Why Does Porn Get a Pass?

Patric Henry Center for Individual Liberty ^ | 8/29/2002 | Gary Aldrich

[breakem]

...........life, liberty, and the pursuit of happeness.

[Zon]

FF578 writes: Prohibition would have worked if we made possession a Capital Offense. We need to do the same for Drug Possession today. Along with Homosexuality, Blasphemy, Fornication, Adultery and Pornography. 48

Zon: That's a keeper that will serve well to discredit you and further show you as a raving lunatic. Thank you. 58

[jodorowsky]

Prohibition would have worked if we made possession a Capital Offense. We need to do the same for Drug Possession today. Along with Homosexuality, Blasphemy, Fornication, Adultery and Pornography.

I don't like Sports, Alcohol-Drinkers, People With Loud Voices, the Over-weight, or Religion. Can we Come to Some Kind of Deal?

Maybe my Executioners can Work on Sunday Through Tuesday and Yours Can work from Wednesday Through Saturday?!?

[weegee]

Organized Crime steps in to meet a need that can not be legally met. Whether it is buying and selling influence, murder, drugs, sex/prostitution, stolen cigarettes/hot merchandise, smuggling illegal immigrants into the country, etc.

Legalizing something won't do away with organized crime (they will move onto something else) and just because organized crime is involved in pornography doesn't mean that all porn is a conduit to organized crime. They operate a number of legal enterprises to invest their capital and to operate as front organizations for money laundering.

This is why RICCO permits the seizure of businesses that were built with the profits of illegal racketeering even if they are operating above board. Seizing the assest is also an attempt to keep the defendents from paying for a costly attorney.

[weegee]

Oooops. Well I tried to post a photo ;vP

[Revelation 911]

Tax every network that allows this human sewage to flow through their switches, cables, phone lines – tax any entity that makes it easy for this material to go from camera lens to your living room where little Johnny can see it while you’re out at the grocery store.

can you imagine the squeal from Time Warner and HBO ?

[weegee]

Porn and smut have been with us for a very long time.

Someone estimated that it was only a few days after the movie camera was invented that someone was convinced to perform a sex act for it.

There were "French postcards", "Tijuana Bibles"/"8-pagers", white-label "party records" sold under the counter, "Adults Only" exploitation films, smokers, stag reels, "limited edition book clubs" that mailed their novels in a plain brown wrapper, etc. Prostitution is called "the world's oldest profession". What is different is that it is all out in the open now and young children are confronted with it every day.

[SauronOfMordor]

No, OC thrives by providing products and services that are in demand, yet banned by governments. There status as "vice" or "virtue" is irrelevant.

OC's market niche is in being better able to provide products and services than independent operators. They accomplish this by infiltrating/corrupting law enforcement and intimidating community activists.

Where products and services can be offered without harrassment from law enforcement or community activists, OC has no competitive advantage. You never hear about OC involvement in the regular movie industry. Why? Because if they try to lean on a regular movie producer, the producer can complain to the FBI or police, and get protection

On the flip side, an independent strip-club operator can get lots of harrassment from community activists, and be able to do nothing about it. But the community-activist leader will stop the picketing when local OC tells him it would contribute to his long-term health (assuming he wasn't on the OC payroll all along, as part of the push to convince the independent to sell to the "family")

[Boot Hill]

Zon posts "The Constitution of the Universe, Article 1"

"No person, group of persons, or government may initiate force, threat of force, or fraud against any individual's self or property."

"The Constitution of the Universe"??? Good grief man, please tell us that you don't actually subscribe to such nonsense. I don't know how people can post something like that and still keep a straight face.

How would someone violate article I by masturbating in public? How would someone violate article I by operating an open and notorious whorehouse next to an elementary school? Is that really your idea of a utopian society? Got answers?

Regards,

Boot Hill

[Vast Buffalo Wing Conspiracy]

And I'll say it again, real slow, just for you: Pass all the laws you want, but you can't legislate morality...

Keep repeating an inane and self-contradictory saying, and it remains an inane and self-contradictory saying.

For your line of reasoning to be valid, you would have to prove that the passing of a law never changed anyone's behavior, never made them reconsider their morality or their actions, and never reformed public behavior in the slightest. This is manifestly untrue.

Sure, in many cases legislating morality does not work, because the legislation itself is a bad idea, especially when overwhelming numbers of people do not agree with it. This was the case with alcohol prohibition, for example.

In other cases, legislation not merely reflects the dominant views of society, it also transforms the views of society, and educates those who might otherwise have not agreed or not have understood the need for the legislation in question.

