The smut industry’s trade paper once boasted that “in 1979 there were . . . three to four times as many adult bookstores in the U.S. as McDonald’s restaurants.”

UNITED STATES​—The California Department of Justice estimated that pornography in that state was a “$4 billion business annually” in 1978. Other reports show profits of $475 million a year by “ten leading ‘skin’ magazines” and $365 million a year by “adult” movie theaters. An “adult” bookstore in Times Square in New York City can make $10,000 a day. A single dial-a-porn number in the same city brings in $35,000 a day to the phone company alone. One such “service,” operating in more than a dozen large American cities, averages half a million calls a day!