lot on a court where one other justice was convicted last year of illegally using state employees for political work, and where a former almost-chief justice once defended himself against criminal conspiracy charges by claiming (correctly) that he was mentally ill.

Clinton’s ‘crime’

For many reasons, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is well rid of Seamus McCaffery. But pornography is at worst a symptom of his problem, not the root of it. It’s also a relatively benign vice. Better to have McCaffery exchanging sex images with his juvenile buddies than sexually harassing his court employees or accepting bribes or sending innocent people to prison.

In politics as in life, the right things often happen for the wrong reasons. Pornography provided a handy excuse to force McCaffery off the bench. But given the ubiquitous nature of the Internet, it’s an excuse that could be used against any fallible human. You and I, of course, are totally candid about our sexual peccadilloes. But what about those oversexed public figures — Bill Clinton, Lyndon Johnson, or John F. Kennedy, say — whose absence from government we now find ourselves lamenting?

In 1998, when Clinton tried to minimize his sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, supposedly sophisticated journalists embraced this mantra: “Clinton's personal sex life is his own private business. The public issue here is whether he lied under oath.” Yet as any psychiatrist could have told them, everybody lies about his or her sex life — and that being the case, the relevant question isn’t whether Clinton lied under oath, it’s who maneuvered him into a position where he was required to testify about his sex life under oath.

You and I, of course, would have testified forthrightly. And of course pornography is beneath our contempt. I’m talking about everybody else.