Those brave souls at the Department of Justice are at it again, protecting freedom and democracy pissing on the Constitution, in violation of their oath of office.
XBiz reports that John Stagliano and Evil Angel Productions are the latest targets of the Bush administration’s faith-based censorship task force and its lead toadie, Brent Ward.
Stagliano and his related companies were charged with “three counts of using a facility of interstate commerce to sell and distribute DVDs containing obscene films together with a movie trailer in violation; two counts of using a common carrier for the conveyance or delivery of DVDs containing obscene films in interstate commerce; one count of engaging in the business of selling or transferring an obscene film and a movie trailer; one count of using an interactive computer service to display an obscene movie trailer in a manner available to a person under 18 years of age; and one count seeking forfeiture of certain assets of the defendants.” (source)
The indictment reported on here apparently is for films involving squirting, anal squirting, and/or enemas. A copy is available here.
I will agree that films involving squirting milk up a girl’s ass, and then watching it spray out again are on the far side of strange-world. Nevertheless, is this something that you want your government pursuing? Do you really think that your government should be spending its resources trying to put Stagliano in prison?
Who is the greater threat to us all? Stagliano or Brent Ward?
Ward is a repressed Utah fascist who came to power during the Bush administration’s push to make the entire government a faith-based initiative. After years of languishing in frustration in Utah, Ward was given a position of power at the Department of Justice — heading up the DOJ’s obscenity task force. When prosecutors laughed at him for trying to divert government resources to putting people in jail for selling “dirty movies,” he got pissed — and did his best to remove prosecutors who didn’t follow his faith-based anti-First Amendment crusade. (source). Remember the U.S. Attorneys scandal from a few months ago? At least two of the U.S. Attorneys lost their jobs because they thought that pursuing crime was more important than trying to criminalize First Amendment protected expression.
Adult obscenity prosecutions are notoriously difficult to win, since prosecutors must show that materials involving and used by consenting adults have violated local “community standards.” In the post-9/11 era, law enforcement experts have questioned whether a focus on federal obscenity cases makes sense, given the massive resources diverted to counterterrorism and the demands of other criminal priorities like gun violence, identity theft and the proliferation via the Internet of sex crimes against children.
“With everything else going on, should they really have FBI agents and prosecutors devoted to sitting around watching dirty movies?” said a senior law enforcement official who attended a national conference on adult obscenity orchestrated by the Gonzales Justice Department in October 2006. “We’re not the policymakers,” he said. “But I guarantee you won’t find any office in any major metropolitan area that would seriously consider this a priority.” (source)
Well, it looks like someone threw Ward a bone. That bone is Mr. Stagliano — but Mr. Stagliano stands in as a proxy for all of our freedom, whether we like milk enema movies or not.
I do not believe that obscenity can truly and honestly be Constitutionally prohibited. See Two Girls, One Cup – Practical Obscenity Law. Nevertheless, for as long as we have zealots serving as prosecutors, and they seek to pander to the worst people in society, there will be obscenity prosecutions.
I believe that even the worst content (as long as that content is of consenting adults) should be constitutionally protected. Nevertheless, the reality is that the social conservatives have funded this modern-day thought police, this obscenity task force that exists for one purpose — to watch dirty movies and put people in prison for making and selling them. Somewhere, right now, there is a Ned Flanders type with deep feelings of repressed homosexuality watching a film with some church-chat looking woman who spent three years in law school with her face buried in Andrea Dworkin law review articles, and the two of them are deciding that the person who made a certain movie needs to be in prison.
In the United States of America… Your tax dollars are spent on efforts to put adults in prison who filmed other consenting adults and sold the movie to other consenting adults.
So much for the land of the free.
The only “crime” that Stagliano committed was dissemination of speech that challenges the morality that Brent Ward has decided we should all live by.
If you don’t like milk-enema films, then exercise your right to not watch it. But, shouldn’t we all, as free Americans, have the right to make that decision for ourselves? Nobody forced the girls to be in the video. Nobody forced the guy to make the video. Nobody forced anyone to fork over their hard earned cash to buy the video.
