It’s interesting that an issue that gets almost no discussion in the US, garden variety pornography, gets trotted out as a political football in some other countries. Today’s example is England, where David Cameron is launching a new effort to crack down on “child porn” by which he means not just material for pedophiles, but also children viewing porn on their parents’ computers:
Every household in Britain connected to the internet will be obliged to declare whether they want to maintain access to online pornography, David Cameron will announce on Monday.
In the most dramatic step by the government to crack down on the “corroding” influence of pornography on childhood, the prime minister will say that all internet users will be contacted by their service providers and given an “unavoidable choice” on whether to use filters.
This doesn’t go quite as far as Australia, which has been flirting with a mandatory Internet filter for years.
I can’t remember Obama or Bush even mentioning Internet pornography, and even the cray-cray crew members like Bachmann, Gohmert and the like seem to be so fully occupied hating gays and abortion sluts that they’re leaving porn alone. I wonder why we’ve dodged that bullet.
Sibling Nonspecific Firearm of Random Adjective Followed by a Noun That Describes a Mental State (fka AWS)
laser-like focus on jobs, jobs, jobs, obviously.
Sibling Nonspecific Firearm of Random Adjective Followed by a Noun That Describes a Mental State (fka AWS)
On a somewhat related note, Alan Turing will be pardoned, 50 years after killing himself.
Xenos
Ed Meese springs to mind. I think there was something in the early Bush months, before 9-11, that came up about pornography, ostensibly about child porn but so broadly written that it could make all pornography on the internet illegal.
It sounds less like a sincere policy than a ‘let’s come up with an issue that will make us look busy and thereby protect our phony-baloney jobs’ sort of proposal.
p.a.
Their constituents are the biggest users.
Jay in Oregon
I seem to remember an article or two during the 2012 campaign about how Romney, if elected, would come after everyone’s porn (or give an opportunity to those who wanted to).
But yeah, it’s funny how the culture warriors seem to have let that one go, aside from the periodic sermons on “dealing with porn addiction”.
LittlePig
it’s funny how the culture warriors seem to have let that one go
Not especially. They aren’t real crazy about the things that gore their own ox.
ETA: Shorter me: what p.a. said
Mike in NC
If the wingnuts had their way, any Internet access in this country would be just slightly more available than in North Korea.
Ramalama
Oh now you’ve done it. It would be different had you posted this on Joe’s chocolate donut blog (population: 12), but posting here?
Lee
I would hazard a guess that since they have been badly beaten every time they tried to limit porn, they have at least temporarily given up.
cane giallo
Why? This will result in the Cameron government becoming wildly unpopular, if it isn’t already. Maybe their polls told them that people would be okay with it but people undoubtedly lie about porn usage. I can see this being an underground issue in the next by election.
Omnes Omnibus
@Xenos: John Ashcroft and the sweatering of the statues at the Justice Department.
The Red Pen
Maybe because we fought the battle before anyone knew it was being fought?
In 1990, before the “web,” the net was “Usenet” — a collection of special-interest forums. A huge and diverse collection of special-interest forums. It wasn’t the web, mind you. If you wanted to discuss stuff like you do here, there would be a forum for it. A. Forum.
Anyway, a Houston Comical columnist named Joe Abernathy went to some advanced charter school which had access to this magic thing called the Internet that would allow students to access information and communicate with smart people around the globe. Unfortunately, it also allowed them to communicate with drunk college students, asshole wingnuts (well, Ray Frank), and porn aficionados (lots and lots of those).
Abernathy blew a fuse and published some Drudge-worthy columns on the subject and inspired Mike Godwin to use his lawyer skills for electronic good (I dunno, I’m extrapolating). The net (pun intended) effect was that the Internet said, “This is not supposed to be safe for work or safe for children, so please fuck off,” and that was that. By the time Congress started trying to pass laws, there were organized groups like the EFF ready to fend them off.
Face
Fixed.
pharniel
Actually there were huge crackdowns on (some types of) adult entertainment- especially in the alt community by both the justice department and state attorney generals – I wanna say 2005 or 6 or so. Right after the re-election.
Buoyed by some early victories they ran right into the wall of EFF.
