YNOT – The U.S. Attorney General, the U.S. military, publishers, broadcasters, a hotel chain and three online titans populate Morality in Media’s latest “hit list” of organizations to be ridiculed because they don’t march lock-step with the Religious Right’s socially conservative agenda.
Called the Dirty Dozen, the 12 entities on the list are “sex exploiters who facilitate the spread of pornography,” according to MIM. In the No. 1 spot is U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who heads the department in which MIM President Patrick A. Trueman formerly served as a federal prosecutor.
“Holder’s actions keep the porn industry thriving,” Trueman noted in a statement MIM released early this week. “He not only refuses to enforce obscenity laws currently on the books that prohibit the distribution of hardcore pornography, but he even disbanded the office charged with enforcement.”
As an attorney, Trueman doubtless is aware he’s stretching the truth. Hardcore pornography is not illegal. In fact, courts repeatedly have ruled pornography is protected by the First Amendment’s free-speech clause. Obscenity is illegal, but pornography only becomes obscenity when a jury finds it “patently offensive” and devoid of serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value. Nevertheless, Trueman and his organization continue conflating pornography and obscenity as though the two were identical.
According to Trueman, MIM launched the Dirty Dozen list “to bring awareness to the pandemic of harm caused by pornography, including violence against women, increased child pornography and sex-trafficking. With your help, we will successfully target, expose and shame 12 top enablers of our country’s pornography pandemic.”
In addition to Holder, the list includes:
- Comcast, for providing explicit material on basic cable television.
- Facebook, for failure to prevent users from sharing pornography.
- Googleplay, for allowing porn apps to invade the Android mobile ecosystem.
- LodgeNet Interactive Corporation, for providing pay-per-view adult entertainment to major hotels.
- Hilton, because the hotel chain has resisted MIM’s attempts to shut down in-room adult entertainment.
- American Library Association, for standing firm on a broad range of free-speech issues, including unrestricted internet access in tax-funded libraries.
- Twitter, for failing to censor users’ tweets.
- Wikipedia, for refusing to remove everything even remotely sexual from its community-curated online encyclopedia.
- Cosmopolitan, for publishing features about human sexuality.
- Barnes & Noble, for selling erotic books and magazines.
- U.S. Department of Defense, for allowing service members to purchase and enjoy adult entertainment during off-duty hours.
As with MIM’s previous calls for boycotts and public shaming, it’s likely the organization’s attempt to embarrass major corporations and public officials into compliance will represent little more than a tempest in a teapot. Pornography is not illegal, but it is profitable, and money talks far louder than pseudo-religious hypocrisy.
