KANSAS CITY, MO — Philip Cosby, executive director of the National Coalition for the Protection of Children & Families (NCPCF), has collected between 17,000 and 20,000 signatures from several counties in Kansas and Missouri calling on prosecutors to investigate adult bookstores and other adult businesses for violating state obscenity laws.In a written statement issued Tuesday, Cosby states that the group’s goal “is to change a community’s lack of knowledge or indifference into active participation in the legal process and to confront the predatory and addictive nature of the pornography industry, especially with the exacerbation of advanced wireless technologies.”
According to his press release, Cosby plans to present petitions to prosecutors in Wyandotte and Johnson counties in Kansas, and Platte, Clay, Jackson and Cass counties in Missouri.
In July, Cosby announced that he had partnered with Bill Dunn Sr., the chairman emeritus of JE Dunn Construction Company, to assist the NCPCF in securing the help of ministers and business owners in Kansas City in its anti-porn effort.
“There’s a connection between pornography consumption and sexually criminal behavior,” Cosby told the Kansas City Business Journal at the time. “We’re just connecting those dots and then bringing people together to address the problem.”
In the county-specific petitions, which are available for download on the NCPCF website at NationalCoalition.org, the NCPCF identifies by name local businesses the group would like to see subjected to a grand jury investigation.
“The undersigned qualified electors of the County of Johnson and State of Kansas hereby request that the District Court of Johnson County, within 60 days after the filing of this petition, cause a grand jury to be summoned in the county to investigate alleged violations of law, Kansas Statute 21-4301 Promoting Obscenity, possessed and sold at the following locations, and to perform such duties as may be authorized by law,” states a paragraph at the top of the NCPCF petition for Johnson County, KS.
Following that text, the Johnson County petition specifies five locations for grand jury investigation: Gringo Loco, Hollywood at Home, Priscilla’s, Video Library, and Movie Gallery.
If successful, Cosby’s petitions will result in the calling of a grand jury, which would then be given the task of assessing whether the businesses in question are promoting material that is “patently offensive” to their local “community standard,” one of the prongs of the “Miller test” for obscenity, established in the 1973 US Supreme Court case Miller v. California.
According to the Business Journal, Cosby previously has successfully petitioned for porn-related grand jury investigations in other Kansas communities, including Wichita and Topeka.
Bill Dunn, Cosby’s partner from the corporate sector, said the petitions are an effective way of drawing attention to the porn “problem.”
“I think most of the business community is not aware of how bad this problem is,” said Dunn, according to the Business Journal. “It’s addictive, just like drugs and alcohol. I think the church groups are the ones that can have the most influence, but the business community probably should be concerned.”
