Sorry its not about Palin, McCain, more polls or Sunday talk shows. My working title was: "Federal Hypocrisy: Max Hardcore, George Bush and what it means to you."
Glen Greenwald, Salon this Sunday writes:
On Friday in Tampa, Florida, Paul F. Little was sentenced by a federal judge to 3 years and 10 months in a federal prison after being convicted of the grave and terrible crime of distributing pornography "over the Internet and through the mail" -- films featuring only consenting adults and distributed only consenting adults who chose to purchase them. Even though he lived and worked in California, the DOJ draged him to Tampa, Florida in order to try him under Tampa's "community standards," on the theory that his website used servers physically based in Central Florida and because some of the films were sent to Tampa customers.
That's not terribly shocking, but there is, of course a constitutional twist to all this.
These porn prosecutions are the by-product of the demands from Senate Republicans such as Orrin Hatch, who simultaneously argue that (a) the Threat of Muslim Terrorism is so grave and "transcendent" that we must dismantle our entire Constitutional system and turn ourselves into a lawless surveillance state in order to combat it, and (b) the FBI and DOJ should use their resources to prosecute American citizens who produce consensual adult pornography. The same Alberto Gonazles who decreed the Geneva Convention to be a quaint relic in order to legalize torture announced in 2005 that adult pornography prosecutions would be his "top priority" as Attorney General.
(emphasis mine)
You might be pretty disgusted with what this guy likes. You wouldn't be alone, but then again large quantities do. This is a business, not a charity that we're talking about here. This is sexual adult material, produced by, with and for adults.
Even if it is a niche of people that want this kind of pornography, the First Amendment is specifically designed to protect every view, not the consensus. When they start wearing away at the 1st Amendment, Your views could be next.
Lets put aside the obvious issue with imposing "local community standards" on the internet for a moment. Lets talk hypocrisy:
Glen continues:
Because the films which Little produced included scenes involving sadomasochism, the Bush DOJ alleged, and the federal court found, that the films were not merely pornographic, but also "obscene," and thus illegal. Ironically, Little's defense to the obscenity charges was virtually identical to the defense which the Bush DOJ itself, years earlier, had embraced in order to claim that Bush officials were not engaged in "torture" when subjecting helpless detainees to gruesome treatment: namely, because the acts in question didn't involve the infliction of severe pain, they weren't illegal:
...
In 2002, the Bush DOJ radically re-defined "torture" and illegal treatment of detainees to exclude anything that falls short of "the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death." Merely degrading or humiliating someone -- or even subjecting them to severe mental stress and intense though temporary pain -- magically became perfectly legal. And just to be sure, our Federal Government then retroactively immunized anyone and everyone in the Government who may have been involved in any state-sanctioned line-crossing behavior even after the lines were radically re-drawn, so that this, from the U.S. Army's own findings, was and is perfectly legal behavior -- when engaged in for real by the U.S. Government against helpless detainees, but not by film-makers doing it for entertainment with consenting adults:
Mohammed al-Qahtani, detainee No. 063, was forced to wear a bra. He had a thong placed on his head. He was massaged by a female interrogator who straddled him like a lap dancer. He was told that his mother and sisters were whores. He was told that other detainees knew he was gay. He was forced to dance with a male interrogator. He was strip-searched in front of women. He was led on a leash and forced to perform dog tricks. He was doused with water. He was prevented from praying. He was forced to watch as an interrogator squatted over his Koran.
And:
He was deprived of sleep for almost two months, stripped, held on the floor and sexually abused by a female interrogator, forcibly hydrated with liquids while shackled to a chair and not permitted to go to the bathroom. His CCR attorney, Gita Gutierrez, reported that Mohammed was still suffering from the effects of his torture and abuse: He "painfully described how he could not endure the months of isolation, torture and abuse, during which he was nearly killed, before making false statements to please his interrogators."
(emphasis, again, mine)
This is the crux of the problem. Social conservatives want us to do as they say, but not as they do.
Consent is the big thing here. Consent means you agree to do something. You want to do something. There is no consent for the Guantanamo Bay detainees. There is no claim that the above case involves such non-consensual actors or viewers.
If "We, the people" do something against someones will legally, should not that same act be legal, if we do it to them with everyone agreeing?
Let me state for the record, that I view non-consensual torture in our name, for our protection to be abhorrent, unconstitutional and most of all counterproductive. I also view, personally, private sexual acts, even sadomasochistic, to be absolutely protected free speech.
I wonder what you guys think of this blatant hypocrisy.