By J.D. Obenberger, Esq.

CHICAGO – The nomination of Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions to serve as the next Attorney General of the United States will certainly precipitate a cackle of attorneys to raise the alarm that the sky is about to fall in on the adult entertainment industry, asserting that obscenity prosecutions are about to begin apace to placate Morality in Media and insisting that the only smart move is an immediate deposit of large sums into their respective client trust accounts and emergency steps to take it all offshore.

But I just don’t see it that way. In fact, for my adult clients, I’m kinda relieved that Trump won — and that the radical feminists and social do-gooders who supported Hillary are left to roll over cars and block the 101 instead of sifting through job applications.

Sessions is to serve as steward over the enforcement of the U.S. Criminal Code, a duty he shares with the person who will be, after all, the Chief Executive, Donald J. Trump. I expect Trump himself will set the general tone and pace of law enforcement. In President Trump, we find a man with only very personal religious beliefs — some might say they seem shallow — that he’s refused to wear on his shirt sleeve despite the obvious temptation every candidate shares to use religion for political purposes. He got 81 percent of the Bible-thumpers by stating his obviously sincere conviction that the killing of fetuses during the final three months of development was horrible and should be outlawed, without talking about G*d at all. His post-election comments about the subject, too, were far from moralizing about it, stating that he’d be content to leave the issue to state lawmakers. None of this has precipitated any Bible-thumpers to holler about betrayal or go on to demand criminal obscenity prosecutions. They got exactly what they bargained for in Trump. That and no more. They are not fools; they know that Mr. Trump sells pay-per-view hardcore porn in all of his hotel rooms and suffer from no delusion that a Presidential Trump will find Jesus, discontinue that revenue and show up at D.C. Bible Study.

Mr. Sessions will serve the first president who seems proud of the erotic nude pictures of his wife that are a click away from each of us. He will enforce laws for a president who’s never denied an aggressive and robust sexuality and who takes the size of his generative organ as a matter of pride, being willing — unlike LBJ, who shared the same pride, even to visiting heads of state in the washroom — to talk about it in front of the microphones. But then again, it’s a different era, one made different from LBJ’s time in important ways by the profusion of porn cascading at every turn online. LBJ’s salty observations were intended to stay private and did. Trump certainly never intended what he said about grabbing pussy to become public at the time, but his words became public as hell regardless. He never denied them but dealt with them in a manly fashion; in so doing, however, bringing those words into every American home in the news, just as Bill Clinton introduced discussions about blowjobs to every elementary school playground in the country through the same news outlets. The hands of this culture-changing clock never go back, and regrets or no regrets, Mr. Trump’s very culturally incorrect male sexuality has both branded him personally and affected society. America will never again be a place too sensitive to talk about blowjobs or pussy in all public contexts. The pictures of Mr. Trump’s wife in some intangible way validate sexting.Even Hillary’s emails wound up on a laptop associated with sexting a fifteen year old girl. This was the stuff of everyday election news in 2016!  In lawyer-speak, these things have affected the contours of contemporary community values. Forever.

Even were Senator Sessions and Mr. Trump of a mind that pussy and blowjobs are just too sensitive, and even if (improbably) they had a desire to impose a false sensitivity about sex (I really don’t think they do), they’d have to consider reality. In doing that, they’d realize that Trump and Sessions would become modern King Cantues against a tide that’s been crashing against the cliffs and eroding them for a generation. Hell, Trump is part of those waves himself. The shoreline just isn’t the same anymore.

Sen. Jeff Sessions is a guy who’s never been afraid to speak his mind and to do so expressing views that simply rail against the accepted truths and conventions. Some real, true Redneck stuff, all products of the time and place of his youth. Most uncharacteristic and uncommon for anybody in public life, and he’s paid a price for it several times, including the loss of an appointment by President Reagan to the federal bench. That trait is exactly what he has in common with Trump. They really do radically challenge the accepted, conventional wisdom, they defy it, and they have largely succeeded because Americans still admire the courage and audacity it takes to call it like you see it. Especially if others howl and scream to shut it down. Even at the risk of being wrong. It’s a value that looks to American eyes like courage.