But there is a law passed during that period, forget what it’s called, that requires all adult entertainment to keep copies of drivers licenses and birth certificates on file for every model and to clearly state how to contact them to verify ages on websites. That’s 2004 or 5 iirc.
aimai
@Jay in Oregon: Romney was a major shareholder in Mariott Hotels and they were making (are making) a lot of money off of selling porn videos to businessmen. He would have had to come after(home) porn, if only to maintain Mariott’s monopoly
MomSense
@Sibling Nonspecific Firearm of Random Adjective Followed by a Noun That Describes a Mental State (fka AWS):
I was thinking the same thing. Haven’t the unemployed suffered enough? Now they are going to take away their pr0n?!
Just Some Fuckhead
Internet porn is America’s sex education for kids.
Punchy
Oh noez! The end of internet pr0n is the end of all pr0n everywheres! Wait, hold on a minute….
/Playboy, Penthouse, Hustler, Netflix, strip clubs
peach flavored shampoo
@aimai: How does this “selling to buisnessmen” work? Who would charge p0rn to their company card? Is this stuff simply put on the bill as “movie” and not “anal sex with horses movie” and that’s how salesmen get away with it?
Chris
I assume it’s because while abortion and gay marriage are the vices of These People (uppity women and gay people), porn is a vice that Straight White Christian Men indulge in just like everyone else.
So, same reason we don’t see any campaigns against divorce on the same level as the abortion or gay marriage campaigns.
aimai
@peach flavored shampoo: Yes. Its just movie rentals. Mariott and Romney got into trouble with it at the time.
PurpleGirl
Isn’t pr0n the one thing that definitely makes money on the net? At least, it was the first thing to consistently make money. Therefore. according to the ghods of mammon and the free market, pr0n cannot be banned or restricted on the net (beyond those silly menu boxes asking you to verify your age or parental approval/filters).
Ronnie P
Aimai is on the right track. There’s money in porn, and where there’s money, there’s big businesses.
Gin & Tonic
@peach flavored shampoo: It’s very non-specific on hotel bills. The bill doesn’t say if you watched “Dances with Wolves” or, say, uhm, bad example.
PurpleGirl
@peach flavored shampoo: Yup, it’s just noted as “Pay Per View” on the bill, IRC. Traveling business-people need their entertainment.
mattminus
@Punchy:
Your interests must be as vanilla as they com if you think Netflix has anything even remotely resembling pr0n
Gin & Tonic
@PurpleGirl: It’s the first thing to consistently make money regardless of medium. VHS, DVD, Internet, it’s always the leading (and profitable) edge.
dr. bloor
@Just Some Fuckhead:
FTFY.
Gex
Well if you look at the regions that download the most porn, I think you will see pretty quickly why our religious right doesn’t go after porn very hard. If the largest online gun selling site is owned by the LDS, don’t you have to wonder how much Internet porn they sell? I know before the Internet got huge they profited off of it in all the hotel chains they owned.
If you watch the anti-gay groups, it looks like their next round of fundraising to avoid getting real jobs will involved blaming atheists for everything. So I don’t think the porn wars are going to be making their way here.
jake the snake
@peach flavored shampoo:
It just shows up on the bill as “Movie”. Or so I’ve heard.
One company I worked for allowed one movie on the expense report, any additional movies had to be paid for by the employee.
jake the snake
@peach flavored shampoo:
It just shows up on the bill as “Movie”. Or so I’ve heard.
One company I worked for allowed one movie on the expense report, any additional movies had to be paid for by the employee.
Belafon
I remember, not sure about the dates, where they tried to restrict p0rn, requiring sites that had it to put up some kind of barrier, generally involving a credit card. They got overruled on 1st amendment grounds and because the site owners would actually have no way to prove that the person wielding the card was actually above 17.
p.a.
@PurpleGirl: don’t know if it’s urban legend or not, but I have heard that back in the day vhs won the vhs/beta war because beta wouldn’t license to pr0n, and that market put vhs over the top.
Ed
Red states have the most porn:
http://consumerist.com/2009/03/05/which-state-consumes-the-most-online-porn/
MrSnrub
There’s a kid that my son is sort-of-friends with, age 9 who is actively looking at porn sites and is telling other kids all about them. So far my son is blissfully unaware of these things, but it’s caused problems for other kids in the same social circle.
The best option is for this kid’s parents to take control, but that’s not going to happen, and watching him go through his teenage years is going to be like watching a slow-motion train wreck. We are doing our best to extricate our son, delicately if possible, bluntly if necessary, from the friendship.