That’s what freedom is. You make your own choices — for ill or for good.
The government has no right to take a hand in that decision. And the only person who belongs in jail in this equation is Brent Ward, a crusading lowlife who thinks that he should have the right to reach into my life, and your life, and punish us for exercising our fundamental rights to express ourselves any way that we damn well please.
Update Here is a link to Stagliano’s legal defense fund page.
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1) Go buy a Con Law book. 2) Are you really that surprised that the head of the Obscenity Task Force is prosecuting the sale and distribution of obscene material that is a clearly outside the bounds of the first amendment? (See 1). 3) Do you really think Brent Ward decided what is obscene and what isn’t? (See 1, under Marbury v. Madison).
Pardon all of the rhetorical questions but I couldn’t conceive any other way to write this. Also, lacing an article with f-words doesn’t do much for a writer’s credibility, then again, neither does failing to understand the topic you write about.
Is it actually “obscene”? Read Miller v. California.
All speech is presumed to be First Amendment protected, but, yes, you are correct — obscenity still falls outside that protection due to the holding in Miller.
Here is the conundrum, all speech is First Amendment protected until a court says otherwise — no matter how “bad” the material is. In a Constitutional Catch-22, a work can not be considered to be obscene until a judge and jury have analyzed it under Miller. Of course, once that happens, the determination is made, and the defendant is either guilty or not guilty.
To make things even worse, you have to apply “community standards.” What is obscene in one town can be completely acceptable in the next. What is run of the mill in Miami will shock a jury in Bibleburg, Tennessee. When it comes to the internet, this entire concept throws every card into the air.
In other words, you never really know whether something is legally obscene (or not) until the court makes its decision — and by then it is too late. You’ve already been convicted.
How in the hell can *that* really withstand constitutional muster? It can’t. It will, likely, since zealots have taken over the judiciary and the DOJ. But, anyone who finds that to be anything less than constitutionally repugnant needs a con law book of their own.
Do I think that Brent Ward decided what was obscene and what isn’t? No, but he did whine and cry that the DOJ wasn’t letting him play the game they said they would. A few U.S. Attorney firings later, and we’ve got little Brent getting his way.
And, if you don’t like the fact that I use “fuck” in my writing, there are plenty of soft-handed pussy law professors out there… go read their fucking blogs.
I must say that, with the exception of the last sentence, your response was much more logical debate and much less angry rant than I would have expected.
I agree that the community standards test seems a little strange, but in reality it isn’t. In every case of illegal activity, a court actually has to decide whether or not your actions were truly outside the legal boundaries. This is no different. In the instant case, there is no question that every jury in every town in the country would find this as only “appealing to the prurient interests” and thus obscene, and in fact, states must have statutory language regarding specifically what constitutes obscene speech. So really, there *are* clear lines and this is not some ex post facto law. Common law, and presumably every state law in the country includes “depictions of excretory functions,” among other things, on their obscenity statutes.
Thanks for responding so quickly. I was worried you were going to moderate my comment away, and then I really would have started to wonder about this blog. But alas, you didn’t.
Moderate criticism away? Never!
I learn more from one sentence from those who disagree with me than volumes from those who agree. So… fear not. Come by and criticize and challenge any time you like. And, the last sentence wasn’t angry… “fuck” is truly an irreplaceable word. See The Fuck Brief. I take pride in the fact that this is not your “typical” legal blawg. I try to write to people in the common tongue, not legalese. That includes liberal use of the “magic words” that others call “profanity.” Fuck-em if they don’t like it.
But, to the meat of your comment…
In every case of illegal activity, a court actually has to decide whether or not your actions were truly outside the legal boundaries.
Agreed… even if you kill someone, you may not have stepped outside the legal boundaries, (self defense, for example) and a court will need to decide whether you’ve committed murder.
But, I disagree that this is the same as making a smut film, and then having a court decide if it is something that should land you in jail. You’ve brought up one prong of the Miller test, but not all three.
