Stephen Bates writes for the Washington Post July 15:
That toxic combination makes a mockery of the First Amendment — chilling freedom of expression even as it erodes the separation of church and state.
The Web site is run by Morality in Media Inc., an "interfaith organization" that has battled pornography, profanity and blasphemy since 1962. It aims to "rid the world of pornography" — most of which is constitutionally protected. The site blames porn for, among other things, the Virginia Tech massacre, international trafficking in women and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. ("The pictures these soldiers produced at Abu Ghraib could have come out of porn valley in California," the group’s site says. "In a real way, they did.") According to Morality in Media, Playboy promotes sibling incest, and even Cosmopolitan is nothing short of pornographic. The outfit also fulminates against "the hellish sexual revolution," R-rated movies, gangsta rap and Bratz dolls.
What about the First Amendment? It’s merely part of "a framework of ordered liberty," the group said in a 2005 letter to President Bush, not "a license to publish pornography." Unfortunately, the site argues elsewhere, "a judicial oligarchy accountable to no one" has brushed aside considerations of decency in favor of the agenda of "pornographers and radical libertarians." If the Constitution protects consensual, private gay sex, what’s next? asked Robert Peters, the group’s president, in July 2003. "A right to bugger farm animals"?
I email lawyer and journalism professor Stephen Bates: "How is hardcore pornography speech? Have you ever seen hardcore? How familiar are you with hardcore? What exactly is speech about twelve guys ejaculating on the face of one woman? How is this constitutionally protected? How is reasoned discourse chilled by obscenity prosecutions of gang bang producers? Do you think that the writers of the Bill of Rights had in mind Max Hardcore and JM Productions’ bukkake videos when they crafted the First Amendment? Do you truly feel that your rights as a journalist would be infringed upon if you could no longer rent DVDs of 100 guys ejaculating on one woman?"
In my view, pornography is expression, not speech. I have no position on whether it should be legal or not.
Bates responds:
I’m sure that the authors and ratifiers of the First Amendment had no such thing in mind. But the Supreme Court has ruled that the amendment protects "hardcore porn" so long as it doesn’t violate a three-part test for obscenity. The Court has been construing the Constitution since Marbury v. Madison, whether we like it or not.
As a policy matter, fwiw, I’d rather see the Justice Department devote its limited resources in this realm to prosecuting child porn, as it did under Clinton, instead of obscenity. Not that I’m a particular admirer of Clinton, having worked on the Whitewater/Lewinsky investigation as an associate independent counsel.
If harcore porno is speech, why straight prostitution is not part of the right to privacy?
Why the double standard?
Miller v. California is the pornographer’s best friend much the same as pre-internet limited accessibility to adult mags and films was years back.
There are pro-porn dimwits out there who still think the ‘community standards’ test is a violation of a smut peddler’s free speech rights rather than the actual get-out-of-jail-free card it has actually become.
A couple of things are missing from this snippet on LukeIsBack.com (just check the WashPost article itself).
First, this religious group managed to get one Republican congressman to put in an “earmark” – a last minute, no one sees it but they spend your money – to finance their program to look at obscenity on websites.
Second, while the actual looking was done by ex-FBI people, they gather evidence to send to prosecutors. In other words an outside organization has been given de facto powers of a law enforcement agency.
Yes, there are other ways our justice system does this, for instance with bounty hunters. But personally I would rather the law enforcement stay with official un-retired law enforcement to make sure (well, theoretically) that they follow the law when looking to enforce the law.
Third, even forgetting all that, for two years now these people have checked on websites looking for “obcene” material, all based on tips gathered on the group’s web site I think. They have sent about two dozen sets of evidence to various prosecutors. The result: nothing.
In other words, they not only spend tax money (okay not much) secretly stuck into some random bill to assume some law enforcement powers, but they accomplish nothing!
As an aside, I personally feel that whatever damage to society is done by hard core porn is insignificant when compared to the damage done to society by a group which believes pornography is the root of all our problems, or by those groups which think the teaching of evolution is the cause of all our problems, or those groups which think that “rampant homosexuality” was the reason for 9/11 and hurricane Katrina.
These anti-science, anti-rational, pro-their one interpretation of Christianity types have the potential to do far more harm to the long term prosperity and freedoms we have here in the good ol US of A, than even the most insidious and yucky hard core.
But, that’s just my opinion.
