Miller V. California - References in Popular Culture

References in Popular Culture

Gore Vidal, whose 1967 best-selling novel Myra Breckenridge was considered obscene by many in the anti-pornography movement (but which was not prosecuted), satirized the Miller v. California decision in the 1974 sequel to Myra Breckenridge, Myron. In his introduction to the novel, Vidal says the recent Supreme Court decision "leaves to each community the right to decide what is pornography." Saying that the decision has "alarmed and confused peddlers of smut" by eliminating guidelines, Vidal says he has decided to substitute the names of the five Justices who voted for the decision, plus the names of anti-pornography crusaders Charles Keating and Father Morton A. Hill, S.J. for the "dirty words." He has done this, he writes, to conform to the Supreme Court's imposition of the "community standards" test, as he wants "to conform with the letter and spirit of the Court's decision. I believe that these substitutions are not only edifying and redemptive," Vidal wrote, "but tend to revitalize a language gone stale and inexact from too much burgering around with meaning." Decades later, in a reissue of the novel, Vidal replaced the names of the five justices and two anti-pornography crusaders with the words their names were chosen to represent.