Sibling Nonspecific Firearm of Random Adjective Followed by a Noun That Describes a Mental State (fka AWS)
BTW, mistermix, you may have forgotten the Child Online Protection Act (COPA) or the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which were both mostly shot down by the Supreme Court.
j
Alberto Gonzales used “child porn” as a ruse to start the warrant free wiretapping that was being done for years before a whistle blower exposed it. And of course congress gave the phone companies an ex post facto pass.
I think Bush even mentioned it one of his SOTU speeches.
Cliff in NH
Key words, It was right in the party platform!
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2012/01/10/401517/three-leading-gop-nominees-porn/
http://www.mediaite.com/online/gop-platform-changed-to-now-target-all-forms-of-pornography/
http://www.dailytech.com/Republican+Leaders+Push+for+a+National+Ban+on+Most+Porn/article25560.htm
The Red Pen
@PurpleGirl:
pr0n is the one thing that makes money for any information technology. When DVDs were new, Sony and Phillips made an effort to ensure that there was pr0n available on the format.
I think the only exception is HD and Blu-Ray. It turns out that crisp hi-def is not a good thing for pr0n. Early efforts to popularize HD centered on sports broadcasts, primarily American football.
GregB
@p.a.:
It must be myth because I remember watching the x-rated Swedish Sorority Sisters on Betamax with my high school pals. As a side note, it had a Stevie Wonder tune on the soundtrack.
True story.
Cliff in NH
@Cliff in NH:
here is the link to the platform:
http://www.gop.com/2012-republican-platform_renewing/#Item4
note:
Steve M.
The 2012 Republican platform called for a crackdown on “all forms” of pornography:
http://dailycaller.com/2012/08/27/gop-platform-calls-for-crackdown-on-all-forms-of-pornography/
Gopher2b
You serious have to ask? Look at the “entertainment” section of Foxnews. It’s all T&A obsession with attractive starlets.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
Those policy discussions are best left for “quiet rooms” (wetsuits optional). But if there’s anyone out there who we can rely on to take a stand, it’d have to be Man-on-Dog. The joint press conference between him, Bachman, Gohmert and Steve King announcing their platform on porn would be an instant classic. Between the nuttiness on the dais and the awkwardness of the stenographers I’d be in stitches for days. Just imagine Blitzer or Tapper (or, heh, Chris Matthews) leading THAT panel discussion. Fox and Friends would be sure to do something that completely baffles all sane adults. The Bill O’Reilly take. Shirtless Geraldo. Feeble old Larry Flynt wheezing and laughing at everyone.
That settles it. Obama must take a position on 50 Shades of Grey. The fallout would be totally worth it.
El Tiburon
This entire thread sux without pics
The Red Pen
@p.a.:
@GregB:
What killed Beta (in the home market) was VHS licensing. Anyone could make VHS tape decks as long as they licensed the technology from Toshiba. As a result, there were price wars and the prices dropped quickly and Beta systems couldn’t compete.
Beta technology lives/lived on in commercial systems (e.g. the ubiquitous Betacam) which used the same core way of processing and storing analog video.
Mandalay
@p.a.:
Not sure whether you are snarking, but that actually seems to be true: Porn in the USA: Conservatives are biggest consumers
Scott S.
All these pointless wingnut cultural issues are cyclical. They don’t care about it now, eventually they will. Eventually, they’ll be hating on D&D, Pokemon, heavy metal bands, comic books, etc. I almost wish they’d go back to that stuff, because they’ll never manage to ban those, and they’re showing too much damn success at banning abortion and voting…
GregB
@El Tiburon:
We can dredge up the sexy pics of Geraldo and G. Gordon Liddy again if you like?
Violet
Isn’t Utah the state with the highest per capita use of p0rn? That would answer a lot.
The Tragically Flip
Aside from their constituents using it, I’d say the ISPs and telcos probably lobby and contribute pretty effectively to keep porn on the back burners for social conservatives.
The right also gave up on fighting gambling, which should be a big issue for socons. Another way the issues of abortion and gay marriage are effective for them – keep the zealots busy with things that aren’t hugely profitable for key campaign supporters.
piratedan
@Mandalay: it’s usually because no one wants to fuck those reprehensible bastards…..
