![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsSo, I'm reading an interview with Alan Sears, the man who once exploited his position as an adjunct to the Meese Commission on Pornography to write a letter to the 7-11 parent corporation telling them that the Attorney general of the United States had identified their stores as alleged distributors of potentially obscene pornography (note the qualifiers there) and asking them to come to the Commission's meeting and explain or defend themselves against the charge. They pulled all their Playboys and Penthouses from the shelves.
How out-of-touch does one man have to be and still seem even the least bit coherent? Sears' definition of "obscene and illegal" material (funny, where is that exception in the First Amendment?) is so broad the only thing it doesn't cover is ordinary nudes, and even those he refers to as "depicting women and other persons as a subspecies of humans to amuse [the viewer]."
I wonder who the "other persons" are in Sears' imaginations. For that matter, I can't begin to approach how he thinks that pornography depicts anyone as "subhuman"; the zoophile market can't be that, can it? And yet it's the "to amuse" part that bothers me, because Sears is clearly signalling his desire to ban amusement as an evil. Let's ban circus clowns and musicians while we're at it.
Worse yet, he wants to define all porn as not having first amendment protection. He can't even really say why. (Dammit, where is that exception in the First Amendment?).
When the interviewer asks, "Is censorship bad?" Sears responds this way:
How out-of-touch does one man have to be and still seem even the least bit coherent? Sears' definition of "obscene and illegal" material (funny, where is that exception in the First Amendment?) is so broad the only thing it doesn't cover is ordinary nudes, and even those he refers to as "depicting women and other persons as a subspecies of humans to amuse [the viewer]."
I wonder who the "other persons" are in Sears' imaginations. For that matter, I can't begin to approach how he thinks that pornography depicts anyone as "subhuman"; the zoophile market can't be that, can it? And yet it's the "to amuse" part that bothers me, because Sears is clearly signalling his desire to ban amusement as an evil. Let's ban circus clowns and musicians while we're at it.
Worse yet, he wants to define all porn as not having first amendment protection. He can't even really say why. (Dammit, where is that exception in the First Amendment?).
When the interviewer asks, "Is censorship bad?" Sears responds this way:
How do we define either term? Bad for the profits lost by organized criminal activity? Bad for a child molester who wasn't able to trade his "collection" of trophy photographs with others? Bad for potential child molesters who could not get a magazine at the corner store that they would use to lower their inhibitions and eventually end up acting out when they sexually abuse a neighbor's child? Bad for the Internet provider who couldn't let 12-year-olds view his wares at the tax-funded neighborhood library?Man, if that's isn't the most fnord-laden bullroar laid down in the service of evil today, I don't know what is.
