William O. Douglas

“ No more powerful weapon for sectarian control can be imagined than governmental censorship. Yet in this country the state is not the secular arm of any religious school of thought, as in some nations; nor is the church an instrument of the state. Whether-as here-city officials or-as in Russia-a political party lays claim to the power of governmental censorhip, whether the pressures are for a conformist moral code or for a conformist political ideology, no such regime is permitted by the First Amendment. ”

“ The presumption of innocence, the right to jury trial, proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt-these become barriers in the path of officials who want to impose their standard of morality on the author or producer. The advantage a censor enjoys while working as a supreme bureaucracy disappears. The public trial to which a person is entitled who violates the law gives a hearing on the merits, airs the grievance, and brings the community judgment to bear upon it. ”

“ The forces that build up demands for censorship are heterogeneous.
'The comstocks are not merely people with intellectual theories who might be convinced by more persuasive theories; nor are they pragmatists who will be guided by the balance of power among pressure groups. Many of them are so emotionally involved in the condemnation of what they find objectionable that they find rational arguments irrelevant. They must suppress what is offensive in order to stabilize their own tremulous values and consciences. ”

“ Every dictator has one; every Communist regime finds it indispensable. [1] One shield against world opinion that colonial powers have used was the censor, as dramatized by France in North Africa. Even England has a vestige of censorship in the Lord Chamberlain (32 Halsbury's Laws of England (2d ed. 1939) , p. 68) who presides over the stage-a system that in origin was concerned with the barbs of political satire. [2] But the concern with political satire shifted to a concern with atheism and with sexual morality-the last being the concern evident in Chicago's system now before us. ”

“ It offends the decent pride and self-respect of an entire profession. To those who are surprised that dramatic authors should take themselves so seriously we say, What workman worthy of his tools does not believe in the honour of his craft? ”

“ The problems of the wayward mind concern the clerics, the psychiatrists, and the philosophers. Few groups have hesitated to create the political pressures that translate into secular law their notions of morality. ”

“ Christenberry, D.C., 175 F.Supp. 488, as to the weight given to post-office determinations of nonmailability.↑ 'First, within the larger pluralist society each minority group has the right to censor for its own members, if it so chooses, the centent of the various media of communication, and to protect them, by means of its own choosing, from materials considered harmful according to its own standards. ”