That was January. Now we have another soft-on-porn piece from Newsweek, this one dated July 2 and posted to the MSNBC web site under this clever little headline:

XXX-ceptable

Acceptable? Pornography undermines the right of every American to live in a decent society. Polls have shown that Americans overwhelmingly want the obscenity laws enforced.

Yet Newsweek managed to spin the July 2 story this way: "Porn has gone mainstream. Today's adult-film stars are writing books, making movie cameos and hitting prime time. When did America get so comfortable with hardcore?"

Comfortable is the wrong word. Sure, people try to ignore the stipper look of the pop singers. Sure, they walk by the "sexually oriented businesses" sprouting up everywhere. Sure they rent decent videos and DVD's in "mainstream" stores that also offer hardcore pornographic materials in so-called "adults only" sections. But in most cases, they really don't have much choice in the matter.

The dollars we spend are a more reliable measure of our comfort level than the editors at Newsweek. The U.S. economy is generating nearly 11 TRILLION dollars a year in gross domestic product. No one knows how much of that is porn-related, but it's been speculated the number is ten or twelve billion dollars, a substantial sum but still only about one-tenth of one percent of GDP. Lawn and garden supplies get four times as much. Ice cream gets twice as much. The list could go on. Of all the money spent in this country, 99.9 percent goes for anything and everything but porn.

The July 2 story opened with a nice-guy description of a top pornographer, Bill Asher of Vivid Entertainment Group, "who makes a living lucrative enough to send his 16-year-old daughter to one of Los Angeles's most expensive private schools," and is "not at all intimidated by the school's other parents - lawyers, CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, even Andy Garcia. 'It's not seen as an odd thing that I'm a pornographer,' he says. 'They know what I do, and they talk to me about it, it doesn't faze anyone.'"

The July 2 story included this from Legs McNeil, who has a book about the porn racket coming out in January: "Girls line up and audition to be in these films now. If they're not on drugs and they're smart about it, they can exploit themselves the way they want to be exploited." That's as close as Newsweek got to the dark side of life for the people who "star" in the films. Others have gotten closer to the truth. The Los Angeles Times Magazine of January 12, for example, carried a story of diseased porn performers under this headline:

See No Evil
In California's unregulated porn film industry, an alarming number of performers are infected with HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. And nobody seems to care

When New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer got a temporary restraining order in August against Big Apple Oriental Tours, alleged to be a promoter of "sex tours" in southeast Asia, the women's rights organization Equality Now spoke for many when it said in a press release, "sex tourism contributes to the demand for trafficking of women and it is a human rights violation."

The connection between sex tourism and the abuse of women is obvious, but that doesn't come close to addressing the fundamental problem, which - unless you want to go bedrock deep - is the mainstreaming of pornography that began when the Justice Department ten years ago stopped enforcing the obscenity laws and freed the pornographers to prey upon America and the world.

How else can we explain what's going on? For instance ...

... A 57-year-old retired judge of the New Jersey State Superior Court has been charged in federal court with possession and transportation of child pornography across state and international lines. His trial experience included Megan's law cases in which sexual offenders are required to register with the police. Yet he is alleged to have gone to Russia to have sex with a teenage boy. If convicted, the one-time judge faces a maximum of 25 years in prison and fines of up to $500,000.

...Fox TV's "Temptation Island" puts "committed" couples in situations designed to entice them to cheat on their relationships while a national audience looks on.

...Abercrombie & Fitch uses nude young men and women to sell its clothing.

...A public library in Romania decided to stock Playboy and other pornographic magazines.

...In Portland, Oregon, where strip clubs are legal, BarFly Magazine sold about 40 tickets for what it called a "Strip-O-Rama" pub-crawl. It was supposed to be a "fun" event. But the crawlers were met along the way by demonstrators with flyers explaining what's wrong with the sex industry in general and why strip clubs in particular are bad for the strippers and their patrons.

...At an obscenity trial in Cincinnati, two jurors found the videotape in evidence so disgusting they looked away rather than watch it. But another juror found it so boring he fell asleep. Together these three were American society in microcosm; the majority are shocked, but some are just bored. The Cincinnati Post (July 23) reported that Hamilton County Common Pleas Court Judge Richard Niehaus declared a mistrial. The judge explained, "Justice is blind to the influence of bias and prejudice but justice cannot be blind to the evidence." A new trial has been scheduled for January.

Frank Rich of the New York Times (July 27) declared porn has won the culture wars, and did it with a line that sounds like glee: "We've come a long way baby."

Vinay Menon of the Toronto Star (August 5) said pretty much the same thing and was no less celebratory about it. Listen: "Today, right or wrong, 'adult entertainment' has lost most of [its] depraved veneer. Somehow the explicit has shed the illicit; the marginal has assumed the center. The fornicating freaks are welcome on Main St. Call it 'carnal chic.' Or 'gutter glam.' Or, maybe, 'pop porn.'"

The U.S. Justice Department returned to the fight against large commercial distributors of obscene material on August 7 when Mary Beth Buchanan, the United States Attorney for the western district of Pennsylvania, got indictments against a corporation based in North Hollywood, California, and two California residents on charges of violating federal obscenity laws. In the year prior to the indictments, 430 reports of what may have been obscene material on the Internet were forwarded to Ms. Buchanan through Morality in Media's Justice Department hotline, www.obscenitycrimes.org.

One of the defendants, Rob Zicari, told ABC News (August 28), "There's nothing wrong with what we do." His California-based company is called Extreme Associates, which tells you something about what they do.

The Minneapolis public library had been toeing the American Library Association line, insisting since 1997 that it would not alter its policy of unfettered access to the Internet for library patrons despite the complaints of library staff, who said the policy led to confrontations with porn-addicted patrons. After all, the ALA's interpretation of the First Amendment was at stake, patrons masturbating at the computers notwithstanding. Now, after inquiries from the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, the possibility of Justice Department action, and a lawsuit filed by the aggrieved librarians, the library has settled with the twelve staffers for $435,000, according to the Associated Press, and agreed to install filters on its computers.