According to Miller v. California, in order for material to be deemed legally obscene, a court must determine the following:
1. Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
2. Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law,
3. Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary and/or artistic, political, or scientific value.
Prurient interest is a “shameful and morbid interest in nudity, sex, or excretion.” Right there we have a problem. Define “shameful.” Define “morbid.” Define it for yourself, let alone for me. I’m sure that if I lifted up the lid of your skull and placed a little window into the part of your mind where the stuff that turns you on lies, I’d find something that many people would call “shameful,” or “morbid,” yet you find nothing wrong with it… And I am not singling you out. I would bet that every person has something locked away there that would shock the rest of us.
The question is, are you comfortable and adjusted to it, or are in deep personal conflict about it? This is what I presume is wrong with Brent Ward, for example. I suspect that he is a closet sex freak, and his crusade is his way of trying to exorcise his “demons.”
In other words, does the material turn people on in a way that they shouldn’t be turned on?
I simply can not come up with a way that the first prong of the Miller test can survive in a free society. We have the right to be interested in women’s softball just because we fantasize that the girls go make out in the locker room, and we could give a damn about the game. And, we have a right to like sex that 99% of the population would find to be “shameful.” (Note: I am not referring to anything that does not involve consenting adults).
Prong two… what is “patently offensive?” Two Girls, One Cup? That is the grossest thing I have ever seen, but can something be “patently offensive?” I find David Hasselhoff’s music to be patently offensive. I find reality TV to be patently offensive.
Look at prongs 1 and 2 together. Kathleen Sullivan, dean of Stanford Law School, put it best when she said that “The first two parts of the Miller test are incoherent: To put it crudely, they require the audience to be turned on and grossed out at the same time.”
I know of content that turns me on, and content that grosses me out. I can’t think of any content ever made that would do both for me… nor for anyone else. I don’t know, perhaps some people are turned on by being nauseous…
Now we have the problem of the community standard… which you agree is “a little strange.” Which community? The third prong is looked at from a nationwide standard. See Pope v. Illinois, 481 U.S. 497 (1987). However, the second two prongs are reviewed by local standards? How can that be? This is unlike any other law. If I express myself in Miami, in a way that is run-of-the-mill, yet it offends a Mississippi jury, I can go to jail?
In any other criminal case, the jury is charged with determining whether the defendant committed the act, and then whether or not there is an excuse for the act. In an obscenity case, the defendant has done nothing more than use his or her right to free expression. After the fact, a zealot prosecutor (no other kind brings obscenity cases) gets to decide whether someone should be prosecuted or not… and at that point, the defendant is already crushed under the weight of an expensive defense.
Lets say the defense wins. After $250,000 in defense costs (which is an average cost, it can get worse), the jury says “no, you didn’t do anything wrong.” The prosecutor goes back to his or her pastor, knowing that they have done the work of the lord… yet they have torn asunder the very fabric of what this country is supposed to be all about.
Or, lets say that the defendant is convicted. This is even worse. The defendant created content, which should be his given right as an American. After it was created, a jury (usually in a hand-picked jurisdiction) is asked to deliberate as to whether the content is okay or not. The kind of idiots who can’t get out of jury duty are sitting in a room, and have to admit to each other that they find no problem with the content?
There are no clear lines, as you claim. And, even worse… whatever loose lines there are, if they are not held tightly, will be pulled back again and again until Baywatch is deemed to be “obscene” by the zealots who seek to enforce these archaic laws in the first place.
Finally, I wouldn’t be as hostile to this kind of thing if the end result was something other than putting Americans in PRISON. Perhaps if a community wanted to put a film on trial, thus effectively banning it from their community, that would be different.
But, if Americans must fear that their sexual expression will land them in prison, then America is a lie.
