As you may know, American Decency has made it part of our mission to oppose sexually graphic magazines at checkout counters. We have expended much effort over the years to encourage supermarkets, grocery stores, and other family shopping centers to remove Cosmopolitan magazine from the checkouts (or to the very least cover it with blinders). It’s hard not to be aware of the sexually graphic headlines of Cosmo – they stare us in the face every week as we wait in line at the checkout. Those efforts have garnered some success, but far less than we’d like. We have also encouraged you to speak out where you shop, and we continue to urge you to do so!
But we are not alone in this fight. In recent months two others have also taken up this concern. On the surface these two new allies may seem like surprising opponents to the pornographic magazine, Cosmopolitan – one is a 26 year old former model and the other is the granddaughter and an heir of William Randolph Heart who founded the Hearst Corporation, the publisher of Cosmopolitan magazine.
Last year former model Nicole Weider embarked on a campaign to put Hearst Corporation’s sexually explicit Cosmopolitan magazine in a wrapper and ensure that it is sold only to those over the age of 18.
Anti-Cosmo Mission“About 12 years ago, before the Lord told me to found Praise Him Ministries in 2001, I noticed how pornographic the content of Cosmopolitan magazine was. I telephoned Frank Bennack, head of the company, and told him Cosmopolitan should not be sold to minors and that I would like to address the board about it,” she told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column. “He refused to allow it, and refused to admit that Cosmo is pornography. Sex sells and the company does not care that Cosmo gets into the hands of children. Since Frank blocked my access, I decided to bypass him and send my petition directly to each board member via Federal Express… I never received a response from the company. But I had delivered the message God wanted. I went on with life and never looked at Cosmo again.”
“It’s important to understand that we are not trying to censor Cosmopolitan magazine or stop the Hearst Corporation from printing it,” she stressed. “We are simply asking Hearst to take responsibility for the magazine’s pornographic content and voluntary bag it and make sure that it is sold to adults only. Right now, Hearst is refusing to do that, so Nicole and I have been speaking to legislators and others in authority to have Cosmo fall under the guidelines of states’ ‘Material Harmful To Minors’ laws. That would make it illegal to sell the magazine to minors.”…
And those are just the cover stories.
The ‘Material Harmful to Minors’ law is defined as “any communication, picture, image, graphic image file, article, recording, writing, or other matter of any kind that is obscene” or that the average person would consider to a pander to a prurient interest; depicts, describes, or represents, in a manner patently offensive with respect to minors, and taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.” The obscenity laws as they pertain to minors vary by state.
As you may know, American Decency has made it part of our mission to oppose sexually graphic magazines at checkout counters. We have expended much effort over the years to encourage supermarkets, grocery stores, and other family shopping centers to remove Cosmopolitan magazine from the checkouts (or to the very least cover it with blinders). It’s hard not to be aware of the sexually graphic headlines of Cosmo – they stare us in the face every week as we wait in line at the checkout. Those efforts have garnered some success, but far less than we’d like. We have also encouraged you to speak out where you shop, and we continue to urge you to do so!
