Ashcroft
(ex-Pentetcostal minister) has begun his latest War on X. This time x =
porn. Solve for censorhip:
[Pornography] invades our homes persistently though the mail, phone, VCR,
cable TV and the Internet, [and has] strewn its victims from coast to coast.
Victims that choose to pay millions and millions of dollars every year to enjoy
erotica in the privacy of their own homes with or without a consenting partner.
Victims that consent to have such content delivered to their homes digitally,
through mail or from local merchants.
Ashcroft, a religious man who does not drink alcohol or caffeine, smoke,
gamble or dance, and has fought unrelenting criticism that he has trod roughshod
on civil liberties in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, is taking on the porn
industry at a time when many experts say Americans are wary about government
intrusion into their lives. (Though he does lead the DOJ in an un-Constitutional
prayer every morning)
See Ashcroft doesn’t understand. You can mess with the Constitution, you can
wipe your ass with the Geneva Convention, you can strip away civil liberties
left and right and Americans won’t budge – just as long as we can eat our fat-burger
and go to the Gap. But if you really want to piss off the entire country – start
taking away pornography. They will feel a wrath they could never imagine – the
power of the pious is always outweighed by the power of the horny (mainly because
the pious are even hornier than the horny).
Adult content is the driving force of nearly all modern achievements in mass
communications. Bulletin-board systems – the pre-cursor to the internet – started
off when one geek said: Dude, you gotta see this girl’s rack!
This will come down to what it always comes down to: obscenity. The Supremes
hinged this on community standards last time the issue came around. But when
this country is up in arms over Janet’s nipple – while the rest of the world
yawns – the community test cannot stand like it used to. Obscenity means a work
or piece of media is totally devoid of artistic merit. My argument, just ask
all the men and women that aren’t performers in adult content – the makeup artists,
the set designers, lighting designers, sound and video engineers – the other
artists that lend creativity to their professional products. (This years number
one gay porn video is a take-off on The Ring called The Hole:
straight frat football jocks see a videotape, the phone rings and says You’re
gay for seven days and they’re overcome with same-sex lust for a week).
And forgive my huge text:
DIDN’T WE SOLVE ALL OF THIS BULLSHIT WITH THE
GODDAMN V-CHIP YEARS AGO?
Wasn’t this crap with cable TV and public television bringing filth into prayer-filled
living rooms everywhere supposed to be solved by the V-chip? Oh that’s right.
People can’t program their frigging VCR so who thought they’d ever be able to
program the V-chip. We actually mandated broken technology into our televisions.
Much like what’s going to happen with digital-rights management (you know, maybe
this is a bedfellows type thing: the recording and movie industry with the super-conversatives).
Critics say that Americans’ tolerance for sexually explicit material rivals
that of Europeans
Have you stumbled on any really crazy German erotica? Those people are nuts!
These censoring nitwits think that a vibrator in a catalog – even if it’s the
Hitachi Magic Wand – is obscene. Don’t forget folks – this
is the guy that covered up Justice’s boobies.
The smartest thing ever said about the adult entertainment industry is from
The Fluffer. A grrly-gal that works for the video studio declares:
That’s the thing with the adult business. It’s for adults.
Don’t quote me the Meese Commission – you remember that cover from Time?
The whole study was bullcrap.
For adults, by adults. The controls are in place to keep the content out of
the eyes of the young – no professional adult content producer wants anything
to do with anything underage. It hurts the business model.
Nguyen and his co-workers spend their days scouring the Internet for the
most obscene material, following leads sent in by citizens and tracking pornographers
operating under different names. The job wears on them all, day after day,
so much so that the obscenity division has recently set up in-house counseling
for them to talk about what they’re seeing and how it is affecting them.
They are all so upset seeing all this obscene material. It’s troubling and
upsetting to them. But they must soldier on as the true Christians they are.
Such martyrs. I have a tip for you: people don’t look at what they don’t
want to. Yes I know about goatse and tubgirl and rotten – all horrendously
nasty sites but who cares?
But what about the children? What about the children?
The final response to anything isn’t it? What about the children? Don’t
buy a computer. Don’t have a television. Don’t buy cable. Don’t shop anywhere
but Wal-Mart. Don’t talk about sex. Condoms. Or: be honest with your children
about erotica. It exists. You can’t hide it from them forever. Might as well
give them a mature opinion of it now so they don’t get freaked out by it. I
remember the first time I saw a hardcore video – I laughed my ass off because
it all looked so ridiculous and mechanical. I was giggling too much to be offended.
Notice how the people most obsessed with sex are the ones that think your sex
is their business. Get out of my bedroom. Get out of my house. Get out of my
hard drive.
You want pornography? Go to the Bible. That Old Testament is nasty!
You know what – I’m going to start a site where half of it is links to hardcore
content and the other is thumbnails of American, Allied and Iraqi casualties.
Then we can see what’s really obscene.
Update: Further discussion on Ashcroft/Pr0n
- Slashdot
- Instapundit
- Buzzmachine
- Article
in Vanity Fair (on LiveJournal) - Tons of citations on Blogdex
Leave a Reply to FATHER JOHN O’BRYAN Cancel reply