Please note: This is a continuation of last week’s article on the history of the anti-pornography movement. If you have not yet read Part I of this feature then we recommend that you do so first before continuing..Please note: This is a continuation of last week’s article on the history of the anti-pornography movement. If you have not yet read Part I of this feature then we recommend that you do so first before continuing.

So with an understanding of the Presidential Commission and the Meese Report, and the politics at play in the anti-pornography movement, we can now move on to the true purpose of this little stroll down memory lane – Bruce Taylor. Taylor is a former Ohio prosecutor who has handled hundreds of obscenity prosecutions throughout his largely successful career. He makes his living off of gullible, self-righteous Americans who are convinced that pornography is at the root of America’s evolution from traditional puritan values.

AN INTRODUCTION TO DARTH TAYLOR

For more than a decade, Taylor has acted as General Counsel to Keating’s National Coalition for the Protection of Children and Families. Apparently the fact that Keating himself is a felon who stole millions of dollars from American taxpayers was no concern to this morality soldier. During the Reagan years, Taylor served as Senior Trial Attorney for the Justice Department’s God Squad, where he was involved in hundreds of obscenity prosecutions.

“I think I have prosecuted more obscenity cases in the history of the United States, just because I’ve been involved in 700 or 800 obscenity cases,” Taylor proudly told PBS for an episode of Frontline that took a judgmental look at the porn business. “From 1988 to 1995, we [the God Squad] got 130 convictions, took in $25 million in fines and forfeiture, and convicted most of the kingpins of the pornography industry at least once.”

Note use of the word “kingpins” in the above quote, a word which is commonly associated with organized crime – associating the pornography business with organized crime is one of Taylor’s favorite techniques of slandering the industry in an attempt to sway public opinion. Public opinion, however, is no laughing matter – it’s what ultimately decides the fate of those accused of distributing obscenity, and Taylor obviously knows that.

What does Taylor consider to be legally obscene?

“To me, hardcore pornography — under the definition used by the Supreme Court, with penetration clearly visible — is the kind of material we prosecuted in Cleveland,” explained Taylor to his PBS interviewer. “It’s the kind that all the federal courts have prosecuted since Deep Throat and a lot of those regular movies. And it is still the standard by which the Justice Department and most prosecutors enforce obscenity laws anywhere in this country. … That’s why we could say safely, without blaspheming or defaming anybody, that just about everything on the Internet and almost everything in the video stores and everything in the adult bookstores is still prosecutable — illegal obscenity.”

In that same interview, Taylor also acknowledged that the Clinton Administration wasn’t interested in pursuing adult entertainment prosecutions, and that the next round of attacks would come after Clinton left office.

”When Clinton was elected, they didn’t encourage us to keep going,” admits Taylor. “They told us to concentrate more on child pornography. They told us to find big gangsters and more extreme material. They didn’t let the section continue with the projects with the mainstream hardcore porn industry. So that was becoming obvious, that we were going to get the people who had already been charged and investigated. But the people who hadn’t gotten indicted in the first round probably wouldn’t see another prosecution until there was a change in the White House.”

Taylor left the Justice Department at the end of 1994, about the time when most of the prosecution efforts from the first Bush administration were done. He never broke his ties with the “family values” groups, and continued to work on behalf of these groups lobbying the government for tough pornography laws. Taylor claims credit for a significant amount of the infamous “Communications Decency Act”, sponsored by Senator James Exon. Attacking pornography is a primary source of his livelihood, and in legal circles it’s what he is truly renowned for doing effectively.

ANTI-PORN MOVEMENT HEATING BACK UP

It’s been ten years since Taylor left the Justice Department under the watch of the Clinton administration. Since George W. Bush took office, a number of significant developments have suggested that the Justice Department is again gearing up for a fresh assault on the mainstream pornography business. Those of us in the adult business have of course been hearing this for years – so often, in fact, that we’ve grown somewhat immune to the effects of such claims. Consider, however, the following:

Both President Bush and John Ashcroft have gone on record stating their intentions to attack the mainstream adult entertainment industry. Of course the President also claims he won Florida fair and square in the 2000 election, so this in and of itself doesn’t mean much.

It’s an election year. The President will no doubt be looking to shore up his conservative base, especially in the South – he needs conservative zealots to show up at the polls in November and rally the troops with enthusiasm at the local churches. Politicians historically take politically motivated actions during election years; it’s something akin to the movie studios releasing Oscar contenders late in the year so that they’ll be fresh on the minds of voters when the voting takes place.

Under the Bush II administration, The Justice Department has held training sessions designed specifically to teach prosecutors how to prosecute mainstream online adult entertainment companies for obscenity. Numerous prominent First Amendment attorneys have verified this fact.

