Critics Say U.S. Attorney Firings Were Linked to Anti-Porn Efforts
BY WAYNE LAUGESEN
REGISTER CORRESPONDENT
April 22-28, 2007 Issue |
Posted 4/17/07 at 7:00 AM
WASHINGTON — Is Attorney General Roberto Gonzales
under fire for prosecuting pornography?
Some administration critics say Gonzales fired eight
U.S. attorneys as part of a Justice Department crackdown on obscenity. The
firings sparked a political debacle for the Bush administration that has
Gonzales fighting to keep his job.
“In a move popular with anti-porn groups and the
religious right, Gonzales had made a renewed war on porn one of the top
priorities of the Department of Justice,” wrote Mark Follman, in a Salon.com
article that blames the firing of U.S. attorneys on a new federal crusade
against porn.
But lax obscenity enforcement, said a former porn
prosecutor for the Reagan administration, has resulted in unbridled
availability of porn — on cell phones, computers, cable TV and in hotel rooms
everywhere — that’s fundamentally changing American culture.
“Our children and our college students are consuming
a steady diet of obscene material,” says Patrick Truman, an assistant attorney
general under Ronald Reagan who headed the Child Exploitation and Obscenity
section of the Department of Justice.
“The mainstream porn industry has been left to do
pretty much whatever it wants,” he said. “Porn is now so pervasive that our
college students don’t even know how to date, because pornography has
conditioned young men to believe that they’re entitled to sexual services from
women without the need for relationship. They’re on such a steady diet of porn
that they can’t distinguish between love and sexual desire.”
Truman told the Register he and a small group of
other lawyers concerned with the lax enforcement of obscenity laws met recently
with Michael Mason, executive assistant director of the FBI, to express their
concerns that no war on porn has been waged.
“No, we haven’t turned this tide of pornography back
at all,” said Robert Peters, president of Morality in Media. “Very little has
been done since the Reagan administration, and the other side is winning big.”
Jan LaRue, chief counsel for Concerned Women for
America, wrote Feb. 26 in the organization’s online publication: “Anybody who
keeps track of obscenity prosecutions knows the stats show that it’s not the
‘priority’ we’ve been told it is.”
Gonzales, aware of growing criticism that the
administration has allowed porn to run amok, last year established the Justice
Department’s Obscenity Prosecution Task Force and appointed veteran prosecutor
Brent Ward to lead it. Justice Department officials declined to comment for
this article.
“I am maintaining hope that with Brent Ward at the
helm of this task force, things might improve,” said Peters. “Do I have
delusions that we’ll put the major pornographers out of business by 2009? No.
But I do think with the appointment of Brent Ward the Bush administration may
be able to show the next administration that enforcing our obscenity laws is
not impossible.”
Ward, a former U.S. attorney for Utah appointed by
Reagan, began his work on the new task force by successfully prosecuting makers
of “Girls Gone Wild” videos for failing to document the ages of young women
featured in the shows.
Ward’s appointment has displeased defenders of porn
as much as it has pleased Peters and other porn adversaries. It was Ward, in
fact, whose actions led some in the mainstream press and thousands of bloggers
to opine that the firing of U.S. attorneys was evidence of a renewed commitment
to taking down the porn industry.
The Nation magazinepublished an article March 20 called “The Porn Plot Against
Prosecutors.” It blamed Ward for much of the Reagan administration’s success in
prosecuting pornographers, saying he was one of former Attorney General Edwin
Meese’s “most fervent and earnest witnesses” in carrying out Reagan’s war
against porn.
The Nation and other
publications say a Sept. 20 e-mail by Ward indicates that the U.S. attorney
firings are part of a renewed war against porn. The e-mail, sent to Kyle
Sampson, Gonzalez’s chief of staff, reads:
“We have two U.S. attorneys who are unwilling to take
good cases we have presented to them. They are Paul Charlton in Phoenix and Dan
Bogden in Las Vegas. In light of the AG’s comments … to ‘kick butt and take
names,’ what do you suggest I do?”
Despite the e-mail, Truman said the U.S. attorney
firings had nothing to do with a crackdown on porn.
“That assertion is laughable to anyone who knows the
inner workings of the Justice Department,” Truman said.
Shortly after his appointment as attorney general,
Gonzalez announced that prosecution of pornography portraying consensual sex
among adults would be “one of the top priorities” of the Justice Department. He
signed off on an FBI memo that said prosecutors would focus mainly on pornography
depicting “bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and
masochistic behavior.”
“That’s part of the problem,” Truman said. “The few
cases that have been prosecuted involve extreme pornography, depicting
violence, defecation or animals. Most people have no interest in this stuff,
and it’s not the business the mainstream porn industry is in. By only pursuing
extreme obscenity, the mainstream porn industry is given a green light. There’s
this perception that anything other than extreme pornography is legal, and it’s
not. The fact that it’s not being prosecuted does not make it legal.”
Truman said for the Department of Justice to have a
substantial effect, it would need to go after cable TV and satellite TV giants,
and most mainstream hotel chains. He said all have realized huge profits in
porn, because a porn feature can be produced for $20,000 or less, yet it gets
sold to the public for the same price as mainstream Hollywood films that cost
tens of millions of dollars to produce.
“Almost all of the major hotel chains are offering
hard-core pornography on the televisions in the rooms, and these cost a
consumer the same as any movie,” Truman said. “A few years ago, it was
soft-core pornography. Now, it’s full-fledged hard-core porn that violates the
standards of almost every community in the United States. This is what happens
when you don’t enforce the obscenity laws.”
Peters, of Morality in Media, said the Justice
Department has taken on only about 15 obscenity cases under the Bush administration,
and none of them has targeted the mainstream porn industry. Truman said the
porn industry is “almost monolithic,” with most porn emanating from only about
50 major companies that could all be taken down.
The problem, said Truman, lies in a misperception
among today’s federal prosecutors that winning porn cases is next to
impossible, with the ACLU and other groups claiming that pornography is
protected speech under the First Amendment. He said prosecutors believe that if
millions of adults are consuming porn, it’s difficult to prove that the
material violates community standards — which the Supreme Court has said it
must do to violate obscenity laws.
“But it’s not difficult,” Truman said, speaking about
the 20 cases he was involved in. “In four years in the Reagan administration, I
never lost a single jury trial in which we were out to prove that a purveyor of
porn violated the community standard. You show the jury the material in
question and ask ‘does this meet the community standard?’ They say No every
time, even if they themselves look at porn.
“They say No because they wouldn’t be seen looking at
it on a bus, or in some other public venue. They wouldn’t show it to their
houseguests. Most porn violates community standards, that makes it illegal, and
it’s easy to prove.”
Wayne Laugesen is based in
Boulder, Colorado.
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