The State is every bit as much a moral educator as the Church or any other actor in society. And when the State is corrupt, so too its laws. You cannot pretend that the laws have no effect on the moral education of the people, or that laws only reflect what people already believe without influencing their behavior. There is controversy over every law precisely because the law is an influence on society, for good or ill.

Every law is an act of legislating morality. Only in a truly corrupt, decadent, and immoral age could so many people lose all understanding of the moral import of the laws - a basic theme of all thought concerning society since before recorded history, and a major theme of Western thought going back to Aristotle, Plato, and Socrates. They for one would have laughed uproariously at the notion that "you can't legislate morality", and would have assumed, rightly, that the person making such a claim was morally and intellectually blinkered, and was trying to put beyond public debate political questions he preferred not to have debated publicly.

[DCPatriot]

This is crap. If you don't want to look at porn....DON'T LOOK! Simple, huh?

[Gumption]

It's not that they don't want to look at porn, they don't want you to look at porn. And if you do
want to look at porn, they want to take your money and use it to make government even bigger
than it is already. Absolutely the most anti conservative article I've ever seen posted here that
wasn't meant to ridicule the left.

[dark_lord]

If it was unwanted by "most of us", it wouldn't be a hundred billion dollar industry.

I've seen few more idiotic posts than this.

I am not sure why you think that is an idiotic post? Is it because of the use of the word "us" - that is, "us" as in freepers posters? Or "us" as the conservative community"? Or "us" as Americans? Personally I doubt it is a hundred billion dollar industry - but it is an industry that makes money from lots and lots and lots of people, not lots of money from a few people.

[Vast Buffalo Wing Conspiracy]

Obviously the existence of utilitarianism and pragmatism, as well as the individual "pursuit of happiness" so long as you do not materially harm anyone else has never crossed your radar.

Oh but it has, many times. I used to think that way myself.

But it is becoming increasingly difficult for me to believe that there is some kind of hermetic seal between a mythical "self-sufficient individual" and the rest of society. And it is becoming increasingly clear to me that lines of thinking which declare "society does not exist" are a kind of cultural Bolshevism that are every bit as destructive of society as the Marxist variety. If the libertine line of reasoning were truly valid, we should not have seen so many disasterous results from the destruction of traditional Western values and norms.

Of course I am sympathetic to small, limited government. But small, limited governments work best with a moral society of individuals who do not think of themselves as social atoms who can do whatever they want with impunity because they do not believe their actions have any effect on others. Small government works best with a moral society which is not afraid to enforce its values, with laws as well as with customs.

It is no accident that moral corruption and Big Government go hand-in-hand; the two feed off each other. This is the one fact the libertines fail to grasp. They also fail to demonstrate how a society is supposed to reform itself without resort to the State or its laws.

The best mere "voluntary action" can hope for in a libertine notion of politics is to create pockets of resistance, powerless to affect or reform an increasingly corrupt State, and thus ultimately doomed to be swept aside by those who are not afraid to use the State for their own purposes. This is an inevitable result of the rejection of politics, and is indicative of why conservatives and libertarians so consistently lose ground politically, in spite of many aparent political victories (that ultimately prove to be illusory).

Unfortunately the social and political thinking and writings that are at the core of Western values and traditions are a closed book to most who take the libertine line of reasoning at face value. They simply are not aware that these things exist. And thus Western Civilization passes away, for wont of enough people who are consciously aware of the need to perpetuate it, and who are aware of the means of doing so.

[dark_lord]

True, but if you made it virtually impossible or prohibitively expensive to put up a porn site in the US, the availablility of porn in the US would be decreased dramatically.

Sadly, I think the Russians would just step in to fill the gap. They take Amex, Visa, MC, etc. now. Just all happy capitalists. The only way to shut it down would be to try to do what the Chinese govenment does. And that really would be the only way to do it.

[Tribune7]

Pornography is something designed to cause sexual arousal. This means that a photo of a girl in a bathing suit on a beach can arguably be called "pornography." Nobody is really suggesting this be outlawed, or regulated.

What I think most people are upset about and which is very destructive of our culture is acts relating to sex which have traditionally been defined as "obscene."

I don't have any problem with making depictions of these acts illegal using a national, rather than community, standards.

And obscenity is not, nor has it ever been, protected by the First Amendment.

[BluesDuke]

First of all, porn took off with the invention of the VCR, not the invention of th internet (didn't Gore invent both of them?).

Why, didn't you know? Mr. Gore invented television!

