If you watch adult movies, or watch adult content on the Internet, and you voted for George Bush, you should be fucking ashamed of yourself.
During Bush's first term, the War on Pornography that John Ashcroft was going to announce on September 11, 2001 (before that became a very, very big news day) was pretty much set aside and forgotten, no doubt because it would have seemed a somewhat questionable use of Justice Department resources.
But the evangelicals, for whom the whole porn thing is a bigger, hotter burning issue than all the US servicemen lost in Iraq, turned out in force in November, and George W. Bush, he pays his bills.
I'm not going into a long, boring technical explaining about the new regulations that the Department of Justice published in early May, and which come into effect on June 23rd. Nominally, of course, they are to Protect the Children. Isn't everything? But, equally of course, they have absolutely nothing to do with protecting children.
What they are trying to do, and what they may well do unless the Supreme Court steps in, is shut down the adult video business.
The reality is that it has become very hard, almost impossible, to get an obscenity conviction anymore. This is not surprising, because it's hard to get anyone to really care about what people watch in their homes. The world has changed, we've all moved on, and obscenity as a crime is starting to sound as quaint as prosecuting someone for blasphemy.
But for the religious right, this issue is never going to go away. This is holy war, and they are going to win this one. And the Bush administration is ready to help. If you can't get an obscenity conviction, what can you do?
You can do what the government does best: Regulate.
You have an adult video at home, right? Of course you do. PIck it up, and look at the case. Somewhere, there's going to be a legend saying something about “18 USC 2257” on it. To make a long story short, that's a law that Congress passed way back in 1988, requiring every producer of adult videos to keep records about every single performer, nominally to prove that the performers were 18 or older at the time of production.
At the time, the regulations were tedious, but not impossible to comply with. The fact that failing to keep the right records was a Federal felony for which you could do 10 years in prison certainly focused everyone's mind.
And, to the DoJ, that was precisely the problem. If they started raiding producers, and the producers had all their records in order and everything was fine, then it would start looking like a big waste of time.
So, they changed the regs. Now, the producer who actually makes the film doesn't just have to keep the documentation. The documentation has to be available for inspection, without notice, at any time between 9am to 5pm Monday through Friday. If they knock on the door at 9am, and you aren't there because you were having your car worked on? 10 years.
Further, now, every single web site, every single magazine that publishes things for which documentation is required must have copies of that documentation. Every single one. Every single document. I'm sure that all the adult models out there are excited by the idea that a webmaster they have never met now will get copies of their driver's license.
It goes on. It is, in fact, impossible to comply with the new regulations. And that's precisely the point. The DoJ doesn't want producers to comply. They want to be able to knock on doors, discover that the documentation wasn't indexed properly (also a requirement of the regs), and toss someone into jail for a few years. They can't knock on every door, but they won't have to: We'll all get the message pretty quickly.
And will this protect children? Oh, please, don't insult anyone's intelligence. I have a news flash: Child pornography was already illegal. There is absolutely nothing in this law or these regulations that was required to put makers of child pornography out of business. People who make child pornography do not put legends on their videos telling the Federal government where their records can be found. This will be as effective a deterrent against actual child pornography as asking someone at passport control if they are planning to blow anything up.
And all of you who voted for George Bush? This is what you voted for. You went into the voting booth, thought carefully, and said, “Yes, I want all makers of adult videos to spend 10 years in Federal prison.” If you somehow manage to persuade yourself that Bush doesn't really care about this, that it's all happening without his consent and encouragement, you are delusional. And if you somehow believe that having a government which is willing to throw people in jail just to pay electoral bills somehow makes you “safer” than the alternative, you are morally deficient.
posted 21:19