Watch this, if you want the cliff notes version of the point I am making. (Safe for work)
Now we’re talking! This is the post I wanted to read. Perhaps you are now appealing to the Libertarian inside of me but I am somewhat on the same page with you regarding your last post. True the standard is wishy-washy. Many are. I guess I take comfort in the fact that it is a jury deciding rather than a judge “applying” (read: massaging) some standard that is really just a ruse to get the result she wants. Ahh the judiciary . . .
Either way, this standard is a strange one, and you have really convinced me of that. Perhaps I agree, however, with the justification that this is all an effort to protect minors from getting their hands on the stuff (because just having this in your home isn’t actionable, just dissemination in commerce). I am worried about those being exposed to something they aren’t ready to be exposed to, by their 17 year old older brother who ordered something foul on the internet. Then again it could be his 18 year old brother and it doesn’t make a difference anyway.
You must admit, however, that no jury in the country would have a second thought regarding the videos in question. I don’t think too many people think that this is the front lines of the obscenity battle but I see your point.
Regarding your style as the one who like to be the straw that stirs the milk, so to speak: I am growing a little tired of reading posts that villianize others and report mini-conspiracies of surreptitious attempts to destroy the constitution. Further, I am not convinced that it is actually that original anymore. Maybe I have been reading too many Christopher Hitchens articles.
Regardless, I am impressed with your thoroughness and despite the fact that I may disagree with plenty, there is no question that your words contribute to the marketplace of ideas and I am glad we have the right (and means) to express ourselves. Whether that should extend to obscene material, I am not convinced, but you make some good arguments to change the way it is analyzed.
Why is it so bad for minors to “get their hands” on this kind of stuff?
What proof is there that merely watching a bizarre sex video will harm them?
Children are very good at getting out of doing things they don’t want. I can’t see how this would be any different.
“In every case of illegal activity, a court actually has to decide whether or not your actions were truly outside the legal boundaries.”
Professor, I thought this went by with a little too much felicity, but you were otherwise occupied. In most of these cases, you would want a jury to decide the facts rather than a judge if you were allied with the defense. The true vice of the “strange” standard, Teej, is that it misleads the finder of fact and, in many cases, leaves him/her to hisher own devices in the attempt to understand and correctly interpret the law. Too vague a standard results in a due process, or in extreme cases, an ex post facto violation – the law must be clear enough so that a person of ordinary intelligence can determine, before acting, whether the proposed acts will be illegal.
A scheme that leaves people free to “consume” pornography (Stanley v. Ga.) but punishes its producers, actors or distributors is just as doomed to failure as the war on drugs – both fly in the face of common sense.
Some of the earliest cave drawings are representations of people fucking – all the implications of that are completely lost on our self-appointed censors. If they had their way, we would all still be covered from neck to toes and seeking euphemisms to talk about the legs on a table.
Prof. Randazza:
Thank you for this article. I have read some of your blog posts before, but never one which focused on a federal indictment against my husband.
When I started dating my husband 10 years ago, I barely knew what libertarians believed in. Before long, I became open to many libertarian ideas. Over the years, I have myself become a supporter of groups like the Reason Foundation.
As the website store that you linked to has stopped selling the 3 movies in question (2 movies and a trailer, actually), I welcome you to link directly to our site. We have not created material which has been found obscene by a jury, and we do not believe that we have done anything wrong.
Karen,
Thank you for coming by. I don’t think that you have done anything wrong either. The only people who have done anything “wrong” are Brent Ward, Jeffrey Taylor, and any other government officials who said “fuck my oath of office, I’m pandering to the religious right.”
Your family is in for a hell of a ride. These zealots *enjoy* ruining peoples’ lives. Don’t let it get you down. I know your legal team, and they are some of the finest minds ever to advocate on behalf of the First Amendment. You are in excellent hands.
If you put up a link to a legal defense fund, please let me know. I’d be proud to link to it.
Marc-
Our defense website, which will be established as a non-profit organization to help with future obscenity cases is up at
http://www.defendourporn.org.
Thank you.
Hello, Marc.
