The truth about NCOSE - 1962 Operation Yorkville
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I’m doing a deep dive on the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE). You might know them from Nicholas Kristof’s December 2020 New York Times article "The Children of Pornhub" which helped push Visa and Mastercard to temporarily stop serving Pornhub. Kristof referenced a NCOSE lawyer.
Who is NCOSE? What’s their deal? What’s the agenda?
I wanted to find out. So I started digging. Here’s some of what I’ve found, starting in 1962.
In his amazing history of American obscenity case law, Stephen Bates lays out the case that the 1950s were a surprisingly libidinous time for Americans. In 1953 Hugh Hefner launched Playboy. In 1956 Peyton Place hit the shelves, “a tangled tale of sex” that went on to become the best-selling novel ever. That same year Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, followed by Lolita in 1958 which hit the third spot on the national best-seller list. By 1960, the first Playboy Club was operational and the first birth-control pill had FDA approval.
The backlash came in the form of a New York-based interfaith group called Operation Yorkville (OY). Formed by a Jesuit priest named Morton A. Hill in 1962, and described as a “faith based organization,” OY operated out of the rectory of St. Ignatius Loyola Church.
Bates writes that “OY newsletters identify the founders as Rev. Wiltenburg of Immanuel Evangelical Lutheran Church, Rabbi Neumann of Congregation Zichron Moshe, and Father William T. Wood, S.J., of the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola.”
Even in infancy, OY stretched the truth. In those same newsletters, OY promoted the theory that pornography was "part and parcel of the Communist movement to destroy the United States."
"Pornography is contributing to the downfall of the United States," OY proclaimed in 1963. Even in infancy, OY misrepresented its agenda. Leaders claimed to not want censorship or new laws while simultaneously pushing for new, broad obscenity laws.
“Obscene material is simply the imaginative projection by word or picture of an obscene action,” the group said. “An obscene action is a sexual action which would make those engaged in it subject to arrest if it were to be performed in public.”
The group was explicitly religious from the start. In 1962 OY described "cesspool publications" that publish material that "teaches open defiance of the Ten Commandments of God." OY described masturabtion as “evil conduct” and “sacrilege” as obscene, along with violence, offensive song lyrics, and "the glorification of drug usage."
They claimed masturbation, porn, and offensive lyrics would lead to:
1. Perversion: first an idea, then experimentation, then fixation.
2. Atheism: The seed planted, the action taken, the child will begin to rebel against all authority.
3. Violence: Rebellion against authority will eventuate in: crime, sex crime, narcotics using.
The anti-scientific claims about the harms of pornography also started early. Father Hill claimed that 75 to 90 percent of pornography reaches children. The group claimed that kids who encountered porn created "high school sex clubs,"' were more likely to become gay, do crime, contract STIs, get pregnant, become introverted, be bad citizens, endure "psychosexual development" disruption, “and even murder.”
In 1963 OY went to the Justice Department and FBI and asked them to do something about pornographic magazines.
Hearing a Criminal Division representative explain that obscenity is largely a state and local issue, the group focused on the local level. Hill went on a hunger strike after authorities failed to set up an anti-pornography unit in the police department and a pornographers-only court fast enough.
Next we’ll pick up in 1968, when OY incorporated, made Hill president, and changed its name to Morality in Media.