Violet
Saw an article yesterday about “porn in the high street”–meaning shop windows that show scantily clad women and magazine covers with the same. The woman who wrote the article was saying how much worse it was since she was a kid and she didn’t think kids should have what amounts to forced exposure to it when they’re walking in a shopping area. So it’s not just the government in the UK that is talking about it.
jon
There is porn and there is porn and there is PORN. It’s always a freedom-of-expression issue at some point, whether it’s the pearl-clutching panty-sniffing wing of the US Wingnut party at one point or the feminists of Canada at another (in Canada, any form of bondage is unacceptable, thanks to the tireless work of Catherine MacKinnon and others who teamed up with right wingers to make the rules under which mostly lesbian and gay depictions have been prosecuted.) The idea of pornography being itself a hate crime or hate speech is something that some on the left and right would love to use to make it illegal. Strange bedfellows, no cameras please.
And it ignores the fact that filters just don’t work. Yeah, if you look up “porn” in your googlebox, you’ll get blocked. But if you can think of other ways to ask for those results, it’s easy if you have the slightest bit of a thesaurus in your head (they’re also available online, if you can spell thesaurus.) So they might work with third- and fourth-graders, but the moment someone disappointed in youtube finds out about vimeo, it’s over.
Back in the internet dark ages, 2001 or so, I was in a library school class where someone had a computer with a filter set up. I was able to find images of nude children in four steps. Yeah, they were from a nudist site. And yeah, they weren’t focusing on their genitals, which I imagine would disappoint those looking for actual child pornography rather than images that would do for a pedophile in need of a fix, but it’s really not that difficult to get around a filter and find stuff if that’s your wish. The public library where I now work has filters approved by the federal government (and adult users are completely UNFILTERED on the wired computers,) but some sites on the wifi get through while others don’t. I can use my kindle to look at Socially Unacceptable Art (check it out, it’s a hilarious trainwreck of sexual absurdity) but not Nudiarist. As What’s odd about that is that as a parent I would much rather have my sons looking at Nudiarist all day long rather than see a single image from Socially Unacceptable Art.
Chris
@Mandalay:
I’m sure there’s a more scientific explanation, but it doesn’t really surprise me that repressed people would indulge in porn.
Seanly
@peach flavored shampoo:
Most hotels will allow you to pay a portion of your bill with another card or cash. Not that I know anything about that. Or if you’re a company bigwig you probably don’t get a pr0n lecture when you expense it…
If you gotta look on your work laptop, make sure you’re not connected to an VPN. Or play it safe & just bring ladies of the night to your room.
Back to the topic, so much of this culture war stuff is BS. A proposal like that would never fly in the US – our culture warriors are just as sick & twisted as the rest of us (if not more so).
RE: pr0n on Blu-Ray ~ didn’t Sony try for years to have no pr0n clauses in their Blu-Ray licensing? Although who even buys DVDs or Blu-Rays anymore*? My Blu-Ray players are used with Netflix & vudu about 95% of the time.
*caveat – I do need to get Django Unchained on Blu-Ray.
The Red Pen
Oh yes, let’s not forget Mormon porn.
jheartney
@Seanly: Redbox has affordable blu-ray. Also if you’re a geek you’ll want the new Star Trek Next Generation blu-rays.
Violet
Don’t business travelers just bring their own iPads or something these days? Why use the business laptop for that has the potential to get you in trouble if you use it for p0rn? Just bring your own laptop or tablet.
The Red Pen
@Seanly:
That was a rumor that Sony denied. As pointed out in this article, Sony has no ability to control the content of Blu-Ray discs.
Some of the extras are worth it. Also, stuff you can’t get anywhere else.
I just got a Steve Martin boxed set and a boxed set of the 70’s sci-fi series UFO (although UFO is reportedly on YouTube in its entirety).
Bubblegum Tate
@The Red Pen:
I was working for a video game magazine back the PS2 and original Xbox were still mere prototypes. One of the editors came back from E3 with a bunch of pr0n games for both. The consoles hadn’t even been finalized yet, much less sent to manufacturing, and pr0n companies already had software for them. Pr0n companies are frequently the earliest of early adopters.
Seanly
Interesting sidenote – I’m at work so I can’t search for the article, but I read something a few years ago about how pr0n was instrumental in early photogrpahy (probably not Daguerrotypes though).
At the end of the day, we’re nothing but a hairless ape with dexterous hands and a big brain. The biggest problem with so much of the conservative agenda is that it denies such an important part of our psyche (unless you want to have 20 kids and get a TLC show).
Paul Gottlieb
The porn industry is a multi-billion dollar business. In the United States that makes it holy
The Red Pen
@Seanly:
Speak for yourself, pal.
Some of us are pretty fucking hairy.
