What do the American Library Association, Hilton Hotels, and Attorney General Eric Holder all have in common? If you said they all facilitate the country’s “pornography epidemic,” gold star for you.
Morality in Media, a conservative organization trying to change the country’s laws in order to, among other things, ban pornography, released its list of the top 12 “facilitators of porn in America” list this week. Topping the list was Holder, who in addition to earning the title as the nation’s top law enforcement officer is now also seen in some circles as the top pornography-sympathizer. The group complained that Holder isn’t doing enough to fight pornography:
The Hill has more:
Patrick A. Trueman, president of Morality in Media, said the attorney general leads the group’s “dirty dozen” for shutting down the Department of Justice’s Obscenity Prosecution Task Force in 2011.
“Holder’s actions keep the porn industry thriving. He not only refuses to enforce obscenity laws currently on the books that prohibit the distribution of hardcore pornography, but he even disbanded the office charged with enforcement,” Trueman said in a statement.
The Department of Justice folded the organization, which investigated and prosecuted distributors of hardcore pornography, into the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section.
It’s tough to imagine a bigger waste of taxpayer money than using limited prosecutorial resources to target porn depicting legal acts between consenting adults. Child porn is illegal and should be prosecuted with vigor, as the only way to produce such material is to sexually assault a child. Naughty films involving consenting adults, by contrast, enjoy robust protection under the First Amendment. As the Supreme Court explained in Miller v. California, prosecutors may target adult materials only when “the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value,” and only when “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would find the work appeals to an inordinate interest in sex. Subsequent decisions make clear that few, if any, adult works meet this standard.
Nevertheless, ridding the nation of pornography has become something of a cause celebre among social conservatives. The movement gained notoriety during the Republican presidential primaries when an Iowa-based conservative group named The Family Leader put out a pledge, signed by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) and former Sen. Rick Santorum (R-PA), that called for a ban on “all forms of pornography.” (After the pledge created national controversy, the group’s leader backtracked and claimed he only wanted to ban women being forced into pornography.)
The other nine winners singled out by Morality in Media include Comcast, Facebook, Google Play, LodgeNet, Twitter, Wikipedia, Cosmopolitan Magazine, Barnes & Noble, and the Department of Defense, which allegedly “has a serious pornography problem, and it is doing next to nothing to combat it.”