This article in the NY Times has more details:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/10/us/10obscene.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
New York Times, August 10, 2007
Federal Effort on Web Obscenity Shows Few Results
By NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON, Aug. 9 — Tom Rogers, a retired Indianapolis detective, toils away most days in his suburban home office reviewing sexual Web sites and other Internet traffic to see whether they qualify as obscene material whose purveyors should be prosecuted by the Justice Department.
His work is financed by a Justice Department grant initially provided through a Congressional earmark inserted into a spending bill by Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican of Virginia.
The grant, about $150,000 a year, has helped pay for Mr. Rogers and another retired law enforcement officer in Reno, Nev., to harvest and review complaints about obscene matter on the Internet that citizens register on the Justice Department Web site.
In the last few years, 67,000 citizens’ complaints have been deemed legitimate under the program and passed on to the Justice Department and federal prosecutors.
The number of prosecutions resulting from those referrals is zero.
That may help explain why no one — not Justice Department officials, not Mr. Wolf, not even the religious antipornography crusader who runs the program — seems eager to call the project a shining success.
The department Web site invites citizens to report material that they believe is obscene so it can be investigated and, perhaps, prosecuted. Clicking on the site to make a report takes the user to ObscenityCrimes.org, which is run by Morality in Media, the grant recipient.
Morality in Media is a conservative religious group that has worked since 1962 to “rid the world of pornography” and whose headquarters is, improbably, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
Morality in Media has received two annual grants from Mr. Wolf’s earmarks and is hoping that Justice Department officials decide on their own to award a third, as Mr. Wolf’s ability to obtain an earmark for the program has apparently waned with the Democrats’ control of Congress.
Department officials, however, seemed less than keen to talk about ObscenityCrimes.org. Spokesmen for the criminal division said officials there had nothing to do with the program, which they had been obliged to start because of the earmark.
In the seven years of the Bush administration, the department has prosecuted about 24 obscenity cases, several centered on film producers who failed to keep proper records showing that their models were not minors.
Although the Justice Department seems not to take ObscenityCrimes.org very seriously, the Web site suggests that prosecutors scrutinize the complaints so carefully that it warns people considering filing a complaint that false statements could expose the filer to federal criminal prosecution.
Would-be complainants are also advised not to trawl for obscene Web sites, noting that “men are particularly vulnerable to pornographic addiction.” Identifying Internet smut, the site advises, is best left to professional law enforcement personnel.
The president of Morality in Media, Robert W. Peters, expressed disappointment with the department’s failure to act on any of his group’s complaints and acknowledged that he understood why some people might say the program had been of little value.
“We’d like to see some prosecutions that arose from the complaints submitted to the Web site,” Mr. Peters said in an interview. “But it’s ultimately up to the Justice Department, and I can’t tell the Justice Department what to do.”
Like the outlook of many antipornography campaigners, Mr. Peters’s combines disappointment in the government’s performance and optimism that the situation will soon change. Mr. Peters said he was confident that officials would eventually assume their responsibility and go after what he described as a prime threat to society, the growth on the Internet of sexual material involving consenting adults.
Child pornography is dealt with through separate laws that have been upheld by the courts, which have had far greater difficulty in evaluating when adult sexual material may be classified obscene and prosecutable.
Stephen G. Bates, a Harvard-trained lawyer and journalism professor, said he was appalled when he discovered that the Justice Department was outsourcing a search for obscenity.
Although sexual material may be distasteful to many, it is not necessarily obscene, which the Supreme Court defined in 1973 as material that, taken as a whole, lacks artistic merit, depicts certain conduct in a patently offensive manner and violates contemporary community standards.
Professor Bates, who teaches at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, filed a Freedom of Information Act request that helped him discover the program by ObscenityCrimes.org.
In an op-ed article last month in The Washington Post and other newspapers, Mr. Bates said Morality in Media’s religious cast, the sensitivity of the constitutional issue of free speech and the outsourcing together made “a mockery of the First Amendment, chilling freedom of expression.”
Mr. Wolf would not comment. Over several days, his aides said he was too busy to do so.
If hardcore pornography is not speech then why are religious beliefs protected? Both are fantasy. I do not see any difference.
Dean thats what the thumpers (as in bible) are too dumb to get…the same end of the eraser that erases my free speech can erase their free religion.
Honestly though, while I support the porn biz 100% it would seem more than possible for individual states to pass laws against specific sex acts being depicted on film rather than relying on the Miller 3-tier test. Each state could then file cases against specific titles and studios with the intent of reaching the Supreme Court for a new obscenity precedent.
