How America's gov't views porn

• Report rights infringement
• published: 04 Apr 2013
• views: 91053

The world's best news sources : http://www.youtube.com/user/NTDTV and http://www.theepochtimes.com/ http://www.waronillegalpornography.com/ Why should we care about the legality of adult pornography? Why is it important to enforce the laws? Why aren't these laws now being enforced? What would it take? When the Justice Department enforced obscenity laws under Reagan and Bush I - they NEVER lost a case and brought in more than $20 million from seized assets. Many of you have asked these questions when you hear about our Coalition for the War on Illegal Pornography. We discussed these issues with former U.S. Justice Department Prosecutor, Robert Flores in a livestream event on April 19, 2012. You will be able to ask questions via the live chat feature. Robert Flores is a former federal prosecutor and was in charge of the federal government's Innocent Images investigative effort conducted by the FBI in the 1990s. From 2002-2009 he led the Justice department's Internet Crimes Against Children Task Force Program targeting child sexual exploitation. Federal obscenity laws, which are not being enforced, prohibit distribution of hardcore, obscene pornography on the Internet, on cable/satellite or hotel/motel TV and in sexually oriented businesses and other retail shops. The role of the Federal Government should be, as it has been in the past, to prosecute the major producers and distributors of obscene pornography. However, rather than aggressively enforcing federal obscenity laws against large-scale distributors of obscene pornography, for several years the Department of Justice has targeted primarily small operations that traðcked in the most extreme hardcore pornography and prosecuted very few of them. Thus, illegal, obscene pornography is flooding our nation and the harm is great. What Is Obscenity? The term "obscenity" is a legal term, and in Miller v. California, supra the Supreme Court established a three-pronged test for determining whether a "work" (i.e., material or a performance) is obscene and therefore unprotected by the First Amendment. To be obscene, a judge and/or a jury must determine: First, that the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; AND second, that the work depicts or describes in a patently oðensive way, as measured by contemporary community standards, "hardcore" sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable law; AND third, that a reasonable person would find that the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political and scientific value. SIDE NOTE: Typical "hardcore pornography" (e.g., a website, DVD or magazine) consists of little if anything more than one depiction of hardcore sex after the other (i.e., it's "wall-to-wall" sex). Obscenity Is Not Protected By the First Amendment Enforcement of obscenity laws does not raise any Constitutional problem - In Chaplinksy v. New Hampshire, 315 U.S. 568, 571-572 (1942), the Supreme Court said: "There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene...It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality. Obscenity is not within the area of constitutionally protected speech or press - In Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957), Justice Brennan observed that "this Court has always assumed that obscenity is not protected by the freedoms of speech and press" (at 481). In Roth, the Supreme Court went on to hold that obscenity is "not within the area of constitutionally protected speech or press" (at 485). First Amendment was intended to protect ideas and debate, not obscene material - In Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, 34 (1973), the Supreme Court said: "[T]o equate the free and robust exchange of ideas and political debate with commercial exploitation of obscene material demeans the grand conception of the First Amendment and its high purposes in the historic struggle for freedom. It is a 'misuse of the great guarantees of free speech and...press.'" More recently, in Ashcroft v. ACLU, 535 U.S. 564!(2002), the Supreme Court rejected a constitutional challenge to application of obscenity laws to the Internet. See also, United States v. Extreme Associates, 431 F.3d 150 (3rd Cir. 2005), cert. den., 547 U.S. 1143 (2006).