Penny Nance, founder of the Kids First Coalition and a self-described "victim of pornography," has been hired by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as an "advisor," possibly to handle the hundreds of thousands of broadcast indecency complaints filed over the past couple of years by groups like hers. The exact date on which Nance began her duties is not known.
Nance was the moderator of the "Victims of Pornography Summit" held on May 19 in D.C., which you can read about here, which featured Nance's Concerned Women for America compatriot Jan LaRue. (LaRue is CWfA's chief counsel; Nance was a board member until she quit recently.) In an article last year on the CWfA site, LaRue described adult video producers and Webmasters as "terrorists."
When Woodhull Freedom Foundation executive director Ricci Levy spoke with Nance during the Victims of Pornography Summit and suggested that future such conferences might want to include representatives from the adult industry, Nance's response was a flat, "No, I'm not about to give your side a voice."
Nance will advise the FCC’s Office of Strategic Planning and Policy Analysis, aides to FCC Chairman Kevin Martin told Mediaweek reporter Todd Shields. Among the positions and laws Nance supports are a bill to force cable-TV companies to allow subscribers to purchase individual channels rather than channel packages, so that parents who believe that, say, The History Channel is indecent or sacreligious won't be forced to pay for it along with other channels in the package; and a bill that would allow companies that manufacture software that deletes nude scenes and naughty language from Hollywood movies to sell their product, even though such censorship violates the movie owner's copyright.
According to the Mediaweek article, Nance has terminated her lobbying efforts on behalf of Kids First, as well as for the Center for Reclaiming America, an organization founded by the Rev. D. James Kennedy, who also runs Coral Ridge Ministries, both based in Ft. Lauderdale. Just last week, Kennedy hosted a PAX-TV program "One Nation Under God," which purports (and fails) to show that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation. Kennedy's organization paid for the 2.5 ton Ten Commandments monument which was installed in the Alabama Federal Courthouse at the behest of then-Chief Justice Roy Moore, and sponsors frequent conferences such as the "2005 Reclaiming America for Christ Conference: Leading for Generations", which will take place in October.
In what would appear now to be a classic "make work" scheme, groups like the religio-reactionary Parents Television Council have flooded the FCC with complaints of indecency in network programs. For instance, by PTC's own estimate, a quarter of the 530,828 complaints that poured in after Janet Jackson's 1/32nd-of-a-second breast revelation came from PTC members or those informed of the performance by the group's e-mail alert. PTC regularly issues membership alerts, asking concerned citizens to complaint about one broadcast issue or another – it will be interesting to see if such an alert is issued to target Robert Novak's utterance of "bullshit" on last week's CNN "Crossfire" news program – and by one estimate, 98% of all indecency complaints to the FCC originate with PTC.
On March 31, 2004, radio and television broadcasters met behind closed doors with FCC commissioners and representatives of religious censorship groups on, allegedly to "discuss ways of responding to growing complaints about indecent programming." Nance's hiring may have been one response to that meeting. But as First Amendment attorney Paul Cambria commented at that time, "What a lot of people don't understand on this indecency thing for broadcast standards is that it has a community standard element in it, just like the obscenity law does. But who is speaking for the community? In all the congressional hearings and everything else they’re having, what component demonstrates the pulse of the [mainstream] adult community as to what ... they think the standard should be? Shouldn't the community have a voice in that? Where's the survey of the community?"
Such questions might be a good starting point for Nance's duties with the FCC. No one, however, is holding his/her breath waiting for that to happen.
