Protecting Pornography

As anybody who reads industry publications can tell you, it is not a good time to be in the adult entertainment business. Since President George W. Bush assumed power, there has been a federal crusade against this supposedly immoral form of entertainment, aided in large part by his creation of the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force in 2005. These trials have done little other than disrupt businessmen from being productive contributors to the economy, and wasting taxpayer dollars. The initiation of this assault on a legal industry, and its continuation to this very day are both highly alarming.

Undoubtedly some shrug this off as inconsequential. After all, there are literally millions of pornographic websites on the internet, and thousands of new adult titles make it to DVD every year. Moreover, few people can name a single person or company that has been subject to this absurd attempt to regulate commerce and free expression by religious zealots and their leaders. The reason for this is that pornography is constitutionally protected, but “obscenity” is not, according the precedent-setting verdict of Miller v California (1973). Incapable as our government often proves to be, those in charge of the “obscenity” prosecution for the Department of Justice are smart enough to realize that they will not be able to convince the average jury that mainstream pornography should fall outside the scope of the First Amendment. Instead, they opt for easier targets, going primarily after fetish material. Because such content has a relatively small consumer base, and contains material that is both foreign and shocking to the average person, it is far easier to win a case against such content.

More unsettling is that there is nothing the industry can do to protect itself, short of shutting down completely. There is no list of things that are obscene, and standards are set by the community. As such, the government has license to target anybody they want, for any vague reason, in whatever venue is most sympathetic to their anti-pornography position. Consequently, a pornographer may make a title, and then several years after its release, be brought to court over it, being told that if his work is deemed obscene, he faces substantial time in jail. Each conviction carries with it a potential of five years in jail, with cases often involving enough counts to ensure they spend decades behind bars.

If we as a society value liberty, it is incumbent upon us to express out outrage over this campaign to quash freedom of expression and freedom of commerce, regardless of one’s own pornographic preferences. Whether you enjoy the material specifically under attack, or you’ve never seen so much as full frontal nudity is irrelevant. What matters is that the protection of minority rights and personal empowerment that is constitutionally ensured is not done away with because of the myopic views of a few faith-inspired extremists. At the end of the day, how we as a people respond to this siege on what our founding fathers fought for will determine whether we can begin to reclaim the freedom lost to two centuries of governmental overstretch, or whether we sacrifice what little we have left of it.

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