Anti-pornography Crusading
In 1956, Keating joined a priest leading a group of Catholic men in Cincinnati who were concerned about the dangers of pornography, and he began giving fervent talks on the subject to parents and other groups. In 1958 he went to Washington, D.C. and testified before the House Judiciary Committee on mail-order pornography, saying that it was "capable of poisoning any mind at any age and of perverting our entire younger generation", that it was closely tied to juvenile delinquency, and that it was "part of the Communist conspiracy".
Keating founded Citizens for Decent Literature in 1958, (later renamed a number of times, the best known of which is Citizens for Decency through Law), which advocated reading classics not "smut." It would grow to 300 chapters and 100,000 members nationwide and become the largest anti-pornography organization in the nation. Over the following 20 years the organization mailed some 40 million letters on behalf of its position and had filed amicus curiae briefs. Keating gained the moniker "Mr. Clean". During the early 1960s, Keating twice requested FBI assistance on behalf of his anti-pornography campaign but the bureau, still skeptical regarding Keating due to its early investigation, declined.
In 1964 – 1965, he produced the movie Perversion for Profit featuring announcer George Putnam. It was a survey of then-available pornography, and asserted that pornography was linked to juvenile delinquency and decline in culture.
In 1969, Keating's national reputation on the issue led to President Richard Nixon appointing him to the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, which had been begun under his predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson. The majority on the commission developed a controversial report which concluded that pornography does not degrade the morals of adults or cause crime, and recommended that all federal, state, and local laws preventing consenting adults from obtaining pornographic materials be repealed. Keating, Nixon's only appointee on the 18-person commission, was the leading commission dissident against this report. In September 1970, Keating gained a temporary restraining order from the D.C. Federal District Court to hold up publication of the report, on the grounds that he needed access to all the report's backing materials and more time in order to write a comprehensive dissenting report. The order put at risk any publication of the report at all, since the commission was about to expire. Several days later, Keating and the commission settled the case out of court, and Keating was given the desired materials and two weeks to write his report.
Keating then filed his dissenting report, stating, "At a time when the spread of pornography has reached epidemic proportions in our country and when the moral fiber of our nation seems to be rapidly unravelling, the desperate need is for enlightenment and intelligent control of the poisons which threaten us – not the declaration of moral bankruptcy inherent in the repeal of the laws which have been the defense of decent people against the pornographer for profit." Keating also wrote, "One can consult all the experts he chooses, can write reports, make studies, etc., but the fact that obscenity corrupts lies within the common sense, the reason, and the logic of every man." The Nixon administration tacitly supported Keating's legal efforts, and Counsellor to the President John Ehrlichman assigned White House speechwriter Pat Buchanan to help draft the dissenting report. The commission's majority report was denounced by congressional leaders of both parties as well as by the administration.
The commission involvement earned Keating even further national attention, which he used to push towards stringent behavior in Cincinnati. In 1969, Keating obtained an injunction preventing the showing in Cincinnati of softcore sexploitation master Russ Meyer's film Vixen!, claiming it was obscene, and the film was seized by the police the first day it opened. Showing of the film was successfully stopped in other parts of Ohio as well, and Meyer spent $250,000 in defense against Keating legal actions. Keating said that Meyer had done more to undermine morals in the nation than anyone else; Meyer responded that "I was glad to do it." The Cincinnati Vixen! case was appealed and in 1971 the Supreme Court of Ohio upheld the prohibition. In 1970, Keating tried to block a closed-circuit showing of the musical Oh! Calcutta! in Cincinnati, saying that "it appeals to a prurient interest in sex." During 1972, a Keating legal action kept a sex film theater shut as a "public nuisance". He tried to prevent newsstands near his office from selling Playboy and Oui magazines. He denounced the Ramada Inn chain for offering adult programming on cable television to guests. Other local actions involving shutting stores and removing books from public libraries were attributed by civil liberties advocates to the "oppressive" trend that Keating had set. Such was the effectiveness of Keating and his organization that when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the 1973 Miller v. California decision establishing that obscenity definitions should be established based upon local community standards, every adult bookstore and movie house in Cincinnati was closed within hours.
Keating also held a strong dislike for gays, saying "Homosexuals should be prosecuted and put in jail." Keating kept a large supply of pornographic examples in his law offices in Cincinnati, to show to any visitors who seem skeptical about the nature of the problem. He continued to testify to Congress about the dangers of pornography during the 1970s, often describing the materials in question in lurid detail.
In 1975, Oui magazine gave Keating the top spot on its "Enemies of pornography" list. Hamilton County prosecutor Simon L. Leis, Jr., who was also a crusader against obscenity, put Ohio pornographer Larry Flynt on trial in 1976 for pandering obscenity and for engaging in a form of organized crime. Local public opinion ran against Flynt, largely because of Keating's denunciations of him. Flynt was convicted of both counts and received the maximum sentence of 7 to 25 years in prison. While the conviction was later overturned on appeal, the verdict again established Cincinnati's community standards in this regard, and even after Keating left for Arizona, his influence remained in Cincinnati being a center of anti-pornography fervor. In the 1996 Flynt biopic The People vs. Larry Flynt, which exaggerated Keating's role in the prosecution and trial, Keating was portrayed by actor James Cromwell. Attempts to show Vixen! in Cincinnati would continue, but by the late 1990s it was still illegal to do so.
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