By Mark Kernes
Senior Editor, Adult Video News (AVN)
We in porn are watching Ashcroft marshal his forces for a massive attack. We've seen a training seminar about 18 months ago where Ashcroft told all the Assistant U.S. Attorneys (AUSAs) in the states that ALL major porn prosecutions would now be coordinated through the Department of Justice, with the AUSAs themselves having little or no say in whether a prosecution would even occur, and no veto power whatsoever over them (which the AUSAs used to have).
We've seen Bruce Taylor, one of the Reagan/Meese era obscenity prosecutors, hired back at Justice, and Congress requiring, in the PROTECT Act, the hiring of 25 new obscenity prosecutors -- a fact that was not reported in ANY major-market news story on the Act. We've seen religious right groups becoming stunningly proactive in pushing restrictive zoning laws and other "time, place and manner" restrictions on adult businesses. They even have a 300+ page manual of boilerplate anti-sex business laws, so the politicians don't even have to do any work; they can copy the stuff verbatim and enact it! And that is happening all over the country, even in the major metropolitan areas like L.A., where the City Council enacted a very restrictive ordinance targeting dance clubs, and only backed down when it became clear that the club owners were prepared to spend millions on lawsuits against it.
During the first Bush presidency, in the aftermath of the Meese Commission, the DOJ began a campaign of multi-jurisdictional obscenity prosecutions, which drove almost all of the large adult mail-order companies out of business. Adam & Eve, which was indicted in at least five jurisdictions, only survived by spending millions defending itself. Fortunately, it had those millions to spend; most don't. A decade before that, in the days after Reagan took office, the DOJ launched MiPorn, a sting operation that resulted in indictments against almost all the major adult film producers of the time, and though most of the convictions were eventually overturned on appeal, the defense cost more millions, and some producers did go to jail. When Clinton took office, however, his attorney general gave no priority to the prosecution of sexual speech, and federal busts stopped. That's one major difference between a liberal and a reactionary administration.
The conservatives, backed by the evangelicals, are gearing up for a massive assault on constitutional rights, to a degree never before attempted in this country (except perhaps during the McCarthy era), and anyone who thinks they're shooting blanks hasn't been following the attacks on society's most deplored, and hence most vulnerable, groups -- the sex industry and the drug users. When those are successful, other targeted groups will follow, including journalists.
Both the adult video industry, through its trade organization, the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), and the dance club industry, through its Association of Club Executives (ACE), have mounted a massive campaign to register voters, and thanks to ACE Executive Director Angelina Spencer, clubs across the country have registered over 150,000 new voters. Both the FSC and ACE have created a flyer for distribution to all customers, noting that whatever party has power in the White House over the next four years is likely to pick four new Supreme Court justices -- and the flyer notes that Antonin Scalia is Bush's ideal justice.
Scalia wrote in a decision last spring, "I do not believe, however, that [adult bookstore] Z.J. Gifts is engaged in activity protected by the First Amendment. I adhere to the view I expressed in FW/PBS v. Dallas (1990): the pandering of sex is not protected by the First Amendment." [Citation removed] Talk about "judicial activism"! A Supreme Court justice has read sexual speech entirely out of "Congress shall make no law"! If that doesn't scare journalists, nothing will.
[Editor's Note: Adult Video News (AVN) is the trade magazine of the adult video industry. Many of its articles are reprinted on AVN.com.]
Posted by jules_siegel at October 22, 2004 08:23 AM | TrackBack