Sen. Brownbacks latest anti-porn hearing

[mongo]

Really good article from AVN.com - very long and detailed.

Senate Subcommittee Hearing on Porn Prosecution Delivers Few Surprises
By: Mark Kernes
Posted: 7:05 pm PST 3-22-2005

WASHINGTON - With the federal court decision dismissing the obscenity indictments against Extreme Associates still fresh in conservatives' minds, Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) presided over a March 16 hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights titled "Obscenity Prosecution and the Constitution" – with Brownback himself the only senator in attendance, though Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.) did put in a momentary appearance between floor votes on his legislation.

<snip>

Sen. Brownback, in his opening remarks, claimed that Judge Gary Lancaster had "cobbled together hand-picked strands of 14th Amendment substantive due process, decisions from Roe, Lawrence and others and ruled that the statutes at issue violated an unwritten constitutional right to sexual privacy" and that "just recently, we have in Southern California examples of human trafficking, of individuals trafficked into the porn industry for use by the porn industry." Neither statement was accurate, but accuracy was hardly the point of the hearing.

<very big snip>

In some ways, the March 16 hearing dovetailed nicely with a November 18, 2004 hearing, over which Sen. Brownback also presided, of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation's Subcommittee on Science, Technology, and Space, titled "The Science Behind Pornography Addiction." At that hearing, Dr. Mary Ann Layden testified that pornography is "toxic mis-education about sex and relationships," while "Dr." Judith Reisman – her doctorate is in communications, not biochemistry – claimed that porn images "imprint and alter the brain, triggering an instant, involuntary, but lasting, biochemical memory trail, arguably, subverting the First Amendment by overriding the cognitive speech process." She called those biochemical memory trails "erototoxins."

So if a viewer doesn't have to think about sexually explicit material in order for it negatively to affect him/her, and if the message conveyed by the material can be given secondary status somewhere below the acts performed that convey the message which, without the message component, may already be illegal acts, then pornography – not just obscenity, but porn in general – has effectively been stripped of its constitutional protections without a First Amendment fight. That clearly seems to be where Sen. Brownback is headed with his hearings.

much, much more (warning from AVN.com - may contain sexually explicit material http://www.avn.com/index.php?Primary_Navigation=Articles&Action=View_Article&Content_ID=220877

I really wish I could post more of this very excellent article.

Some days, I think I'm just fucked if I stay in this business...

[htuttle]

1. "erototoxins"?????!?

More Lysenko-science from the Republicans.

I don't know if it's erototoxins so much as a phlegmatic or sanguine humour. :crazy:

[mongo]

2. Yep erototoxins.....

and even though several groups on the industry's side have been begging to get into these hearings, they are never allowed to speak.

This is a one-sided dog and pony show.