With Miller gone it would be pretty simple to differentiate between religion and porn if, for instance, hardcore double penetration on film was made illegal rather than the vague ‘community standards’ which literally legalized all types of hardcore porn no matter how extreme or obscene.
Yes, hardcore porn is free speech I would say. The dicks that come on a girl’s face are in effect saying that this feels and looks good and I’m getting paid to have ecstatic orgasms for a living while the average working stiff slaves 9-5.
The downside about porn is that the poor voyeur jerkoff who is doomed to watch gets no action except to lust vicariously or complain bitter sour grapes due to unnaturally repressive puritan conditioned, myopic, brain damaged, moral religious psychosis.
As a result, this is why Western Civilization is decaying or becoming extinct. Half of the white race are addicted to visual sexuality and the other half are prone to demonize sex or love. The result is that neither are having enough kids to keep up with 3rd world Juans and Mohammeds who theaten western world soverignty.
So from Europe to Russia to the US, whites are not having enough babies. Whether one is a pervert or a prude, porn is at worst a sexual catharsis or catalyst for the socially inept. It is not the graphic content of it, but caucasian’s double edged over-reaction which is slowly dissolving his asexual, non-procreative anti-social gene pool here and abroad.
Hence the new age global disorder is his neo fascist reaction to the dwindling population of the selfish elite ruling classes who to maintain the status quo, will do with money, power and bombs what they can’t do with love, sex or their genitals.
What we are seeing here is natural selection brought on by the evils of technology. And it is not just porn at fault, but mass media itself. For if we live life via TV reality show entertainment, we don’t make love, have sex or start families ourselves.
In short, if we forget to have kids because we are either afraid of sex or obsessed by it, we are in for a barren future and thus certain doom.
Without corruption to reign in the blood-thirsty desires of the modern white neofascist the world would be minus many millions of non-whites in a very short moment.
Our enemies are now our labor force while our bombs have become our children. Don’t confuse political corruption with all-out war. What’s happening in the middle east is no more than an extended corporate takeover.
We shall overcome!
The so-called enemy labor force, defined as the new proletariat, is subsidized by our own system which hires foreign slave labor both here in illegals and abroad in the 3rd world.
We vs. the oppressed masses, fight a losing battle of civilization by pretending that the selfishness and greed of materialism will ward off sheer math and numbers of humanity.
What part of fascism doesn’t equal political corruption in the face of such a threatening population explosion? And how can the hordes of unassimilating newcomers who failed at civility in their lands of origin support peace when they outnumber us here?
Moreover, if we become extinct as a race because we live through fame, fortune and media and fear love, sex and family, what good will money, power and bombs do when we’re outpopulated and rendered politically impotent by democratic majority rule?
Predatory organisms which do do not reproduce enough are doomed by natural selection. The same laws which govern the animal kingdom also apply to humankind. Like it or not.
Once upon a time, they used to pay
the people to not have kids in China. Here in the west we need to be paid to have kids to keep up with disloyal immigrants if this nation is to survive.
The white man is dying because he is obsessed with ego, money, work and media. Meanwhile the 3rd world rabbits are the new barbarians out
to even the score after millennia of
caucasian imperialism.
By outloving and outfucking us. They are busy making babies while we’re all debating whether porn or sex is evil. I wonder what Freud would say. LOL!
Freud was yesterdays news.
He was wrong in too many things. Evolutionary psychology is the future. And for them, sexual represion is actually a good thing for the humans, it might keep male violence in check.
But before we keep the libertarian/socialist/anarchist porn discourse. Remember the role porn have in Orwell’s 1984.
Porn is just a guilty pleasure (my guilty plesure I might add), it should be legal but controled. If porn disappeared tomorrow, we still be wanking with our imaginations.
Rather than reading the true meaning of my words, you’re taking a side reference out of context and missing
the point.
Freud was one of the five most brilliant men who ever lived and anything and everything that happened yesterday or yesteryear represents the best of times compared to today.
There was once a classic old school smut flick called Cafe Flesh. In it there were sex positives and sex negatives. Those able to screw and those doomed to watch.
The porn parallel along with mass media is that it’s turning the white race into zombies who live life vicariously through the entertainment world and don’t reproduce enough.
And make no mistake, when our sexual life force is wasted as pastime
rather than procreative survival,
which is happening across the globe, we become the minority and thus the slave.
Of course, this won’t happen in our lifetime. But while we knitpick over
the value of a porno jerkoff as opposed to a family conception, the clock is ticking…