Love & Passion Quote by William J. Brennan, Jr.

Brennan slices through America’s favorite category error: treating sex itself as suspect. The line reads like a tidy definition, but it’s really a constitutional power move. By separating “sex” from “obscenity,” he refuses the moral panic that lets government smuggle broad censorship into the law under the guise of “protecting decency.” Sex can be art, education, confession, comedy, politics. Obscenity, in Brennan’s framing, is narrower and uglier: it’s the calculated pitch to prurient interest, the material designed to stimulate voyeuristic appetite rather than communicate an idea.

That emphasis on intent and effect matters. Brennan is doing jurisprudence by way of psychology: what is this work trying to do to its audience? He signals that the state shouldn’t police content simply because it mentions bodies or desire; it should only step in when the work’s core purpose is lascivious titillation. The subtext is a warning against the lazy conflation that turns “I’m offended” into “it should be illegal.”

The context is the Supreme Court’s long, messy effort to draw a line between protected expression and unprotected obscenity in a culture perpetually anxious about sex. Brennan, associated with the Court’s mid-century civil-libertarian wing, is trying to build a workable boundary that doesn’t hand local majorities a veto over speech. His definition quietly admits how subjective the project is: “prurient interest” isn’t a scientific measurement, it’s a social judgment. The brilliance is that he narrows the target anyway, forcing censors to justify themselves rather than letting disgust do the arguing.