[Vast Buffalo Wing Conspiracy]

People might be suprised to know that I take a libertarian position on many issues, or at least consider the libertarian solution as sometimes a viable alternative to existing policies.

For example, I believe that our current "war on drugs" is insane, and certain parts of it (asset seizure, for instance) are invitations to corruption and abuse of power. I also would not reject all calls for legalization of some drugs, or for legalization of prostitution or pornography, in certain circumstances.

What I object to is the absolutist notion that what an individual does to himself has no effect on others, and therefore should not be subject to legislation, and that the State and the laws have no role in the moral education of the people

Such a line of reasoning leads to where we are today, and where we are going tomorrow, if it is not reversed.

This absolutist thinking is derived from a desire by libertarians to put certain political questions "beyond the bounds of acceptable political debate" - in other words, to trump and to silence those who do not agree with them.

Libertarians and conservatives would get along together if we could get over this tendency to try to avoid politics by "trumping" the opposition with absolutist stances on what are in fact political questions validly open to public debate.

The founding fathers never imagined that their attempts to place rational limits on the powers of government would be taken to an extreme whereby the moral and social efficacy of the State would be rejected out of hand.

I believe that questions of personal morality - drugs, abortion, prostitution, pornography, etc - are genuine political questions that need to be addressed, not mere personal matters which are beyond the bounds of politics. I think that we may very well find in some cases that a libertarian solution to a particular political question might be the best solution - but only if this is decided in a genuine political process, whereby the libertarians convince a majority that they are right.

Doing an end-run around politics by declaring certain issues to be "personal" and therefore off limits, is no different from the way that liberals have misused the Supreme Court to do an end-run around legitimate democratic politics, to get what they wanted but were not willing to defend in public debate.

[layman]

It is wrong to tax the snot out of tobacco. It is wrong to tax the snot out of alcohol. Where does it stop? It's just as wrong to use the same tactics on pornography and fat foods. The Taliban punishes what they consider to be immoral but they don't try to make money off of it.

[BluesDuke]

True, the state alone cannot succeed in fostering a virtuous society. It needs the help of the Chruch, family, and other social institutions.

I would suggest that that is kind of inside out. The State does not "need the help" in doing the things beyond its proper competence; if anything, what it needs is "the help" in getting it the hell out of such business and getting it back to the business for which it is, by design and construction, properly competent. (The founding era vice laws, such as they were, were laws of the individual states of the union, having their common threads with each other but having emphatic differences as singular as the states themselves as well; it was presumed the several states, and not the central State, had the proper call to enact and uphold such laws, it was rarely thought to be the legitimate business of the central government.) The church or the synagogue, the family, and other institutions of social power (in the proper sense of that too-often abused term) should be let alone to do that job of fostering the virtuous society, which they are competent to do. The State's assumption of matters properly assigned the church or synagogue, the family, the social power, has contributed more than even the State's critics might surmise in the breach and rupture of that which religion, family, social power is both construed and competent to do. (Bear in mind, for those who find the distinction confusing, that when I say "the State" I do not mean the individual states as defined under the United States, I mean instead a singular and suprerogatory body which corrupts and perverts a properly construed government into an instrument of plenipotentiary power over her citizen's doings and undoings beyond its legitimate construction and competence.)

A properly construed government (it is distinct from the improperly-consecrated, presumptuous State) has as its proper and legitimate business nothing further than protecting and defending her citizens against predators at home (real predators, not mere vicemongers - vice is sin, crime is evil, and too often are the occasions when the concentration against vice obstructs or even abrogates the concentration against true evil) and enemies from abroad. You would not, I presume, consider pornography more grave than murder, assault, fraud, theft, property crime, and certainly you would not (I presume again) consider that, on the rare enough occasion when such crimes are committed in the name of or on behalf of pornography or anything else classifiable as mere vice or sin, it makes murder, assault, fraud, theft, property crime more grave than by definition they are in the first place.

Let the social power of the church and synagogue, the family, the voluntary association institution do the job of reducing that interest (no one knows, realistically, just how widespread the actual interest is) in pornography and other vice, and let the State bother itself to its proper realm of competence in battling actual crime. When that day came on which the State said, in effect, that because social power was not doing its job in the manner in which the State saw fit the State was going to take that power away, that day should probably have been marked as a dark one, indeed, in a society purporting to be a free society in which men and women could live as they deemed fit with only the condition that they inflict no harm or damage upon their fellow citizen as they lived. That day arrived longer ago than many think, even if it could not be isolated to a single calendar period, and among the numerous victims of that transformation social power of the sort in which you appear strongly enough to believe was one of the more badly battered of them.