The Phoney Baloney War On Porn
From a NYT article entitled Federal Effort on Web Obscenity Shows Few Results:
Tom Rogers, a retired Indianapolis detective, toils away most days in his suburban home office reviewing sexual Web sites and other Internet traffic to see whether they qualify as obscene material whose purveyors should be prosecuted by the Justice Department.
His work is financed by a Justice Department grant initially provided through a Congressional earmark inserted into a spending bill by Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican of Virginia.
The grant, about $150,000 a year, has helped pay for Mr. Rogers and another retired law enforcement officer in Reno, Nev., to harvest and review complaints about obscene matter on the Internet that citizens register on the Justice Department Web site.
In the last few years, 67,000 citizens’ complaints have been deemed legitimate under the program and passed on to the Justice Department and federal prosecutors.
The number of prosecutions resulting from those referrals is zero. ...
As I argued here, conservatives like to pretend they energetically oppose pornography, and liberals like to pretend that porn is under attack. Neither is true, but the respective heuristics are so useful to partisans that no one wants to pay attention to what is actually occuring, which in my opinion is that porn has become socially nomalized so effectively that the industry and its output is less subject scritiny and criticism than McDonald's commercials. Cross-posted with additional ranting and raving here.
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