[Naturally I'll give Bruce the chance to reply. --Declan] ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Sat, 2 Feb 2002 14:51:56 EST From: MarkKernesat_private To: declanat_private Subject: Re: FC: PBS will air special "American Porn" show on Feb. 7 In a message dated 2/2/02 2:46:29 AM, declanat_private writes: << Former Justice Department attorney Bruce Taylor concurs. "If there had been continued federal prosecutions [for obscenity], you wouldn't see the Internet presence of the porn syndicate as big as it is today," says Taylor, who maintains he has prosecuted more obscenity cases than anyone in U.S. history. "The combination of the industry's willingness to go on the Web in a big way and the prosecutors not indicting them for it allowed it to explode beyond anybody's imagination." >> "Porn syndicate," my ass! If this guy knew ANYTHING about porn, he'd know it's one of the most DISorganized enterprises ever to turn a profit. If porn dealt with anything other than sex -- which everybody seems to crave, no matter how poorly it's done; perhaps even Taylor in his more secret moments -- most of the guys that make it would have been out of business long ago. And of course, his proposal is that cities across the country should have spent essentially billions of dollars prosecuting something that the vast majority of Americans use in the comfort and privacy of their own homes, without even their next-door neighbors even having a clue what's playing on the monitor or TV next door. Now THERE'S a policy the general public is just waiting to jump on the bandwagon of! I am moved to attach the section on Taylor that will appear as part of my article, "The Enemies List" in the March issue of AVN Online, the magazine of adult webmasters: << 1) The Attorneys: Ayn Rand, in Atlas Shrugged, said of some of the characters she depicts that if they could get real jobs, they wouldn't be working for the government. Whether there's any validity to that concept is open for debate, but the fact is that some of the more visible legal personalities in the censorship movement arrived on the scene fresh from government service. One breeding ground for warped attitudes toward speech has been the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ). Bruce A. Taylor and J. Robert Flores, for example, were both prosecutors, during the Reagan/Bush years, in the National Obscenity Enforcement Unit (NOEU), which changed its name in the early '90s to the more euphemistic Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS). Best known for having been the main prosecutor of early porn mogul Reuben Sturman, Taylor began his public career as an assistant prosecutor in Cleveland, Ohio, where one of his first assignments was to digest what have become known as the U.S. Supreme Court's Miller decisions on obscenity, and to formulate a plan to prosecute purveyors of sexually explicit material that would withstand Supreme Court scrutiny. It may have been his anti-porn zeal that earned him his Justice Department position, but it certainly led him, after leaving the DOJ, to form the National Law Center for Children and Families, of which he is currently president and chief counsel. Though the National Law Center (NLC) claims to be a "specialized resource to those who enforce state and federal obscenity and child exploitation laws," Taylor himself has often been ineffective when it comes to the nitty-gritty. Last November, after the city of South Bend, Indiana brought Taylor in as a special prosecutor for the first of three scheduled bookstore trials, a 12-person jury took just six hours to find Little Denmark owner Robert Henderson not guilty on all counts of trafficking obscenity, money laundering and conspiracy. Several attorneys who actively defend adult businesses have expressed the opinion that Taylor is both a lacklustre legal writer and an unimpressive advocate in the courtroom. That, however, hasn't stopped Taylor from being a favored speaker at anti-porn events, and a commentator on various newscasts regarding the adult industry.>> My advice? Give it up, Bruce; the American people better understand their First Amendment freedoms than you do. Mark Kernes, Sr. Editor Adult Video News ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLITECH -- Declan McCullagh's politics and technology mailing list You may redistribute this message freely if you include this notice. Declan McCullagh's photographs are at http://www.mccullagh.org/ To subscribe to Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/info/subscribe.html This message is archived at http://www.politechbot.com/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Events: Congreso Nacional de Periodismo Digital in Huesca, Spain from Jan. 17-18 (http://www.congresoperiodismo.com) and the Second International Conference on Web-Management in Diplomacy in Malta from Feb. 1-3. (http://www.diplomacy.edu/Web/conference2/) -------------------------------------------------------------------------
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