Once again, a move is underway to ban the sale of certain adult magazines on U.S. military bases. Predictably, many troops are outraged.

We’re not talking here about what most people would call pornography, the wild stuff. In question are magazines that feature photographs of nude or barely clad women, interspersed with articles on general subjects. Playboy and Penthouse are the ones usually put in this category.

Magazines like that were banned from base sales in the nineties. But a Defense Department review board subsequently ruled that their content was not explicit enough to continue the prohibition. It remained in regard to real porn, the kind that shows raw sexual acts, or worse. Now 16 congressmen, led by Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., want the less explicit publications banned, too.

They’ve introduced a bill that would make it impossible for the Army and Air Force Exchange Service to sell magazines like Playboy or Penthouse. A bare female breast would be enough to ban them. (In an apparent attempt at some accommodation, the legislation would allow "the cleavage of the female breast exhibited by a dress, blouse, bathing suit, or other apparel.")

Broun’s rationale, from his Web site: "Allowing the sale of pornography [not further defined] on military bases has harmed military men and women by escalating the number of violent, sexual crimes, feeding a base addiction, eroding the family as the primary building block of society, and denigrating the moral standing of our troops both here and abroad."

There are psychiatrists and social scientists who believe that pornography causes sexual crimes. Others question that, citing studies showing that in some areas – such as Japan – use of pornography has increased but sexual assaults have decreased. And some, like Dr. Jane Rinehart, a sociology professor at Gonzaga University, want terms defined. Not all erotica -- a category that could include the newly endangered magazines -- is pornography, she says, and thus may not be as hurtful.

Some soldiers didn’t need scholarly opinions to make up their minds about the proposed ban. Although some female servicemembers favored a ban, a sergeant from Grafenwohr, Germany, Simon Brown, seemed to speak for the male majority. He told Stars and Stripes that adult magazines have a positive effect on morale. The sergeant, who is preparing for his third deployment downrange, said, "It would suck if they ban [them]. It’s bad enough we are down there to begin with. Taking that away would be like a knife in the chest." He said reading the magazines is not all about the photos, "although 80 per cent of it is."

In a letter-to-the-editor, Sgt. Andrew Jackson from FOB Rustamiyah, Iraq, made a loftier argument. While avoiding the magazines himself "because of a jealous wife," he argued that banning them in AAFES stores "is a clear violation of the First Amendment."

To that, a court might well agree. What Congress and the DOD decide can be a wholly different matter, however. With so much interest in the outcome, the media needs to keep track of the bill’s fate.

GLAAD is bad for some

A letter-writer, Staff Sgt. David L. Quinn of Camp Bueca, Iraq, asks whether the editors of Stars and Stripes have "completely lost their minds." His gripe: A story about the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). Provided by The Associated Press, it was a straightforward account of a ceremony at which the group gave awards for media personalities or projects that cast gays and lesbians in an understanding light.

Quinn denounced any notion of allowing homosexuals in the military and accused Stripes of being "just another glitzy liberal publication" for supposedly thinking otherwise. That’s unfair criticism. Just because a newspaper publishes an article about an organization’s activities – and GLAAD is a legitimate one whatever you think of its mission – it doesn’t mean the newspaper embraces the group and what it stands for. It simply made some news, period.