Expert Witness

It wasn't long, though, before LaRue's life was about to change again. By the end of 1959, she was a divorcee and a single mother. She was working as a waitress when she met Gene LaRue.

"I tell people I put a cup of coffee in front of him and I've been doing it ever since," she says.

They married in 1960. He was a police officer and a single father of three whose first wife had walked out on him.

Jan LaRue became a homemaker with four kids. Then she and Gene had a son and there she was, the mother of five. But something was missing from their lives. They found what they were looking for in church, she and Gene LaRue say. They became Christians on Easter Sunday 1967.

"I always say it was a good day to be risen from the dead," she says.

She has never gotten therapy for the traumas of her youth, she says, because on that day all the anger she'd carried for so many years simply disappeared.

The LaRues went to work for Campus Crusade for Christ. They also did missionary work in several prisons, where LaRue says she found so many women who had also been sexually abused as children. She talked to them about her life and how she became a Christian, and she told the story of her youth -- all of it. Women, she says, came up to her to share their own stories of abuse.

It was her son, one day, who brought her a brochure about a special law program.

People had told her that she had the arguing skills of a lawyer and she would laugh it off, though truth be told, she had wanted to be a lawyer since she was a little girl. Now, here was her son, holding information about a program that allowed life experience to count toward a law degree.

"He said, 'Here, you can do this,' " Gene LaRue recalls.

The family, his wife says, "practically pushed me out the door." She was nearly 42 and still without a high school diploma. She applied and was accepted to the program run by the California State Bar and graduated in 1985 from Simon Greenleaf School of Law in Orange County. (The Christian law school is now known as Trinity International University School of Law.) She passed the bar on the first try.

In 1989 she went to work for the Western Center for Law and Religious Freedom, which defended the antiabortion group Operation Rescue. In another three years she would move to the conservative, anti-pornography group National Law Center for Children and Families, where her work against porn began in a serious way. She then became senior director of Legal Studies for the conservative Family Research Council before moving on to CWA. She and Gene describe the events that got her to law school and on her current path as "divine interventions."

"I went to law school with a goal," Jan LaRue says. "Not because I wanted a career, but because I wanted to make a difference."

The War on Porn

LaRue uses her personal story to help explain why she has focused on fighting pornography. Pornography is big business. Depending on whom you talk to, it rakes in anywhere from $8 billion to $12 billion a year. The Internet has placed it an anonymous click away.

Pornography, she and York argue, is a social poison that desensitizes its users -- most of whom supposedly are men -- and can destroy a man's ability to form healthy relationships with women. It is also addictive, they say, which in turn can lead to "deviant attitudes" and greater tolerance of deviant behavior. It can lead to the user acting out sexually, they say. Pornography, they say, is a tool of rapists and pedophiles, who have used it in particular to lure and seduce children. And children, they say, are what Americans should worry about.

"It means that your child is in danger of having his views of sexuality and relationships permanently warped . . . if he has access to pornographic materials. It also means that he may, like a growing number of kids, become a predator," they write.

But for however many studies they note in their book, there are studies to counter them.

"Research in this area is very politicized," says Neil Malamuth, a professor of communications and psychology at UCLA who for three decades has studied the social impact of pornography. Still, the findings do point in convincing directions, he says.

First, Malamuth reports, there is no empirical data to make a direct link of cause and effect when it comes to pornography and sexual aggression, be it rape or pedophilia. And the real effect of exposing children to pornography, according to many experts in the field, remains an unanswered question.

Malamuth notes, however, that if individuals who already have very high inclinations to aggression against women "are also heavy consumers of porn, particularly sexually violent porn, then they are even more likely to actually be sexually aggressive toward women."

LaRue's work against pornography has brought her up against those who see CWA's efforts and those of groups like it as censorship and a potential violation of the First Amendment.

"They have a right to condemn it. What they don't have a right to do is to tell other people what they can do," says Joan Bertin, head of the National Coalition Against Censorship.

No Question on Abortion

CWA supports Alito because it believes he'll vote to overturn Roe, says Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women.

"The Concerned Women for America weren't satisfied with being 98 percent sure with Harriet Miers" that she would be a vote for overturning Roe, Gandy says. "They had to be 100 percent sure. With Alito they are 100 percent sure."

LaRue demurs. "I would be disappointed if he indicated how he would vote," she says.

She says she knows that the majority of Americans support a woman's right to a legal abortion. Yet, she says, abortion is murder.

"We know when life begins," she says, brushing aside other arguments.

Besides, she says, her interest in shifting the court is larger than Roe, though overturning it would be the kind of justice that comes with overturning what she calls bad precedent, such as when Brown v. Board of Education rejected the court's earlier "separate but equal" ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson .

"There is no denying that it's a major issue, but it's certainly not the only major issue," she says.

But LaRue is also considering moving on. Her husband faces several health challenges. LaRue already works at home two days a week. She says she is beginning to wonder what life would look like from the perspective of a retiree. She would continue working on the issues that matter to her, continue writing, too, but she says she and her husband have already been talking about where they might move.

Washington, she says, doesn't have a hold on her.