Obscene hardcore pornography is not protected by the First Amendment. We have laws that ban its distribution by any means, including the Internet. These laws have been passed by the Congress and most state legislatures. Presidents and Governors have signed off on them. The Supreme Court has upheld them.
Maybe we ought to give law enforcement a chance. Nothing else is working.
A one-time civil rights attorney, public defender and youth sports official was sentenced September 7 to seven years in federal prison after pleading guilty to possession of videos that showed rope-bound young girls being tortured and raped. The criminal complaint said the man had subscribed to multiple child pornography websites over a period of years.
At the sentencing in Alexandria, Virginia, federal district court judge T.S. Ellis III called the videos "abhorrent" and wondered aloud how it happened that a man "who devoted his life to good works" could come to possess such material. The judge said, "the term 'child pornography' does not convey the depravity" of the videos, and called the man "a serious risk of harm to the community."
The man was Charles Rust-Tierney, who once ran the Arlington, Virginia, Little League and was president of the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. He told the judge that child pornography was a way to escape "despair" in his life, as though that explained it.
The divorced father of two young boys had it backwards. He was addicted to images of someone else's children being tortured and raped. How could he not be in despair? What he needed was professional help, not more porn.
The Rust-Tierney case shows the ACLU trying to have it both ways when it comes to Internet filters. In opposing the Child Online Protection Act, the ACLU contended filters could protect children from Internet pornography better than the procedures provided for in the Act. But the ACLU was against filters when it came to actually using them in public libraries, even in the children's section.
It was Charles Rust-Tierney, in fact, who appeared before the Loudon County, Virginia, Library Board in December 1998 to present the ACLU's argument that the Board should allow "maximum, unrestricted access to the valuable resources of the Internet." He told the Library Board that "individuals will continue to behave responsibly and appropriately while in the library," and added, "other libraries have adopted less restrictive policies that allow adult and minor patrons to decide for themselves whether to access the Internet with or without a filter." Filtering should be "optional. . . on computers in the children's section," he said.
This from the man whose own exposure to pornography led to an addiction that led to disgrace and prison.
The story of Charles Rust-Tierney's fall from grace does more than illustrate the ACLU's facile, not to say duplicitous, maneuvering around the issues. It is mainly a story about the destructive power and the addictive hold of pornography. There are many other such stories.
A young woman in Navarro Mills, Texas, about 65 miles south of Dallas, found the dead body of her 6-year-old daughter, Hanna Mack, early on September 10. Hanna was hanging from a rope in the family garage at home. She had been raped before being killed. Police arrested the mother's live-in boyfriend, holding him initially on child pornography possession charges. Days later he was named the prime suspect in the girl's death. Navarro County sheriff's chief deputy Mike Cox told the news media, "Computer files obtained during the initial crime scene investigation revealed the presence of pornographic images of children."
Researchers at Goucher College in Baltimore have concluded that pornography use significantly increases the odds that a battered woman will be sexually abused. The finding was based on an analysis of data from 271 participants in a program for battered women.
Internet predators on the hunt for children for sex know police posing as children are out to get them. The predators keep trying, anyway, despite well-publicized sting operations. David Holmes, a professor of psychology at the University of Kansas, told the Kansas City Star August 24, "These people just don't think they're going to get caught - it's really that simple. . . . They see people drunk out of their minds on Skid Row and see what disaster can occur if they drink again, but they still do. . . . It's the same with a sexual offense. We can't underestimate the urge of that sexual craving. It just overwhelms their rational thinking."
A man in San Rafael, California, served most of an 8-year prison sentence for secretly videotaping a woman and teenage girl, then sued the police to get back the tapes! You can almost hear some crazed inner voice telling him GOTTA HAVE IT, GOTTA HAVE IT, like that creepy character in "Lord of the Rings."
A grand jury has handed up indictments against three retail businesses in Kansas City, Kansas, on obscenity and drug charges. The business operators were scheduled for pre-trial appearances in Wyandotte County District Court in September. The grand jury was convened pursuant to a citizen petition drive, which is a valuable legal weapon in the hands of the citizens of Kansas.
In Atlanta, Mayor Shirley Franklin has expanded her anti-prostitution campaign to take on Craigslist, asking the online classified service to take responsibility for the fact that it is a "marketplace for child prostitution."
In Sioux Falls, the South Dakota Family Policy Council has fired off a public protest letter to Governor Mike Rounds over the Governor's support for LodgeNet Entertainment Corp. and the company's expansion plans. LodgeNet sells pornographic pay-per-view movie services to hotels and motels and has plans to expand its headquarters. Joining the protest was Citizens for Community Values of Cincinnati. Keloland TV reported the story with this lead August 6: "An out of state organization is calling for a federal investigation into one of Sioux Falls' largest employers." How's that for a spin? And you thought the impartial news media wouldn't do that.
Omni Hotels took hardcore pay-per-view movies out of their guest rooms in 1999, after the chain's new owner, Bob Rowling, got a look at some of the movie offerings. "I wondered what in the world we were doing as a company giving this kind of option to anybody, particularly young kids," he told Focus on the Family's Daniel Weiss for Citizen Magazine. "It just isn't the right thing to do for us, or really, for anybody."
Eight years later, now, there's a long list of other hotels that are porn free and proud of it. You can check the list at www.cleanhotels.com, which Citizens for Community Values maintains. You can even book a room through this service.
Pro-family groups are urging the Defense Department to remove sexually explicit publications from post exchanges as required by the Military Honor and Decency Act. DOD says it is complying, based on the Department's interpretation of "sexually explicit." Not sexually explicit, in the opinion of the Department's review board, are such porn magazines as Penthouse, Celebrity Skin, Playboy's Vixens and others in what the Department calls the "adult sophisticate" category. There's one for your catalog of doublespeak. Since when has it been sophisticated to seek sexual arousal by staring at a magazine full of pictures of naked or nearly naked women?
We can assume this affects military families negatively. Recently, Morality in Media received an email from a woman who said this about pornography on military bases:
I am a military spouse finding it harder and harder to live with the sexuality and pornification of our military installations. I can't take my 4 daughters to the PX, commissary or even the on-post library without being bombarded by sexually suggestive items and magazines. It is very hard feeling helpless as a mom…I want a better world for my girls.
And we know it makes life difficult for some of the women in the military. There were 174,769 women among the 1.4 million active duty enlisted personnel in all branches of the military in 2004. In that year, when the women were outnumbered by the men eight to one, the Department received 1,700 allegations of sexual assault, defined to include "rape, nonconsensual sodomy, indecent assault, and attempts to commit such acts." Of these allegations, the Department reports, "1,275 incidents involved a service member as a victim and 1,305 incidents involved a service member as an alleged offender."
The Defense Department announced in May 2005 that it was taking steps to "address the crime of sexual assault within our ranks. In October 2004, the department established the Joint Task Force for Sexual Assault Prevention and Response (JTF SAPR) as its single point of accountability for sexual assault policy."
But the Department sees nothing wrong with skin magazines at the PX. Maybe the Joint Task Force ought to have a word with the magazine review board.
WRAP Week is Sunday October 28 through Sunday November 4
You can find all the news about the annual White Ribbon Against Pornography Week (Sunday, October 28 through Sunday, November 4) and what you can do to help the cause on the www.moralityinmedia.org website ("WRAP Campaign" page). In this space, we've tried to persuade our readers that there is every reason to jump in with both feet and every other legal weapon at your disposal. So, write those letters to the media and your legislators, organize rallies, speak out to your neighbors, make a pest of yourself at town hall and the district attorney's office. And display the white ribbon.
Go get 'em!
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