PHOENIX – A little over three years ago, Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery fired a warning shot across the bow of the adult entertainment industry. Montgomery wanted to head off at the pass any notions the industry might entertain about moving to Arizona due to increasing government regulation and scrutiny in California.
“Under Arizona law, anyone paid to appear in a pornographic movie may be guilty of the crime of prostitution, which carries mandatory jail time as well as the possibility of other penalties,” Montgomery’s office noted in a statement issued in March 2012.
The threat wasn’t aimed solely at producers and studios, either, as Montgomery’s office also stated “anyone involved in other aspects of producing pornographic movies, including soliciting individuals to appear, collecting a fee from the monies received by individuals solicited to appear by virtue of an agent relationship, transporting individuals from California to Arizona for the purpose of appearing in a pornographic movie, and/or establishing a venue for the filming and/or production of pornographic movies may be guilty of committing one or several felonies in the state of Arizona.”
Of course, no such prosecutions have been initiated in Arizona since the statement was issued, but the threat remains open, even if unlikely to be carried out.
In the period since Montgomery issued his warning, Arizona and other states have become focused on a different kind of porn, one not produced by any coherent industry or business: the headline-catching scourge commonly called “revenge porn.”
Like many other states across the country, Arizona’s legislature took a stab at crafting legislation designed to punish revenge porn. Unfortunately, as has been the case in some other states, the Arizona legislature didn’t do a particularly good job, cooking up a law with constitutional holes big enough to justify the nickname “the Grand Canyon State.”
Inevitably, the well-intended-but-flawed legislation became the target of a lawsuit, as the American Civil Liberties Union and others took issue with the law’s troublesome breadth and vagueness. The groups argued the new law would do more harm than good, couldn’t survive court scrutiny and should be enjoined forthwith.
After a detailed review of the statute and relevant case law, the legislature’s legal advisers were inclined to concede the ACLU’s point: The new law was a mess, in desperate need of narrowed construction and a serious retooling of its definitions. In other words, the legislature was about to trot out a government attorney to defend in court a law said government attorney wasn’t entirely sold on in the first place.
With the encouragement of the judge hearing the case, the legislature and ACLU put the litigation on hold to give the legislature a chance to amend the law and rectify the problems specified in the lawsuit. It was a positive sign, if nothing else: The legislature effectively admitted it screwed up, and the ACLU had agreed to extend a chance to fix things without spending a ton of money defending a (likely doomed) law in court.
Rep. J.D. Mesnard (R-Chandler) sponsored a bill that looked promising in terms of addressing the concerns of civil libertarians without completely gutting or removing the fangs from the previous version. As the end of the legislative session approached, local media outlets published hopeful reports suggesting the revised law might satisfy the ACLU and leave Arizona with a revenge porn statute it could actually enforce.
Everything was moving along just fine until April, when the legislature inexplicably adjourned its session without passing the amended bill.
“Unfortunately in the waning days of session, it got lost among a few other bills, and it wasn’t addressed before the legislative session ended,” Montgomery said last week. “So we need to get that fixed.”
Yes, Bill, you do need to “get that fixed,” because as it currently stands, Arizona finds itself in the patently ridiculous position of saying its poised to strike at legitimate adult companies and studios who might dare to produce presumably legal erotic depictions within the state, but completely helpless to do anything about porn disseminated (and in some cases, created) without any manner of consent from the people depicted therein.
Yes, the same guy who said he’d come down like a ton of socially conservative bricks on the head of any Los Angeles-based producer possessing the gall to cross the border into Arizona with a camera crew has to concede he can’t do a fucking thing to help Arizonans whose highly personal and intimate photos and/or videos are splashed across the web by jilted lovers, privacy-invasion hobbyists or any other asshole with an internet connection and some time on his hands. And it’s all because the Arizona legislature is a part-time organization, one that apparently can’t maintain a reliable to-do list in order to prevent itself from going on its annual eight-month vacation without finishing important tasks at hand.
In a way, it’s a perfectly Arizonan dilemma, because Arizona is chock-full of people who don’t particularly trust the government’s ability to do anything right, and now state’s own legislature is — once again — actively proving citizens correct.
At the same time, Arizona’s voters really have no choice but to entrust the same buffoons with cleaning up their own mess, because even if revenge porn were to be made subject of a voter referendum, crafting the language of the law would still fall to the legislature, putting them right back at square one.
The situation could be called a Catch-22, except nobody in Arizona packs such a low-caliber weapon, so this porn policy debacle is at least a Catch-357.
In the meantime, while the Arizona legislature has been busy finding its dick only to step on it, U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton has been waiting to hear from the opposing parties again, which she’ll do at hearings scheduled for August. Unless Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey calls for a special session, the legislature will not meet again until mid-January 2016.
Mesnard says he’ll push to have the bill reconsidered and passed if Ducey calls such a special session, but otherwise “we’re kind of in this purgatory situation.”
Purgatory? No, Mr. Mesnard, you aren’t in purgatory. You’re in Phoenix — and judging by the current temperature, I’d say this puts you substantially closer to hell than limbo.
Who knows? Maybe Ducey will call a special session, or maybe Bolton will find the patience and sympathy to give the legislature a deadline extension, so to speak, on revising the law. If not, some poor schmuck from the office of the state’s attorney general will find himself or herself standing in court with the thankless task of defending a law to which nobody expects the court to give a green light.
It’s all so dumb, so needless, so exceedingly absurd, it could only happen in Arizona.
(OK, OK — and maybe Florida. Possibly Texas, as well.)
