How would you like to have this person’s job? Or Art & Porn:

“Lam Nguyen's job is to sit for hours in a chilly, quiet room devoid of any color but gray and look at pornography.” He’s actually a "computer forensic specialist" who is part of the Federal government’s up and coming war on adult pornography.

The article also says that, “Nguyen does [this job] earnestly from 9 to 5, surrounded by a half-dozen other ‘computer forensic specialists’ like him…” What...they don't trust these specialists to work all alone in office rooms by themselves?

On a more serious note, doesn't the Justice Department have better things to do with its time? I learned while watching a Frontline special on porn, that right off the bat, Ashcroft planned on bringing this war on pornography; then 9/11 happened (I'll count that as 9/11's silver lining).

I come down on the side that sees this as a free speech/ free market issue. And the market has decided; the people want their porn. Pornography is a 10 BILLION dollar a year business, which various Fortune 500 companies, such as Comcast, are heavily invested in.

When the legal cases are brought, the case of Miller v. California guides us in terms of whether the government is acting consistent with the First Amendment. While “obscenity” technically is not protected speech, the test that the Supreme Court established in Miller, in reality does grant obscenity at least *some* degree of protection. In order to be prosecutable as “obscenity,” something must first qualify as such. Here is the Miller test for determining whether a particular work qualifies as obscene:

(a) whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards" would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

Like most people on either side, I don’t like this test for obvious reasons. I think that the Court should simply hold hard core pornography to be protected speech and be done with it. But the test does offer defenders of pornography some leeway to win cases. For instance, in 2001, Ashcroft et al. decided to bring an obscenity case in “St. Charles County, Mo., the heart of Ashcroft's conservative Missouri base.” In comes Paul Cambria—a First Amendment lawyer, who specializes in defending such cases—to the rescue. “Cambria defended a video store there against state charges that it was renting two obscene videotapes that depicted group sex, anal sex and sex with objects.” The outcome: “Cambria won, convincing a jury of 12 women, all between the ages of 40 and 60, that the tapes had educational value and helped reduce inhibitions. They reached the verdict in less than three hours.”

In other words, the third prong of the Miller test offered a defense, gave the jury an out, etc. Other types of unprotected speech—child pornography for instance—do not require the government to jump through as many hoops. If it has artistic and educational value but it involves children—tough, it’s still not protected. Here is Robert Bork lamenting the Miller test, how it makes it too hard to prosecute porn:

The first two prongs of the test become increasingly difficult to satisfy as contemporary community standards decline and as fewer and fewer descriptions of sexual conduct are regarded as patently offensive. But it is the third part that poses the most difficulty. There is apparently nothing that a flummery of professors will not testify has “serious value.” When Cincinnati prosecuted the museum that displayed Mapplethorpe’s photographs, the jury deferred to defense witnesses who said the pictures were art and hence could not be obscene.

Slouching Towards Gomorrah, p. 146.

In fact, I remember reading something by William F. Buckley where he stated that he went to that museum in Cincinnati to see the Mapplethorpe photos and judge for himself what the controversy was all about. He—like most people—found the photographs to range from highly distasteful to downright disgusting. But Buckley was taken aback by the museum curator who presented Mapplethorpe’s work; the curator marveled at the artistic talent—indeed, the genius—displayed in the photographs, how they brilliantly exemplified classical line and form…

I think the bottom line is that Mapplethorpe indeed was a very talented photographer. But he used his talents to venture into areas that most find highly objectionable. But that hardly disqualifies his work from being serious art.

And some hard core pornography—triple X rated movies and the like—may similarly qualify as highly artistic. Here is Camille Paglia on the subject:

My point in Sexual Personae is that one cannot make any kind of firm line between high art and pornography. In fact, porn permeates the high art tradition. Even Michelangelo’s Pieta, the supreme artifact of the Vatican, is a work of pornography—when you look at it up close.

Vamps & Tramps, p. 123.

Later on in the book while discussing footage from the 1979 porn classic Debbie Does Dallas (I'll forego the link), Paglia states, “Pornography and art are identical for me, absolutely.” p. 279. And “Michelangelo is a pornographer…and the Pope is a collector of porn.” Id.

If the First Amendment ought to be interpreted as protecting artistic freedom, then we may rightly conclude that much, perhaps most, perhaps even all pornography is protected.