I agree with this line of thinking, and I agree with the point that I am not willing to send tax payer funded law enforcement after someone for looking at breasts.
My biggest problem, and those who defend it still haven't been able to assure me otherwise, is that the line will get moved. This is the federal government, this is about people who want to tell you what you can and cannot view. What is illegal or legal doesn't matter because the line will move.
Once you have the bureaucracy in place and thousands of federal employees looking at porn (and getting paid to, for once) and deciding what's illegal or legal and either blocking it (federal control of the internet?) or sending out emails to the internet providers to block it, somebody will take that and run with it.
Right now it's hardcore porn (Santorum believes softcore porn is legal), but once you get that bureaucracy entrenched and get people used to the idea of federal bureaucrats deciding what's proper to look at on the internet, the Muslims will lobby that images of Mohammed are obscene and should be banned. Think that's crazy? They consider such images more obscene than pornography, and they think it's worthy of death sentences for those who create such images and cartoons. Given the liberals' tolerance of Muslims and even some support of Sharia law, it's not hard to see something like that coming into play.
I've had the misfortune of being stationed in Saudi Arabia where the government tries to control everything that people view and where there is a true morality police. It's not pleasant.
Look at this thread -
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2861069/posts - you have some FReepers making comments about women weather forecasters - harmless. But just imagine what the Bureau of Internet Obscenity would say 10 or 15 years down the road.
And it's not just stuff like that or cartoons of Mohammed. What happens when Bureau of Internet Obscenity decides that negative comments about gays, illegal aliens, Muslims, etc. are obscene?
If I knew 100% that this would only and forever be about certain types of pornography, I would be okay with some aspects - certain not the hiring of federal agents to look at porn and decide what's illegal and not, but I know that it will not stop with certain types of pornography.
Even if the discussion is about laws already in place, the problem is that once the bureaucracy is created where federal employees decide what is hardcore (illegal) and what is softcore (legal), the lines will be moved by future administrations and sessions of Congress.
What happens when Bureau of Internet Obscenity decides that negative comments about gays, illegal aliens, Muslims, etc. are obscene?Which is exactly what would happen. Put the infrastructure in place and get people to accept that the government will be regularly censoring the internet to protect "morality and virtue", and the bureaucracy will find a reason to expand and censor things not deemed politically correct. It is far better to leave the internet a chaotic, relatively free venue for people to see and read what they want, than to allow the government to get its hooks any further into it and start "regulating" online activity to prevent people from seeing porn.
Even if the discussion is about laws already in place, the problem is that once the bureaucracy is created where federal employees decide what is hardcore (illegal) and what is softcore (legal), the lines will be moved by future administrations and sessions of Congress.
And even then, how would the government really make that determination? Who is going to sit around and create the regulations that govern what specifically falls into which category of porn. Do we really want government bureaucrats doing this? Are we really going to go after, say, couples who like posting amatuer sex videos online at the countless sites they use for this sort of thing? Will we be monitoring things like 4chan, reddit, etc, to prevent individual anonymous users from posting porn photos. If citizens have a private website and wish to put pornographic pictures of themselves, will the government prosecute them? What about all the hundreds of thousands of websites based overseas? Will the federal bureaucrats be tasked with sitting around reviewing every potentially porn related site from around the globe to determine if they are "soft core" and tolerable, or "hard core" and obscene. Where does it end?
The idea we are going to "crackdown" on porn is silly. It isn't going to happen. Rick Santorum only makes himself look foolish when he yaks about things like this. Sure, there are many social conservatives (not small government conservatives mind you) who find this kind of talk appealing - but these are many of the same block of voters that cast ballots for people like Pat Robertson, and in the end those types of candidates have pretty much no chance to ever win a general election anyway.