Nicole
Some of the earliest audio recordings are of people having sex, if I remember the article (I think it was on Slate, a few years ago). Yes, I listened.
I remember being nine years old and sneaking into my uncle’s collection of Playboy magazines (egged on by my 11-year-old friend). Of course, being little girls, we just were all catty about the women’s appearances.
Later I found out the subscription to Playboy was my aunt’s gift to my uncle for their first anniversary (the paper one, natch). That was my first indication that old people were perhaps not as square as I previously had thought. Which was much more shocking than pictures of nekkid ladies.
Omnes Omnibus
@Violet: Shades of Mary Whitehouse.
jon
Of course porn is part of our willingness to buy into technology. Think all the binoculars are purchased by birders and the military? Think all the laptops taken into bedrooms are just because workers are THAT DEVOTED to their work projects?
All the homeless people at the public library computers definitely regret their homeless status when I walk through the computer lab and they quickly open another tab. Homeless men are seriously into shrimping, which makes sense in a way. Still, TMI. T fucking MI.
Thoughtcrime
@The Red Pen:
I think you mean JVC, which developed VHS, not Toshiba.
And don’t me get started on Pioneer and those rotten LaserDiscs.
kindness
Take my porn away? TAKE MY PORN?!?
They can take my porn away when they pry it from my frothy, sticky and well lubed hands.
Mnemosyne
@Seanly:
There’s a Playboy documentary directed by Chuck Workman (the guy who does the montages at the Academy Awards) called The Story of X that includes footage he found of silent porn films from the early 1900s. Or, as the quip has it, the first thing published on the movable type printing press was the Gutenberg Bible, and the second thing was porn.
SFAW
Pr0n filter? Screw that. I want something to filter out the stupid.
Of course, were such a filter available and required, right-wingers would be staring at a blank screen all day. Well, except for the donkey-on-gerbil pr0n, etc.
Shakezula
@Sibling Nonspecific Firearm of Random Adjective Followed by a Noun That Describes a Mental State (fka AWS): 55 years too late is better than never.
What a fucking disgrace that was.
The Red Pen
@Thoughtcrime:
Yes, JVC, thank you.
I have a Laserdisc boxed set containing every Tex Avery cartoon produced and a box set of travel shorts from the 1930’s-1940s (which are awesome — e.g. Los Angeles depicted as a sleepy little city full of Mexican culture). I can’t find replacements on DVD, so WTF am I supposed to do?
The Red Pen
@SFAW:
If you filter out the stupid, I’m pretty sure that you could download the entire Internet every day via dial-up.
WereBear
Actually, that is the source of their power.
Authoritarian regimes, whether it’s the inadequate parents on the small scale, or the ruthless dictator in the large, depends on keeping people off balance and acquiescent in their own oppression. With parenting, it’s overkill on things a kid is going to do anyway; break something, spill something, forget something. With governments, it’s not being patriotic, not loving Big Brother. There’s millions of ways, but they all boil down to the same thing.
Fundamentalist religions turn this up to 11. They get into a cult-lite syndrome where even thinking the wrong thoughts will send you to hell. Constantly guilty, bitter, and resentful; sound like any conservatives you know?
SFAW
@The Red Pen:
I don’t think dial-up has enough bandwidth for B-J and FDL, so I might quibble with you on that.
Other than that, I think your point has merit.
SFAW
@WereBear:
A gazillion times easier to list the ones that AREN’T that way. But you knew that.
Comrade Dread
Growing up Baptist in Baptist school back in pre-Internet days, I can thoroughly attest that children will find a way to see boobs.
I mean, by the fifth grade, I’m pretty sure there wasn’t one kid in our school who hadn’t found their dad’s hidden porn stash.
Chris
@WereBear:
Specifically, in fundamentalist Christianity, they really play up the idea of humans as inherently lost and sinful creatures (original sin), and basically acknowledge that you can’t help but to think the wrong thoughts that make you worthy of hell, it’s who you are as a human… but then giving you an out by saying “but Jesus loves you and he’ll ignore all of that about you if you just let him into your heart” (which, in practice, means joining the church/tribe and conforming to it). It’s the whole “salvation through faith alone” thing.
They basically feed your guilt, your insecurities, and all your self-doubts in order to convince you that you’re worthless, and then tell you that the only way not to be worthless is to goose-step unquestioningly behind them. It’s a hell of a formula. And you’re right, it really does work.
SFAW
@Chris:
There’s an old joke, for which the punchline is something like “Look who think’s HE’S nothing!”