It may surprise you to know that Andrea Dworkin was completely against Obscenity Laws and wanted them abolished. She was for a civil rights legislative approach, which would not involve the State removing “objectionable” or “obscene” materials. And she wasn’t known for writing “law review articles.” She wrote cogent and wise essays and delivered powerful, effective speeches about what oppression of women by men does to women, what rape does to women, what battery does to women, what pornography does to women, what prostitution does to women. Many women have been very grateful to her for making real the reality they would not speak about before hearing her words.
As you are a professor, I would at least expect you to cite authors and activists accurately. Were you perhaps referring to Catharine A. MacKinnon, in mentioning a feminist whose work is focused on law, and who is also a Constitutional Law professor? Dworkin and MacKinnon co-drafted a civil rights ordinance that never became law anywhere. It’s quite startling, really, to see how upset many men have gotten about a law that never actually existed and was never used, civilly, not criminally. But Dworkin’s work stands alone, is generally more investigative of literature than law, and isn’t at all “the same” as MacKinnon’s, and if you took the time to really read each of their many books, you might come to this conclusion yourself.
Re: Dworkin and Obscenity:
See: http://www.nostatusquo.com/ACLU/dworkin/OrdinanceCanada.html
Thanks for taking the time to read all of this.
Paul S.
Paul,
It would have surprised me at one time, but someone enlightened me to the fact that Dworkin was against the obscenity laws — however, it had nothing to do with the fact that they are unconstitutional. They simply didn’t fit into her censorship scheme.
I don’t think that you’re correct when stating that the Dworkin-MacKinnon law never passed. See See American Bookseller Ass’n. Inc, v. Hudnut, 771 F.2d 323 (7th Cir. 1985). It was turned back at the 7th Circuit, but had it not been, this would have been a free expression disaster. I believe (but I’m not sure) that it became (and remains) the law in Ontario.
Back to your other point though… yes, Dworkin did not agree with the obscenity laws: The following excerpt is from Andrea Dworkin, Letters From a War Zone
We are against obscenity laws. We don’t want them. I want you to understand why, whether you end up agreeing or not.
Number one, the pornographers use obscenity laws as part of their formula for making pornography. All they need to do is to provide some literary, artistic, political or scientific value and they can hang women from the rafters. As long as they manage to meet that formula, it doesn’t matter what they do to women.
Number two, the use of the prurient interest standard-however that standard is construed in this new era, when the Supreme Court has taken two synonyms, “lasciviousness” and “lust,” and said that they mean different things, which is mind-boggling in and of itself. Whatever prurient interest is construed to mean, the reaction of jurors to material-whether they are supposed to be aroused or whether they are not allowed to be aroused, whatever the instructions of the court-has nothing to do with the objective reality of what is happening to women in pornography.
The third reason that obscenity law cannot work for us is: what do community standards mean in a society when violence against women is pandemic, when according to the FBI a woman is battered every eighteen seconds and it’s the most commonly committed violent crime in the country? What would community standards have meant in the segregated South? What would community standards have meant as we approached the atrocity of Nazi Germany? What are community standards in a society where women are persecuted for being women and pornography is a form of political persecution?
Obscenity laws are also woman-hating in their construction. Their basic presumption is that it’s women’s bodies that are dirty. The standards of obscenity law don’t acknowledge the reality of the technology. They were drawn up in a society where obscenity was construed to be essentially writing and drawing; and now what we have is mass production in a way that real people are being hurt, and the consumption of real people by a real technology, and obscenity laws are not adequate to that reality.
Finally, obscenity laws, at the discretion of police and prosecutors, will keep obscenity out of the public view, but it remains available to men in private. It remains available to individual men, it remains available to all-male groups; and whenever it is used, it still creates bigotry, hostility and aggression towards all women. It’s still used in sexual abuse as part of sexual abuse. It’s still made through coercion, through blackmail and through exploitation.
Thanks for the comment. Come by again!
Hi Marc.
Thanks so much for your thoughtful and thorough reply!
