What would you say if you found out the U.S. Justice Department is spending millions of your tax dollars to pay government employees to look at porn?
Not illegal types — such as child porn, which should be actively sought out and purged — but the kind that has been deemed acceptable by the legal system for years.
The kind of porn those in the private sector would get fired for viewing at work.
Well, it’s true, and it’s all part of the Justice Department’s ongoing mission to trample free speech rights in this country. Attorney General John Ashcroft is spearheading the effort, where 32 employees are spending millions to find new ways of charging pornographers with “obscenity.” (In fact, the Justice Department has an entire division dedicated to obscenity prosecution.)
And, according to the Thought Police, nothing is safe from the clutches of governmental tyranny, including everything from soft-core sex in television programs to adult movies offered in hotel rooms.
“We want to do everything we can to deter this conduct,” both on the production and consumption ends, obscenity prosecutions chief Drew Oosterbaan told
the Baltimore Sun. “Nothing is off the table as far as
content.”
Luckily, giddy teenagers sharing bootlegged Playboy specials over the Internet aren’t the only people involved in the porn industry. Multibillion dollar companies, such as Comcast, have a stake in the future of pornography broadcasting. Big companies means a lot of money, which means highly paid lawyers and an uphill battle for Ashcroft and his cronies. It will be interesting to see just how far President George W. Bush will let Ashcroft take his crusade; after all, Comcast President Stephen Burke has agreed to raise at least $200,000 for the president’s re-election campaign.