The PROTECT Act passed Congress last year and was signed into law by President Bush II, granting the government all kinds of new weapons to use against the adult industry. Of particular interest is a potion of the PROTECT Act that demands the Justice Department report back to Congress within one year and detail all the efforts it has made to verify the 2257 records of adult companies. This Act also sets mandatory prison terms of five years for 2257 violations – a simple matter of paperwork – and took away the ability of a judge to lessen the penalty should that judge find five years in federal prison too extreme a penalty for not having one’s paperwork in order.

The offices of Extreme Associates were raided, and company officials were later charged with distributing obscenity, the first major federal obscenity raid since Bush I. This case involves multiple charges, some for video recordings that were mailed and others for clips downloaded off of an Internet site. This case is clearly designed to set a new legal precedent for prosecuting online pornography, and unfortunately the government chose its target well. Extreme is a largely unsympathetic company with a history of making offensive, degrading, and, as the name implies, extreme hardcore content. Many industry players will distance themselves from Extreme, which if course plays right into the hands of the anti-pornography business.

DARTH TAYLOR LIVES!

A few days ago, as if to announce its intentions to the entire porn industry, the Justice Department rehired Bruce Taylor to a key position. According to AVN, reports are varied as to what role Taylor will play in the Justice Department. Some reports have him marked merely as “senior counsel to Assistant Attorney General,” while other reports claim he’s there to “oversee the Department’s pornography prosecution efforts.” The latter is a safe bet, considering that’s Taylor’s clear area of expertise, and in fact the L.A. Times reported a couple days ago that Taylor was hired as part of the Bush administration’s plan to step up legal attacks on the mainstream hardcore erotica business. Would you hire Mozart to wash windows? Sure, he could probably do a great job (if he were alive), but wouldn’t you rather pay him to play music?

The adult industry should rightfully be outraged by the Bush administration’s clear desire to rekindle obscenity prosecutions purely for the sake of its own selfish desire to hold onto power. Obscenity laws are undeniably unjust, and the administration’s interest in obscenity enforcement is purely self-serving. George W. Bush is not worried about any possible harmful effects of pornography, and he knows all too well that there’s no stopping pornography on the Internet – he’s merely looking for political support and campaign dollars. Yet to achieve that goal through the anti-pornography game, his administration first has to attack American citizens and American professionals who do not deserve to be attacked. He has to ruin the lives of people involved with adult entertainment companies. He has to destroy their livelihoods, and drag many of them into prison, forcibly separating them from their spouses and children while dragging their names through the mud.

The last bit of significant research that the government commissioned showed porn to be unrelated to crime – why are we allowing the government to ignore this fact? While that research is getting up there in age, and the pornography business has changed, as has its content, the Bush administration has shown no desire to commission a new round of independent, scientifically-backed studies to take a new unbiased look at the issue, instead preferring to spend millions of taxpayer dollars and jeopardize the freedom of American citizens based on the opinions of religious fanatics. When you have an administration that is willing to make up the justification for invading a foreign country, while sending hundreds of its own troops to die over a matter of oil, facts likely aren’t especially high on the list of priorities – only the agenda seems to count.

Will the return of Bruce Taylor truly turn into the return of large scale federal obscenity prosecutions? Smart money is on the affirmative, at least for the short term. With Bush II suffering in recent opinion polls, Taylor knows that if he wants to get something started, his window of opportunity may be short – strike now, and he could guarantee himself ample work for several years, even if Bush loses the November election, since prosecutions started this year would likely be allowed to run their course to completion even under a new Democratic president.

BE LOUD, BE PROUD!

If large scale mainstream porn obscenity prosecutions do return, it will be up to the adult community to draw as much attention to the injustice as possible. Believe it or not, Republicans don’t like to be too public about their adult censorship efforts. Millions of American porn consumers have shown that they like their fix of hardcore as much as the next form of entertainment, and attempts by the Bush administration to censor adult content could easily backfire if the efforts received too much press. After all, some conservatives still believe Republicans are about LESS intrusive government. The ideal scenario for Republicans is to publicize their efforts only to the “family values” crowd, thus ensuring their political and financial support without alienating moderates who might view such efforts in a negative fashion. The Republicans will do their job of publicizing their efforts to the anti-porn crowd – it will be up to us to draw the attention of moderates and liberals who will be offended by any Bush administration effort to control what adults can see and hear in the privacy of their own homes.

Stay tuned folks, this story is likely just getting started.

Connor Young is Editor in Chief of YNOT News and TheAdultWebmaster.com.