COMPARATIVE REVIEW OF TWO ARTICLES Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

COMPARATIVE REVIEW OF TWO ARTICLES - Essay Example Censorship and literature Rev Murray John Courtney 1904-1967 was a theologian with a doctorate in sacred theology. He taught Catholic trinitarian theology and was editor of the Jesuit Journal Theological Studies in Queens, New York until his death 1 John Courtney Murray posits that censorship is a compromise between freedom and restraint. Obscenity in the courts: Written one year before the article â€Å"Censorship and literature†,2 the authors Lockhart and McClure 3 narrate how obscenity was being defined by the courts at the time when there was a revival of Puritanism in the United States especially after the Civil War and the World War 1.. After these wars, there was sudden surge of obscene literature in the country that there was public outcry for a newer legislation to contain obscenity in all its forms. The legislation of the time was ineffective without a workable definition of the term obscenity. There were few reported decisions of pre-civil war period on obscene lite rature with some impact on the people who read such literature. The contemporaneous Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter came to be detested as an outright immoral book which degraded literature and encouraged promiscuity. As early as in 1868, a workable definition for obscene was provided by Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, an English jurist that came to be known as Hicklin test following his decision in Regina v Hicklin 4 which said that a material was obscene if the impugned material depraved and corrupted vulnerable individuals coming across that material. Though Hicklin was soon being followed by American courts, this Victorian moral standard was felt out of time by American federal District Judge Learned Hand who suggested that obscenity must be regulated by the Government in accordance with community standard that changed with times. Following Hand’s ruling, American courts started ignoring Hicklin test and it was finally put to rest by a 1933 Ulysses decision5 in which t he judges Hand and Agustus N H of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a book was considered obscene by its dominant effect. And the test should be by verifying whether the passages alone depraved the mind of the individuals who has access to that book. The authors of the present article examine the treatment of obscenity under different contexts of â€Å" effects on individual readers† , â€Å"effects on community moral standards†, â€Å"offensiveness†, and â€Å"effect on probable audience† and author’s purpose. The authors question whether censorship’s purpose is only to prevent corrupting and depraving of the minds of the individuals or it is also prevent their behavior influenced by such obscene material. In the absence of judicial answer for this, authors state that there has been no attempt to show that individuals reading obscene books started behaving differently that is inconsistent with the extant moral standards. They insist that co urt have never gone beyond determining that an allegedly obscene book only affected the readers’ thoughts and desires without ever being concerned about the individuals’ behavior or actions after reading an impugned book. Courts’ decisions on obscenity have not taken care to find out what kind of thoughts that individuals are affected with. Courts have not spelt out whether the obscene material induces thoughts on sexual intercourse and whether they are within or