The Los Angeles CityBeat, which I'm pretty sure won a lot of Pulitzers this year, has a wild-eyed hysteric's take on "The War on Porn," and how we're all about to have our right to watch "Storm Squirters 2" taken away from us. In "The Porn War Heats Up," reporter Mick Farren considers the greater meaning of the recent indictment of John "The Buttman" Stagliano.
"The material chosen for this case suggests the underlying agenda of the DOJ’s Pamela Satterfield, who leads the prosecution, might be to use a conviction in the Stagliano case as a federal benchmark for what is acceptable pornographic content and what isn’t. If other convictions of porn producers were to follow, they could create a restrictive framework of legal boundaries inside which the adult entertainment industry is forced to work. This would, of course, represent ad hoc federal censorship and a total violation of the letter and spirit of the First Amendment. But the defenders of decency have always exhibited a cavalier, if not cynical, disregard for the Constitution."
I've been writing about the porn industry for over a decade, and every time someone gets indicted on obscenity charges, the same hysteria-mongering story gets passed around. Our rights our imperiled! If we can't watch "The Fist, the Whole Fist, and Nothing But the Fist," the terrorists have won! The world of porn as we know it is about to end!
Yawn.
You know what? Here's a fact. The "War on Porn" is over. And you know what? Porn won.
But if you look closely at the image above, I swear to God, you can see the face of Brent Ward.
