When you got a California senator turning on you the only place to go is www.adultcybermart.com
from www.theminorityreportblog.com - Earlier this month, [Utah Senator Orrin] Hatch and 41 other senators sent a letter to [Attorney General Eric] Holder pushing him to bring criminal cases against “all major distributors of adult obscenity.”
“We write to urge the Department of Justice vigorously to enforce federal obscenity laws against major commercial distributors of hardcore adult pornography,” said the April 4 letter, circulated by Hatch. “We know more than ever how illegal adult obscenity contributes to violence against women, addiction, harm to children, and sex trafficking. This material harms individuals, families and communities and the problems are only getting worse.”
The forty-one senators in question are not a homogeneous group of religious conservatives, but include feminist left-wingers, too, including Dianne Feinstein and Amy Klobuchar. The old unholy alliance between the religious right and the feminist left — smashed by the courts in the 90s for their assault on free speech — is apparently looking to reassemble to launch a new crusade to regulate our private lives.
There are blatant falsehoods in their little letter: there actually isn’t a shred of evidence that pornography depicting consenting adults “contributes to sex trafficking” or leads to violence against women. Orrin Hatch and the other religious conservatives who signed onto this authoritarian drivel are merely borrowing an old radical feminist trope when they utter such nonsense.
Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, the feminist doyennes of the anti-pornography movement in the 90s, formulated the argument thus: pornography, by definition, is about the subjugation of women, and represents, in a raw sexual form, the patriarchal oppression embedded in the very structure of our society. To prove their argument wrong, please Google “gay porn.”
Pornography can certainly be addicting. But so can alcohol, cigarettes, and World of Warcraft. For some reason, we all seem to agree that adults can choose to consume such products at their own risk, without Eric Holder keeping an eye on us. Why on Earth should this same logic not be applied to pornography?
More to the point: why don’t these senators do their jobs? Instead of asking Eric Holder to spend more time monitoring what we’re looking at on our computers, why don’t these clowns get around to formulating real solutions to our spending crisis? If our entitlement system goes bankrupt, will they want us to shrug our shoulders and say: “Well, at least I know that my neighbor can’t watch porn”? They’ll do anything to avoid talking about it, but our federal government’s current trajectory is completely unsustainable. Why don’t these fools talk about that, rather than what we’re looking at in our private lives?
