Of course, even when individuals and families want to raise responsible citizens, the courts won't allow it. So in the end, in our case, I think the culture is a reflection of the courts and our black robed rulers.
What happened?
The difference was that Janet Reno just did not like doing obscenity cases. She wouldn't prosecute obscenity violations when she was the prosecutor in Florida, and she didn't like doing it at the Justice Department. It's not that she's a bad person or anything; it's just that she didn't like doing it. Maybe she never saw it, or it wasn't properly presented. They still said that the Justice Department's units could do more extreme materials or organized crime people. But the idea that had started when the first President Bush was president -- we would enforce the federal law against everyone who was violating it -- that sort of stopped. ...
Out in the San Fernando Valley, they described the Clinton administration as "green lights and blue skies."
They thought, right from 1992 when President Clinton was elected, that all this stuff that had started in the Justice Department would go away. Now Janet Reno was the attorney general. She's a real prosecutor. And ... there were a lot of cases in the pipeline. No serious prosecutor is going to stop those cases. They're felony cases; they got to grand juries; federal judges have issued search warrants. So those in the industry thought that somehow Clinton or Reno would kind of stop all the cases that had started. That's not what happened.
A lot of the cases that started in 1987 to 1991-1992 were allowed to continue and finish, and most of those were wrapped up by maybe 1994, 1995. But as a result of that, in 1992, 1993, 1994, we're getting to trial. And a lot of these people who thought, "I thought you guys were going to go away; Clinton's our buddy," found themselves having to pay $1 million in fines and spend a year in jail. So it didn't work until, I think, the second Clinton administration, when he just changed the policy more and said, "Well, let's not go as aggressively against violations."
They also didn't get anything ... in the pipeline in 1993.
That's true. ... When Clinton was elected, they didn't encourage us to keep going. They told us to concentrate more on child pornography. They told us to find big gangsters and more extreme material. They didn't let the section continue with the projects with the mainstream hardcore porn industry. So that was becoming obvious, that we were going to get the people who had already been charged and investigated. But the people who hadn't gotten indicted in the first round probably wouldn't see another prosecution until there was a change in the White House.