LOS ANGELES—Shelley Lubben may love kitties and doggies, but she could care less about the right of adult human beings to see, hear and read what they like. Yeah, Lubben is all over the map. One minute she's featured in a documentary produced by porn pariah Chris Mallick, next she's appearing with Mary Carey at a animal rescue fundraiser (also associated with Mallick's Oxymoron Productions), and now she's stumping for the government blockage of porn to Jordanian citizens.
A press release issued Monday by Lubben's group, The Pink Cross Foundation, and two another pro-censorship groups, Girls Against Porn & Human Trafficking and Cedars Cultural and Educational Foundation, urges "the Jordanian government to block porn sites." The call comes after the Jordanian Ministry of Communications, Information & Technology expressed support for the idea.
In support of that aim, the PR states, "U.S.-based 'companies' operating, despite U.S. federal obscenity laws that make pornography distribution illegal, create a majority of the world's offensive websites. Since the U.S. Department of Justice won't enforce existing federal obscenity laws, other countries are forced to devise alternatives."
Grammatically, that is a painful sentence to read but it is also rhetorical bunk. For one thing, porn distribution in the U.S. is completely legal, and the idea that any country could eradicate all porn sites through prosecution is absurd, as is the notion that the DoJ could, as Tiffany Leeper states in the PR, "single-handedly decrease the plethora of Internet porn by prosecuting hard-core adult pornographers."
But why even bother trying to refute the preposterous claims of these people, one of whom, Cedars' Tony Nassif, has written previously, "Pornography’s normalization and its addictive power fuel the demand for human sex slavery." (Oddly enough, Nassif runs anti-trafficking seminars, and Lubben was one of his featured speakers in 2010.)
Nassif also like to claim in his anti-porn screeds that 800,000 children are reported missing each year in the United States, implying that the number is somehow associated with porn or the sexual abuse of children. But he neglects to add that, according to the same source (The Department of Justice), only "115 children were the victims of 'stereotypical' kidnapping. These crimes involve someone the child does not know or a slight acquaintance who holds the child overnight, transports the child 50 miles or more, kills the child, demands ransom, or intends to keep the child permanently."
The "censor Jordan" press release, by the way, contains no data at all regarding the alleged impact on its citizens from online porn, but that's probably because they don't have a clue, or care to have a clue.
Which begs the question, can Shelley Lubben even find Jordan on a map?