Different religion, though.
JohnMcC
@p.a.: In order, using the number of broad-band users per thousand (which might skew the numbers somewhat because broadband being slightly more expensive, eh?) the top ten states: Utah, Alaska, Mississippi, Hawaii,Oklahoma, Arkansas, NorthDakota, Louisiana, Florida, WVirginia….
http://blow.blogs,nytimes.com/2009/03/03/red-light-states/
moon
Romney wanted to enforce obscenity laws against pornography and criticized Obama for not doing so. No mention of children viewing it, presumably for Romney it was also bad for adults to view it and especially for adults to manufacture pornography. The campaign is long over obviously, but when you said no major politician had raised the issue, that wasn’t true. Mormons, man.
nemesis
You can have my porn when you pry it from my cold, dead left hand.
Some Random Brit
In this case, you’ve dodged this particular bullet for three main reasons:
(1) You guys don’t have the Daily Mail calling the shots for the entire base of one party (yes, there’s Fox, but it isn’t quite the same thing). That the DM is, by dint of their online content and in the words of someone smarter than me, the paper of record for UK hebephiles is one of the many ironies inherent here.
(2) Lynton Crosby. Cameron desperately needs to change the subject or the fact that his every policy “decision” in the past three years is entirely in line with the strategic aims of “adviser” Crosby is going to dog him all summer long.
(3) Everybody in the UK is absolutely aware of how successful any attempt like this will be, which is to say not at all. Remember how they blocked The Pirate Bay? There are about 500 proxy sites they didn’t block – and nobody has much of a commercial interest in making TPB available as widely as possible. Compare and contrast with the porn industry.
Woodrowfan
@Chris: Some fundy churches actually preach that one you’re saved, you are without sin. That’s absolutely appalling (IMHO) and makes them even dangerous. Authoritarians are dangerous enough, but one who thinks he’s perfect and you have someone who’ll happily shove people into ovens thinking he’s doing God’s work
2liberal
pornography kingpin rupert murdoch makes a lot of money selling xrated porn over his cable networks.
LINK
WereBear
I really loathe the Wingers for making innocent people’s lives a misery. But a hot second-place is the rampant hypocrisy.
different-church-lady
Heaven help them if their children find out about sex. Then they might actually grow up and become adults.
Nick
First Amendment. We have one, they don’t. It’s that simple, really.
drkrick
When the Bush II administration came into office, there was a big shift in law enforcement resources from antiterrorism to anti porn and prostitution. For a guy like Ashcroft who got himself annointed with oil like King David before being sworn in as Attorney General, this was no surprise. Worked out fine for the first 8 months. The GOP may not want to give folks an excuse to revisit that piece of history.
Also, the UK doesn’t have a real strong analog to the First Amendment to deal with.
Fred
FWIW, Red states are the big porn consumers and red state men are the big GOP supporters so… I doubt it is the soccar moms who are checking out http://www.hotasianbabes.com
fuckwit
@p.a.: They THEMSELVES are the biggest users!
I’ve been told that the DC area is the absolutely biggest market for the sex industry: phone sex, porn, prostitution, anything.
There is also the Invisible Hand jerking these guys off too: porn is BIG MONEY and we all know that, in America, money talks and bullshit gets elected.
fuckwit
@kindness: That’s, uh, really TMI.
e.a.f.
The law Australia implemented will never be law in american. Why? Same reason Australia has gun control and the U.S.A. doesn’t.
there is the small matter of all the money porn makes. The right wing seems to not care where their money comes from as long as it comes. No pun intended. It is interesting that all those bible thumpers never got on an anti child porn bus though.
We’d probably have Roberts declare it was an infringement of state laws and/or a violation of freedom of expression. Porn is a multi billion $ business and nothing is going to interfer with that.
Russell M
porn does not really come up all that much because the religious nutters have much bigger rights to restrict. once you cant have an abortion or gets gay married then they will come for your porn-stache but they cant take the spank bank in my head, so screw you RWNJ’s.
Lolcat Liberation Front
For what it’s worth, nothing ever really came of the Australian push to filter the intertubez. For the past three years, the government hasn’t had enough support in Parliament to pass it, and the responsible Minister, a Senator named Stephen Conroy, recently resigned from his position because he refused to work with the new Prime Minister. So it looks like the whole filter thing is dead for good, now.
MNP
@The Red Pen: You know, it’s too bad they shot their wad on that rather than privacy.