Posted on 03/16/2004 5:08:10 AM PST by SJackson
Let me set the scene.
You're sitting in traffic with your 4-year-old. Suddenly you notice she's watching with rapt interest something in the next car. You glance over and realize that the other vehicle is equipped with one of those DVD screens that are available on certain late-model cars.
The option is usually marketed as a way of keeping kids quiet on long road trips. But what the folks over there are watching is more loin king than "Lion King." Because there onscreen, before your daughter's steadily widening eyes, is a pair of exceedingly fit people using their private parts in ways the child never imagined they could be used. It is, in other words, a porn flick. In traffic. In public.
This is not just something that could happen, but something that already did. And the mother in question, 26-year-old Andrea Carlton of Gurnee, Ill., was outraged. "You're not allowed to have sex in your car," she said, "so why are you allowed to watch it?"
We have the Associated Press to thank for bringing this incident to our attention. According to its recent story, more and more drivers are using their onboard DVDs to screen pornography. I won't call it a trend, because that probably overstates the case. But even if we're only talking about a few isolated incidents, it still seems to speak to a rather troubling aspect of life in America just past the turn of the century.
Call it the loss of the public square.
I'll elaborate, but first let me head off any misunderstanding. My concern here is not that some people choose to entertain themselves with pornography. Frankly, so long as no children or beasts are involved, I don't care what grown people watch in the privacy of their own homes.
Public spaces, however, are a different matter. It used to be that you were sent into the world beyond your front door with an understanding that the public square belonged, well ... "to the public." To all of us. You were taught that it betrayed a lack of class and intelligence to act as if it belonged to you alone.
Where I come from, we had a term for that understanding. We called it home training.
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
Define it, then.
Say you live in a neighborhood populated by many homosexuals. You put a movie screen up and start playing a video talking about the evils of homosexuality and your neighbors beat you up. Is the video porn?
Say you live in a very conservative neighborhood with many military veterans. You put up a movie screen and start playing a video that call soldiers baby-killers and your neighbors beat you up. Is the video porn?
Your definition doesn't work.
So what should have been done differently?
What is the dividing line between the non-porn mention of a sex act and pornography? You mentioned CSI earlier. The show certainly mentions sex acts as part of the criminal investigation. However, they do so in a clinical way as part of a crime story, but you seem to consider that pornography, too.
The people who manage video tape rental stores seem to have the ability to define porn that you lack. I suppose they should mix in their John Holmes tapes with Walt Disney because they are not being intellectually honest. Unless you pull out a jar of vaseline when you read the story of Lot (which would also make you a wierdo), you have no argument there using it as an example.
If you really can't even admit that watching porn movies in public is wrong, you shouldn't be on a conservative board. One of the trademarks of conservatism is responsibility. Watching porns in public where other people's children can see them is not responsible. I've noticed this disturbing habit of yours to disparage people who take stances - an example being your comments against people trying to protect their ranches against illegal aliens.
How's that work now?
Yes they sure do that. You could write porn in clinical terms and it would still be porn. Imagine some written porn novel using such terminology. Very little would be lost, maybe nothing at all. Yes they use that clinical terminology dodge on TV now so that you can describe absolutely any disgusting act between man and man and or beast or whatever and you get a pass from the censors yet one nipple stops the presses. I consider this a twisted situation myself.
I think you can be honest enough to state that a film where graphic sex intended to arouse the viewer is pornographic, unless you want to make the silly argument that (for example) Ron Jeremy's movies really can't be defined as pornographic. I hope you aren't that dishonest.
As an aside, do all the moral liberals on this board add a "-man" to the end of their handles? You should just start calling yourselves "metroman1, metroman2, metroman3, etc...
Any laws banning pornography based on those definitions would encounter constitutional problems based on vagueness (a reasonable person could not be sure what activities were legal and which were illegal- would a picture of two lovers kissing equal pornography? What about the Mona Lisa, with her coy little smile?) and overbreadth (the law would ban things that are not constitutionally protected, such as child pornography, as well as speech that is protected by the 1st Amendment).
Let's be clear here- we are talking about trying to come up with a LEGAL definition of pornography for a hypothetical law banning same.
Well, to be honest, on our long family road trips (NY to Northern Michigan) we piled into the family station wagon and had the back folded down and outfitted with mattresses and various toys and games.
Since today that is outlawed and the kids have to be strapped into carseats for the duration the DVD player is probably a welcome solution. (Unfortunately it turns the kids into even more TV addicted zombies than the earlier, albeit less safe, option.)
That definition would not pass constitutional muster for the reasons I described.
Now that has to be one of the funniest statements I have ever read.
Some folks think that any depiction of nudity is pornography. Others believe that frank violence is just as pornographic.
And some people believe they were abducted by aliens. So? Most every home in the land has a dictionary with a perfectly good working dictionary with a perfectly good working definition of pornography. If you have trouble defining pornography, maybe you should ask the next alien that abducts you.
In the US of A, we have this concept called "freedom of press," and our courts have decided that it's quite alright to publish sexually explicit material and for adults to purchase it, as long as it does not contain sexual exploitation of children.
The same courts that decided blacks weren't real people? If we can ban pedophilia, we can ban porn. Freedom of the press is not absolute. Every freedom has reasonable boundaries.
Further, four year olds are generally not even aware of such activity and would not give that tiny DVD screen a second glance.
Some of those DVD screens are not that tiny, and four year olds aren't the only people looking in car windows. For that matter, even 45 year olds don't need that kind of distraction when traveling 80 mph on a crowded freeway.
What a joke. If someone is wanking looking at a print of Mona Lisa, I think we can rule them out as a reasonable test case. None of the instances you bring up are reasonable. Any competent lawyer could use the dictionary definition of pornography can write a one paragraph law that would cover 99 percent of pornography.
You are so right, it is so much safer to be flashed with porn at 70 mph. And the flow of traffic is never 80 mph where there are flow of traffic laws. /sarcasm
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