Every Sunday, “Back in the Day” looks at an article that ran on this date in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. The items are verbatim, so don’t blame us today for yesteryear’s bad grammar.
City Prosecutor Charles Marsland last night called the American Civil Liberties Union “creeps” and two unnamed state senators “slimy,” for protesting the closing of pornography theaters.
Speaking to the Concerned Women for America of Hawaii, he also criticized Gov. George Ariyoshi’s state-of-the-state-address this week because drugs were not mentioned. Marsland, who did not use the governor’s name, called drug sales “admittedly the biggest industry in the state.”
“Our state government does absolutely nothing about the problem — except ignore it — and our governor is afraid to even mention it. I sometimes wonder who ordered him to avoid it.”
Marsland told the audience in the University of Hawaii Campus Center Ballroom that, because of pornography, “virtually every adult male in this country has a license that the Lord never even extended to the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah.”
Run by organized crime, Marsland said, pornography “has done more to degrade, humiliate, shame, disgrace, ridicule and heap contempt upon women and exploit children than any thing else in the history of this country. What racial slurs and the Ku Klux Klan have been to racism, pornography is to sex discrimination.”
The prosecutor, saying he didn’t want to “shock” anybody, noted that things had changed since the days when pornography used to be photos of “people’s privates.”
Marsland then graphically described more recent depictions in films and magazines. He showed the audience some of the magazines and invited the audience to examine the stack of explicit material later. …
He described a Family Court case that, he said, involved three local teen-age boys who had viewed a pornography film, then raped a 3-year-old girl and repeated the same behavior the next day. …
Marsland said, “The only way we are ever going to get the drug menace under control — or rid our community of pornography — or restore Hawaii to the paradise and place of safety it was when I was a kid growing up here, is to get actively involved in politics.”