I believe that the link at the bottom of my first comment addressed Dworkin and MacKinnon’s assessment of what happened in Canada; yes, it “exists” there in a way it doesn’t here, and yes, it did briefly exist here but was later struck down as unconstitutional, as you correctly note. Thanks for clarifying that, and I apologize for my historical sloppiness.
I think the key point is that working to create new civil rights law is something this country, at least in the last few decades, has stood for. Historically, not so much, as you know!
So I personally feel that Dworkin and MacKinnon deserve humanitarian credit, not scorn and ridicule (which is usually what one finds attached to their names online), for trying a new approach to dealing with a multibillion dollar a year industry that is increasingly vicious (both misogynistically and by being overtly racist) to women of all ethnicities, and to men of color. Just check out “Gonzo” pornography to see what I mean. For Dworkin, the issue and problem was never “showing naked women’s bodies” or the attitude that “sex is dirty,” staple positions of the white Right. The issue was how women are treated in society by men, and why. What institutions support women being subordinated institutionally and interpersonally, where and when that happens?
We of course can and will disagree on what approaches are best to deal with human rights issues; I guess my main point was to note that the pornography industry, as it currently exists, is a human rights issue in terms of how pornographers (generally and usually corporate pimps) treat women in the industry, and how the material it mass produces impacts girls and women outside of the industry.
And, yes, many people, female and male, “like it.” But I’d like to think that our values, here, I mean–just between the two of us–ought to contend with the mistreatment and exploitation of human beings, for profit or power, or both. My hope is that my contributions to the conversation help(ed) focus attention on that dimension of the issues raised here.
Thanks again, Marc. I truly appreciate your reply.
Dissenting opinions are always welcome, Paul. I appreciate your thanks, but honestly, comments are what really gives a blawg life.
I think that your comments on the porn industry are perhaps rooted in superstition more than fact. It is true that there is porn out there that is shocking, awful, creepy, disgusting, and disturbing. I personally describe the writings of Andrea Dworkin and the TV show “Survivor” in those terms – but lets stay on your point.
Consult Rule 34 — an internet meme that says “if it exists, there is porn of it.” There is porn of fat people, old people, people pooping, women fucking men up the ass, men fucking women up the ass, women crushing lego cities, you name it. “Porn” is not a monolithic force delivering but a single message. Sapphic Erotica shows young women in lesbian caress, and Farthammer shows a guy farting in girls’ faces. The spectrum is as broad as any other genre of expression. Women are shown in power and in submission — and there is porn that challenges those very definitions of “power” and “submission.” See Kink.com’s network of websites, for some examples.
Accordingly, lets be a little less broad with our paintbrush.
As far as how the porn industry treats women goes… that spectrum is as broad as the subjects dealt with in pornography. I happen to have a lot of inside knowledge as to how the women are treated… and they have it pretty good, and NONE of them come into it with their eyes closed. Lets put it this way… I used to represent condominium associations. Now, I represent adult entertainment companies. The worst treatment of a performer pales in comparison to the average treatment of a condo owner.
There are intelligent arguments against porn. Example here. But, I don’t think that MacKinnon or Dworkin ever really raised one. Their views were based in a lack of evidence, or in the vein of “the anecdote makes the rule.”
I understand what you are saying regarding porn as a civil rights issue, but I strongly disagree. The First Amendment is the keystone of our civil rights. Being anti-porn is something I can accept. Rail against it. Write against it. If you (or anyone else) disagrees with its message, then spread your own. Jews must tolerate Nazis, I must tolerate Pat Robertson, MacKinnon must tolerate porn.
Where I get hostile is when someone tries to give their side of the debate the force of law. This is what MacKinnon & Dworkin did in Indianapolis. See American Bookseller Ass’n. Inc, v. Hudnut, 771 F.2d 323 (7th Cir. 1985). This is why they have my eternal scorn. I don’t mind that they are anti-erotica. Naomi Wolf is anti-porn, yet her argument simply (and honestly) arouses me intellectually.
