Hours before the A2K Awards, the Free Speech Coalition formally introduced its new Executive Director and reiterated an old mission of keeping the First Amendment and free expression alive and protected.
William J. Lyons greeted supporters and spoke briefly at the meeting during the 2000 Consumer Electronics Show. A longtime lobbyist and one-time legal adviser during the Reagan Administration's Iran-Contra controversy, Lyons has become FSC's first paid executive director. He said it would be critical for FSC to make the world at large realize the adult entertainment industry is and has been a viable economic force with large and unshakable consumer support.
But it was Kat Sunlove, adult entertainment legend and now the FSC's chief lobbyist, who struck the most responsive chord of the meeting. Though many within the FSC express alarm at the prospect of a Republican recapture of the White House in 2000, Sunlove warned that, just because one political party doesn't wage overt war against adult entertainment, it doesn't mean it's necessarily a friend of free speech and privacy rights - especially if state and local governments still feel free to attack.
"I do not think the last eight years have been a honeymoon," she said, alluding to the Clinton Administration's lack of porn-related legal initiatives versus an apparent surge in state and local legal battles against adult entertainment. "It's just a different battlefield. And they are just driving all kinds of businesses…underground, out of work, out of money, out of the industry, because of local laws." But she sounded an optimistic note regarding various legal challenges and small victories on those fronts as well.
FSC attorney H. Louis Sirkin recapped his successful battle to get a critical portion of the Child Pornography Protection Act declared unconstitutional by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, noting that, though FSC and, indeed, virtually all the adult entertainment industry objects to child pornography, it was critical to recognize that vagaries in law and cloaking censorship in the banner of protecting children could and often did lead to unwarranted trouble.
FSC President Gloria Leonard was unable to attend either the meeting or the CES show, since she is still recuperating from a torn hamstring and ankle fracture she suffered in a fall following a board meeting a short while back.
