Reason article on Feds & Porn:

Excellent article from Reason on the porn industry & the coming war on it by the Feds. There are many interesting aspects of this article; I'll just focus on one. The article details a husband and wife duo of porn producers, Rob Black & Lizzy Borden, from Extreme Associates (wouldn't link 'em for a million dollars) who will be one of the Federal government's "showcase" prosecutions:

[T]he pair are known for producing material that even fellow pornographers find objectionable. Their videos are products of a jaded, hypermediated era: explicit porn coupled with the over-the-top gore of slasher movies and the stunts and gross-out spectacles of reality TV.

I'd like to quote more from the article, but even the description that Reason gives is just too sickening. I first became aware of these two on the Frontline special on pornography. While I generally think that most mainstream hardcore pornography is utterly harmless—there is very little if any violence in mainstream triple X rated movies—these two produce utterly disgusting & disturbing movies. And I think I—as a longtime fan of Howard Stern’s—have a pretty high tolerance when it comes to being offended.

I still think that this porn is protected (just like the Nazis or the KKK's vile speech). Now is when the Voltaire’s adage (paraphrased by me)—I hate what you have to say but will defend to the death your right to say it—kicks in. Another way of stating this is free speech isn’t for the speech that you like, that you agree with, but for the speech that you disagree with.

“I am fond of Mrs. Jones. She is such a wonderful neighbor.” That kind of speech does not need protecting because its not controversial, no one would ever try to proscribe it. If the First Amendment only protects this type of speech, then our framers wasted their time in writing its Free Speech clause—because that type of speech would be permitted even if we had no “right” to Free Speech.

And the Reason article makes it clear, the Christian right to whom the Bush administration is pandering in going after this porn doesn’t want only the more extreme types of the material gone after. No, that’s only the first step. They want to go after the mainstream stuff, ala Vivid Video and all of those Fortune 500 companies that are profiting off of it. Here is the article quoting Jan LaRue, chief counsel of Concerned Women of America, regarding the policy of going after only the extreme stuff in porn, the stuff out on the margins:

Come on, DOJ. Go after the big guys....It’s time to make the porn industry’s fears a reality. It’s time to send a message to the white collars on Wall Street who think selling porn is a good way to improve the bottom line.