Exploitation is a bad thing… on that you and I agree. But, the exploitation in adult film is no worse than the exploitation of workers anywhere. If you are anti-capitalism, perhaps you and I can agree even more. Lets let *everyone* bask in the glow of liberation.
But, suppression of expression because one disagrees with its message — no matter how abhorrent the message — is no foundation upon which to build liberation.
Without getting into legal technicalities, I’d like to take a broader approach to this issue, while bringing a foreign input.
Having lived in the US for 20 years, I had the opportunity to get somewhat acquainted (not personally) to some of the legal archaisms still being abided to in this realm.
For exemple, the mere survival of community standards in a world globalized to such extent thru commerce and internet reveals a considerable level of obsolescence, for even if these legal bounderies miraclously survive, their enforcement is simply an mirage, as well as a huge waste of tax money on the long run.
During my years spent there, most educated foreigners and americans alike I met stated the same electoral diagnosis : the main purpose of a candidate to office (Dem or Rep), especially federal, is to maintain the american dream alive. I mean by that that as long as long as the average american can own his house, a pick-up truck, a wagon for the wife & kids, as well as cable sports for hubby and Oprah for wifey, and be at church on sunday morning, what a brave new world it was !!! (forgive the stereotype)
However, since the the end of the cold war, the american dream has been harder & harder to sustain, for the US government has been consistently pawning it for the past 20 years to the Chinese (among others).
While this manoeuver helped maintain the illusion in America’s heartland for a longer time than on the coasts which had direct conctacts with the rest of the world, thanks to the lack of relevant infos emanating from outside the “mid-west Bible Bubble”.
Basically, America had been more & more deeply swamped in americano-american issues when the world went global, because this was the only way to maintain that illusion, as it was still sustainable financially and politically, and could probably have been so for another decade or two should the route to wash the alleged shame of 9/11 off have been different – and less expensive.
This state of things has now changed drastically after 7 years of costly unwinable wars which reduced the federal government room for action. Bush’s & Rep analists reasonably can’t possibly have missed on that development. It seems to me an interesting coincidence that this case came up when the subprime-gate was almost about to blow up.
I guess that in that context, letting the zealot stiff have his way at this very time was the only topic left they could “positively” communicate on and brag about in the Bible Bubble (babble-babble ?)
However, as far as History’s concerned, whenever an empire which had reached golden age, and that would be in this case 10-12 years before to after the end of the Cold War, resorted to such stiffening of private life (one might grind one’s teeth and stiffen one’s upper lip when terrorism is invoqued, but after it has been overused for 7 years to such unsignificant avail, the obscenity card seems just so childish…), History consistantly sanctionned that “admission of flaw” : When a leading power begins to mute what brought it on top of the hill of nations in the first place, which happens to be the 1st amendment of its constitution (originally stronger than the emancipation the French Revolution brought about), and in the name of which millions of people have been emancipated from tyranny, even if economics sponsored the actions taken then.
I personally don’t condone the content prosecuted in this case “even if i’ll fight to the end so it can be published”[sic], but watching the US government engaging in such a swampy issue is simply an admission of decline.
As the wise man says : “in order to overcome your enemy, you have to think like him, feel what he feels, you have to become Him.”
Accordingly, It seems that the cost of winning the Cold War was the inheritance of some kind of KGB in the form of a Thought Police that would remind some of the Witch Hunt era, which noticeably coincided too with a threat not to be ignored then (the Soviet Bomb).
Anyway, since wider social issues haved been mentioned here (rape, battery etc), I’d just say that a man jerking of such movies is not enacting it in real life at this very time, and if he is, at least he had a model to follow that ensures the other participants’ safety & body integrity, considering the strain some of these extreme acts can have on human tissues. Who knows how further one could have gone, and what kind of unremediable harm one could done without the educating teachings of a video delivering a fantasy supplied with a safenet ?
When the world’s leading power is focusing on sub-county issues (community standards) at the time its rule is being challenged militarily and economically abroad, some kind of brainstorming should be in order, shouldn’t it ?