JAKARTA—In case you were wondering how a theocratic government works, Indonesia's Religious Affairs minister has offered up a delicious example by thoughtfully providing a definition of "pornography" as skirts that fall above the knee. Others participating in a task force recently formed by the country's president to determine how to more efficiently enforce an anti-pornography law passed in 2008 may have their own definitions, but Minister Suryadharma Ali wants everyone to know that miniskirts will definitely be on the list.
The Jakarta Post reported that establishing the definition of pornography is the first step in the government's ambitious campaign to curb the distribution of pornography in the fourth most populous nation in the world. Once the standard of pornography has been set, the minister said, the "task force would apply it nationwide across all ethnicities."
Minister Suryadharma looks to have the authority to impose his definition on the country after President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono picked him to oversee the day to day operations of the task force, with Coordinating People’s Welfare Minister Agung Laksono as its titular head.
"We will arrange meetings with different stakeholders from the public to get input on how they understand pornography, and I'm sure that they will come up with different definitions," said Suryadharma on Wednesday. "However, there must be a set of universal criteria to define something as pornographic, of which one will be when someone wears a skirt above the knee."
That would be a 'universal criteria," mind you. As AVN reported recently, Indonesia says it has been feverishly shuttering porn sites, though precisely how many is anyone's guess.
