Illinois- Walk into one of Oak Lawn’s convenience or liquor stores, and a bounty of nudie magazine titles are there for the asking.

Hustler. Penthouse. Barely Legal. Playboy. Playgirl. High Society.

That anyone of legal age can walk in, plunk down $5 and walk out carrying 80 pages of naked photos and off-color stories irks Mark Decker.

“Basically, anything perverted the mind can conceive is available for sale in our community,” the 36-year-old Decker told village board members in Oak Lawn recently. “There are laws on the books already, I want you to enforce them and ban this material from being sold in the village.”

Decker, a self-employed carpet cleaner, is seeking a local police crackdown on the sale of such wares under state and local laws banning obscene materials.

If Decker succeeds in Oak Lawn, he’d like to broaden his snuff-out-smut campaign to the rest of the Southland.

Currently, police try to make sure adult magazines aren’t on public display or within a child’s reach.

Oak Lawn Police Chief Robert Smith said he will investigate the question of obscenity, but he doesn’t plan to arrest the owners of area liquor stores for selling skin mags anytime soon.

The material must lack literary, artistic, political or scientific value, Smith said, and be considered obscene under community standards.

“Even if everyone in the community wanted us to ban this, we’d still have a problem,” Smith said. “There are broad First Amendment issues here.”

State law does ban material deemed “obscene” by community standards, however the First Amendment grants protection to various forms of self expression.

The question of where to draw the line between obscenity and art is something local police officers usually don’t go after, according to Mat Delort, a municipal attorney who represents Merrionette Park, Alsip and Worth.

“There is a bit of room for governments to prohibit extreme types of pornography,” he said. “But I have not seen it at the local level.”

Decker is taking is cue from Cincinnati, a conservative downstate Ohio city where police arrested Larry Flynt in 1976 for selling his Hustler magazine and again in 1998 for selling sex videos. The 1990 arrest of a museum director for showing an exhibit with photos depicting several sadomasochistic scenes by Robert Mapplethorpe also captured widespread attention.

But what Cincinnati buys into may not sell in suburban Chicago.

“You have to look at the question of what is pornography,” said Steve Barnett, spokesman for the Hamilton County Sheriff’s office in Cincinnati. “It’s based on a community standard, and the community standard might be different in Cincinnati than it is in Chicago.”

Local police say they are concerned when pornographic material is not covered or displayed in an area where children can see it. They have little interest in clearing convenience store shelves entirely of Playboy, Hustler and the like.

Police get involved only when specific complaints are made.

An Orland Park resident, for example, complained that a store displayed magazines in such a way that children can see the covers.

“We went over there, asked them to keep it behind the counter and they complied,” said Orland Park Police Chief Timothy McCarthy. “Every time we’ve come across this, the owners were receptive to our requests.”

Decker, however, is not deterred.

Citing the support from the Illinois Family Institute, a Glen Ellyn-based nonprofit opposed to gay marriage, pornography and abortion, Decker plans to keep pressure on Oak Lawn to do more. He believes other people want these magazines banned, too.

“If I have to, I’ll start advertising this issue,” he said. “I feel this is a dangerous situation and police need to take action on it.”