Rick Santorum Wants To Ban Pornography (For a Start)

In his 1973 majority decision of  Miller V California, Chief Justice Warren Burger handed down what is now the reigning law of the land concerning obscenity. That ruling established a three tier determination criterion which reads as follows:

"The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether 'the average person, applying contemporary community standards' would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law; and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value." 

Wow. It is one of the most momentus decisions of the last century, and came down the same year as the equally momentus Roe V Wade decision.

So, why the rudimentary lesson on civil rights law? The Supreme Court has ruled and the law of the land is to leave people alone and let them decide for themselves what they eat, what they read, who they worship, who they love, what they consider art, and what they want to do in the sanctity of their own homes and their own bodies, right?

Some people don't seem to think so. Like Republican candidate Rick Santorum, who in this Statement on his campaign website declared that "America is suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography," and that if elected that obscenity laws will be  “vigorously enforced.”

I'm Rick Santorum, and me and about twenty of my whitest friends are here to tell the rest of you what to do.

What should be more concerning to most Americans, apart from losing your ability to whack off to midget porn, is the list of groups named as supporters of his crusade. Morality in Media, Family Research Council, Focus on the Family, American Family Association, Cornerstone Family Council of New Hampshire, Pennsylvania Family Institute, Concerned Women for America, The Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

The Family Research Council. A bunch of goody two shows sitting around drinking punch and trying to decide if they should sell cookies or popcorn to raise money for the Children's Fun Carnival this year, right? Wrong. This group, and all the others on the list want to tell you what television shows and movies you can watch, what music you can listen to, who you can marry, what you can do with your own body, what video games are too violent for your children, and what research scientists and doctors can conduct in order to make breakthroughs in fields like cancer research and birth defects. They want a foot in the door, but once that foot gets in the door they start looking around your house for evidence that you might be one of those "bad people" they have a list of. Then suddenly more and more of us are on the "bad people" list. 

I can't believe we haven't learned from the past. From chilling episodes in American history like the Red Scare of Joe McCarthy and the banning of everything from homosexual poetry to comic books to novels like Ulysses, Lady Chatterly's Lover, and Tropic of Cancer. I can't believe we're going to have to do this again. With women's rights to decide what happens in their own bodies, with the NDAA, with SOPA, and now this shit. We need to put this to rest fast and with a furious resistance that will not be mistaken for complacency for a very long time. Previous generations have done it and now it's our turn.

Make no mistake, this coalition of do gooders will never be satisfied with just pornography. Their websites are all a respective list of bad behavior and sins they believe the rest of us are committing against "their god." At various times in American history people like this have been successful in outlawing homosexuality, oral sex, mixed marriage, gay marriage, marijuana, and alcohol. Look what the Hay's Code did to the motion picture industry. It imposed a detailed and extensive list of rules on filmmakers. Only "correct standards of life" could be presented. No depictions of childbirth. No criticisms of religion. Forget about "lustful" kissing or "suggestive" dancing. Under the Hays Code, films were simply approved or disapproved based on whether they were deemed "moral" or "immoral."

Every so often these self-proclaimed keepers of the moral code scurry out from beneath their rocks and try to tell the rest of us what we can and can't do. And they're often successful in limiting our liberties or taking away our access to some creative work they consider sinful before enough of us get together and tell them to sit, shut the fuck up, and mind their own damn household and family and leave us alone to decide what we want to do with ours.

Tell Rick Santorum to sit down and shut the fuck up.


Night of the Living Republicans
Why Nobody Wants To Vote Republican


Pin It