Distribution of obscene or hardcore pornography on the Internet is a violation of current federal law. Existing obscenity laws also prohibit distribution of hardcore pornography on hotel/motel TV, on cable/satellite TV, and in retail shops. But these laws are obviously not being enforced. Mitt Romney has said he will change that. The following article is from Forbes online.
The Obscenity Police Are Coming
By Susannah Breslin
9/13/12
“They want to put me in jail, basically.”
That’s how porn director John Stagliano responds when I ask him what he thinks of the 2012 GOP platform, in particular one newly added sentence:
“Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced.”
Two years ago, Stagliano was sitting in a Washington, D.C., courtroom, charged with seven counts of distributing obscenity.
Today, he’s a free man, after federal court judge Richard J. Leon “dismissed with prejudice” several of the counts and for the remaining counts “granted the defendants’ motion for judgment of acquittal under Rule 29.”
But an anti-porn crusader says Mitt Romney has vowed if he’s elected president, he’ll ramp up obscenity prosecutions, a task President Obama has shown little interest in pursuing.
According to Patrick Trueman, who ran the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section at the Department of Justice under President Reagan and President George H. W. Bush and who now runs Morality in Media, an anti-porn organization, Romney intends to launch a war on porn.
In a meeting with Alex Wong, Romney’s foreign and legal policy director, Trueman says Wong told him, “Romney is sincere about this. He’s convinced this has now had a terrible effect on society, and he will enforce the law.”
And that means pornographers like Stagliano could become targets once again.
In 2007, Romney swore that if he were elected president, he would put a porn filter on every computer.
As Stagliano, a Libertarian who plans to vote for Gary Johnson, sees it, an administration that seeks to legislate its constituents’ morality is the real threat.
“My morality would be based on, as long as you don’t harm somebody, anything should be permitted,” Stagliano tells me. “The government can’t solve our problems.” As I see it, he is very much harming people. cy
As Trueman sees it, porn is a scourge, and the current status is “pandemic.”
“When I was at the Department of Justice, we were vigorously prosecuting this, and the reason why is because people were demanding it,” he recalls.
Today, porn is ubiquitous, and “The nature of today’s pornographers have changed,” Trueman says. “What you’ve got are the white collar pornographers. These companies know there’s hundreds of millions to be made.”
X-rated content has proved lucrative for big businesses like hotel chains not typically associated with porn. In his bid for the presidential seat, Romney resigned from the board of the Marriott hotel chain, with which he has close ties, and Marriott has announced its intention to phase out adult content.
Trueman believes porn is eroding the very fiber that holds America together: ruining marriages, altering brains, breaking down inhibitions.
“You’ll never do away with all of it, but we have an untreated pandemic of harm, and you have to do something about it,” he pronounces.
Ask Santa Monica-based Roger Diamond (Jew) what he thinks of devoting more government dollars to obscenity prosecutions, and he’ll tell you, “Oh, that’s really a waste of money.”
For the last five years, Diamond has represented Ira Isaacs (Jew), a Los Angeles-based pornographer the Bush administration’s now-disbanded Obscenity Prosecution Task Force at the DoJ indicted for distributing and producing scat and bestiality videos.
Earlier this year, Isaacs was convicted, despite his arguments, through multiple trials, that his eye-popping videos were not obscene, but art.
What is obscene?
... continued - Read full article here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/susannahbreslin/2012/09/13/mitt-romney-porn/
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Pornography in Public
July 21, 2012
By Matt Richtel
SAN FRANCISCO — On a recent morning at the main public library here, dozens of people sat and stood at computers, searching job-hunting sites, playing games, watching music videos. And some looked at naked pictures of men and women in full view of passers-by.
The library has been stung by complaints about the content, including explicit pornography, that some people watch in front of others. To address the issue, the library over the last six weeks has installed 18 computer monitors with plastic hoods so that only the person using the computer can see what is on the screen.
“It’s for their privacy, and for ours,” said Michelle Jeffers, the library spokeswoman. The library will also soon post warnings on the screens of all its 240 computers to remind people to be sensitive to other patrons — a solution it prefers to filtering or censoring images. They prefer to pay to install plastic hoods on 240 computers than to filter out pornography. That seems so brainless, but that's San Francisco. cy
[...]
An antipornography group, Morality in Media, has in recent months launched a “no porn on the plane” campaign, and has contacted most major airlines to argue that they should commit to policing what people watch.
The group took up the cause after its executive director, Dawn Hawkins, was on a flight in January and noticed a man in the row in front of her looking at images on his iPad of naked women whipping each other.
She complained to the flight attendant, who told her he was powerless to force the man to stop, she recalled. The man eventually turned off the images, but Ms. Hawkins continued to press him on why he was looking at those images in public.
She said a woman then came up to her and said, “Be quiet, nobody cares.”
“The fact of the matter is nobody did care,” Ms. Hawkins said. “I couldn’t believe people didn’t care that someone was watching pornography in public. I couldn’t believe society has come to this.”
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