Is porn retreating? Not by a long shot, but insiders fear that could change if the Bush Administration succeeds in getting a longtime anti-porn activist appointed Attorney General John Ashcroft's deputy porn czar, according to adult e-zine The Position.
Bruce A. Taylor, president of the National Law Center for Children and Families, is one of three prospective candidates for the job, and his concentration at the NLC has been predominantly cyberporn. Not to mention, he's not exactly a stranger to investigating and trying to prosecute porn - he worked with Ed Meese, Ronald Reagan's attorney general, and with savings-and-loan target Charles Keating, in bedeviling the likes of Larry Flynt and exhibitors of Robert Mapplethorpe's homoerotic photography.
The other two candidates for the deputy porn czar job are said to be American Family Association activist Patrick Truman and another NLC member, J. Robert Flores.
It's not that adult entertainment people are exactly shocked that the Bush Administration might have porn in its sights, Bush having said while campaigning that porn "has no place in a decent society" and vowing to enforce porn laws sternly. But The Position is a little edgy that Ashcroft might consider going after the porners on tax related charges rather than moral grounds, given porn's image as a cash-in-hand economy and the challenge of reconciling moral-grounds prosecutions with Constitutional considerations.
But in bracing themselves for either a Taylor, a Truman, or a Flores deputy porn czarship, The Position says, "frightened pornographers are willing to change the content of their films to keep the money rolling in. Among the activities that will be discouraged in a Bush era porno include: 'no food used as a sex object, no peeing unless in a natural setting, such as a field or roadside and no coffins or blindfolds'."
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