That’s what they have in common. That audacity. One of them is from rural, small-town Alabama, which shaped him. The other from an urbane New York City lifestyle. The commonality is not that they share all attitudes and beliefs, but that they both think the emperor wears no clothes and their willingness to say so even when it offends the self-proclaimed media guardians of the received and accepted Tradition. The derision they’ve each faced from that forms a powerful glue. One of the things they commonly resent among themselves is the idea that morality moves from the top down and gets imposed by wise leaders on the faithful, socially minded multitude. As they see it, fixing cultural values is not principally a task ascribed to the federal government in the constitution, it comes from the people themselves. I believe that the voters, in overwhelming numbers, were influenced by this issue, too. And these are folks, I think, who really mean what they say about individual rights vs. the government.

So, is Senator Sessions an enemy of the adult industry at all? There is some evidence of that, but not much, and generally distant in time. As Alabama Attorney General, his name is on an appeal that sustained the conviction of a local video rental guy for obscenity, King v. State, 674 So. 2d 1381 (1995). Well, what position would you expect an Alabama attorney general to take when a defendant appeals? In the 108th Congress, in 2003, he was principal author of a Concurrent Senate Resolution encouraging the prosecution of obscenity. Thirteen years ago. Let that sink in. And consider what was considered regular fare on TV and in the Movies thirteen years ago. Given what happened to Trump this Summer and his response, and given the face of Internet porn, especially its ubiquity, given who is appointing Sessions, I just don’t give it much weight.

You see, as people who don’t think that values come from the top down and get imposed, on issues such as the parameters of contemporary community values, I think they will respect the judgment of the people themselves, which, in the end, gets disclosed in both elections and in jury verdicts, as well as in their viewing habits. I don’t think either of them lives in such a vacuum that they don’t understand the popularity of porn among huge segments of the American people. I think they would understand the anger of people at an attitude that arrogates into government hands a choice that the people rightly make themselves when they surf the internet. I think that means no generalized war against pornography is very likely. My concern over Hillary is that the combination of radical feminists and general do-gooder sympathy for workers would have resulted in the use of administrative agencies against porn producers in states subject to immediate federal regulation, steps that would have destroyed the ability of the producers to make porn. I saw that as inevitable, and I believe the adult industry dodged the most dangerous bullet it ever faced.

Will there be any obscenity prosecutions at all? Maybe. But if so, isolated and aimed at the very extreme, against content that is judged to be so deviant from the mainstream of American tastes that its suppression would not be noticeable to the vast majority. Yeah. Like we all saw how the industry stood with arm linked in arm to show solidarity for the defense of Ira Isaacs? The latest waves of porn have begun to focus on just how many men’s things can simultaneously be inserted into one female (or male, I guess) orifice at the same time — I hope they film this stuff near an emergency room — and how young, 95-pound performers are to be “punished” with rope and chain by guys who look like former Heavyweight contenders for some unspecified offense, maybe for their tendencies toward anorexia. I guess that, if I represented these producers, and I don’t, I would probably open a dialog encouraging some careful thought under these new circumstances. The truth is that I don’t expect that or even a very broad swath of extreme content to be prosecuted, given where society is today. I expect that the Justice Department will recognize that it has no duty to impose morality, and that any and all obscenity charging decisions, in order to have any confidence of success, should be importantly based to avoid what Americans actually like to watch and do watch in substantial numbers. That covers a lot of turf.

Jeff Sessions backed legislation in the Senate some years ago that would have given the Attorney General the power to take over domains that feature copyright-infringing content, and ultimately his proposal was killed in committee. It might be a good idea to now revisit his Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) and to otherwise build industry-helpful bridges to Attorney General Sessions.

There have been loud, shrill cries that a Trump presidency will be antagonistic to individual expressive liberties, and I just don’t buy any of that. Some have been concerned that he promised to sue women who, he claims, lied about him for gain and attention, trying to hurt him. Well, the last time I checked, intentional lies against even a presidential candidate that lead to his injury are not protected by the First Amendment. And I don’t think they should be protected. The Republic will not fall when those who intentionally lie about others are made to compensate the target of intentional falsehoods, even in the midst of politics. If this causes some people to avoid intentional lies, that’s a result that I favor.

J.D. Obenberger is the founder and principal partner of J.D. Obenberger and Associates, a Chicago Loop law firm specializing in First Amendment and criminal representation.