Opinion
 

Ashcroft heading anti-porn thrust

By Justin Vann

America, by far, has the most awesome and devastating military the world has ever known.

And let's be honest, this power has gone to our heads. So much so, that in the 1980s we started declaring war on nouns. No longer satisfied with attacking tangible countries with borders and capitals, we decided to assault nebulous things, like drugs and poverty. To this day, we've added terrorism to the "nouns to wage war on" list, and we have still not come any closer to defeating our three enemy nouns. 

You'd think that with all the trouble the United States is having with those three nouns, we wouldn't dare bother with another. But lo and behold, John Ashcroft and the Department of Justice have recently declared war on pornography.

For the first time in 10 years, federal investigators, prosecutors, FBI agents and millions of dollars are being poured into bringing anti-obscenity cases to trial. This dream team of anti-porn specialists, aside from Ashcroft, includes Bruce Taylor, who has helped prosecute over 700 pornography cases since 1970 and served as the president of the anti-porn organization National Law Center for Children and Families. 

In a 2002 speech, Ashcroft enlightened us about the horrors of pornography, stating that pornography "invades our homes persistently though the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet." Like some psychotic mass murderer, porn has "strewn its victims from coast to coast." Brace yourself, America. Porn is coming for you.

I will concede that there is a lot of porn that should be regulated and banned. Anything involving violence, minors, animals or corpses has no place in the media. Children shouldn't have access to pornography of any kind, and steps should be taken to ensure that porn stays out of the mainstream media.

However, Ashcroft's agenda isn't just about prosecuting the freaky stuff; he's gunning for porn in its entirety. Taylor puts it in perspective, saying "Just about everything on the Internet and almost everything in the video stores and everything in the adult bookstores is still prosecutable illegal obscenity." Even soft-core cable porn like HBO's popular Real Sex or Showtime's Family Business is fair game.

I'm not exactly sure what precipitated this renewed porn crusade. John Ashcroft is an extremely religious man who I don't doubt sees porn as anti-Christian. The Bush administration is also desperately trying to secure the votes of social conservatives. Bush's reversal of his stance on gay marriage may have backfired, and I suppose Ashcroft thinks burning Jenna Jameson at the stake would win back the cold hearts of social conservatives.

Whatever the reason for raising the war on porn so high above the status quo, it is misguided and wasteful of time and money. Porn stars don't pose the threat of trying to detonate a nuclear warhead in a major U.S. city and the majority of porn is not harmful. 

I've seen pornography, along with millions of other Americans who are still quite sane and healthy. But that's not even the point. The point is that Iraq is destabilizing before our eyes. Our troops have to purchase their own body armor. Our economy is tanking and 2.4 million jobs have been lost. Our national deficit is in the vicinity of $8 trillion and growing by $15,000 every second. Nearly 600 people are still being indefinitely held in Guantanimo Bay without legal counsel. And pollution is now being reported with the weather. 

There are thousands of problems more immediate and pressing than porn, and yet John Ashcroft has the audacity to blow $10 million and hundreds of man-hours on prosecuting all pornography in America -- just to satisfy the fraction of Americans who think Michael Savage isn't crazy. Let Ashcroft know what you think of his priorities: Go rent Debbie Does Dallas and enjoy it.

Vann, a columnist for The Daily Cougar, 
can be reached at vann_mann@hotmail.com.