Your Obscenity Might Be Someone’s Idea of a Good Time

Shock!  I almost found myself agreeing with a Christian group today, but then they had to go and take things a little too far.  Pro-Decency and Pro-Family organizations are going to hold a conference at the Press Club in D.C. and then go on a peaceful demonstration for a couple of hours in front of the Justice Department to protest what they perceive to be a lack of funding, staffing, and enforcement of obscenity laws by the FBI.

Their press release even managed to hit all the right notes almost all the way through:

“We want the next President to know that failure to vigorously enforce federal obscenity laws is undermining government efforts to, among other things, strengthen the family, protect children from pornography, curb sexual exploitation of children and curb sexual trafficking.”

So they seem to be protesting child pornography and sexual trafficking.  I think just about everyone can agree that those are admirable goals.  And I’m sure that most people who read through the article will focus on that alone, but in the next paragraph they take a sharp swing into left field:

“We also we want the next President to know that widespread availability of obscene materials is not proof of community acceptance. According to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive in April 2008, 75% of adult Americans said they would support the next President were he or she to ‘do all in his or her constitutional power to ensure that federal obscenity laws are enforced vigorously against commercial distributors of hardcore pornography.”

And now we’re safely into familiar territory for the Christian moralizers.  First off, I have to wonder about that survey where 75% of Americans said they want to get rid of hardcore pornography.  I imagine that a fair number of that 75% has their own private collection that they feel entitled to while they’re publicly denouncing the stuff.  It’s more than 25% of Americans keeping the porn industry chugging along rather nicely through the recession, after all.

The real problem here is that they’ve gone from supporting better enforcement of the law to supporting censorship by lumping hardcore pornography in with child pornography and human trafficking.  I’m sure that there is exploitation going on out there in the mainstream porn industry, but the fact remains that it is completely legal to make, distribute, and sell those materials in most of the country.  Saying that something should be banned just because a large chunk of the population publicly disagrees with it is stepping dangerously close to the tyranny of the masses.  Sure Debbie Does Dallas 42 isn’t on par with great works of literature or film, but censorship tends to be a slippery slope once you start down that path.

Besides, people are going to continue to cry and beg God for forgiveness after they finish using their private collection whether or not it’s illegal to own those materials.  These groups almost had me, but then they had to overstep themselves and try to lump the prosecution of a reprehensible illegal action with the censorship of a legitimate and completely legal business venture.  Sorry guys, but you can’t ban something just because your invisible friend in the sky makes you feel bad about using it.

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