Indiana Representative Pence Proposes Internet Porn Segregation

Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) wants to make sure kids are protected from adult content, and he’s proposing a radical way of doing it: segregating porn to its own dot-porn domain.

According to a story published in The Washington Times, Pence argued during a recent summit sponsored by the American Decency Association, Kids First Coalition, and other family values groups that confining porn to its own space instead of dot-net or dot-com locations would be one step toward keeping children safe from pornographic content. “We’ve got to be creative within constitutional protections,” Pence told the summit. “The Supreme Court seems more enamored with protecting obscene speech than with protecting everyday citizens.”

Pence was not alone in his view. Rep. Joe Pitts (R-Pa.) was also in agreement, adding that it’s becoming easier and easier for children to stumble across porn – even when using innocuous phrases like “baseball” and “Pokemon.”

“At any given moment, millions of people are using peer-to-peer technology to move hundred of millions of products,” Pitts said. “We simply do not have the manpower and technology to enforce the laws that we have on the books.”

Rep. Katherine Harris (R-Fla.) offered her opinion as well, warning against the persuasive social power that pornography has over people and calling it “the malignant desensitizer that changes a person’s perception.”

“These monsters that prey upon our children can strike anywhere,” she noted, adding that there should be more severe penalties issued to sex offenders.

Even porn users seemed to be in agreement. Said 20-year-old college student and avid porn-user Dan Gluckman, “Right now, it’s pretty easy to come across pornographic sites. Sometimes, a simple misspelling of a URL will inadvertently bring you to a pornographic site.” Gluckman said that housing porn in a segregated dot-porn Web community not only would help in keeping children from seeing pornographic content, but that doing so would make it more convenient for adults to enjoy adult entertainment. “For users who do want to enjoy pornography, it makes it much easier to find the sites,” Gluckman said.

Pence, who sponsored the 2003 Truth In Domain Names Act (which made it a crime for adult sites to misrepresent themselves as anything else), was adamant that a dot-porn designation would be one step toward a safer Internet. “There ought to be a standard of integrity of domain names,” the representative said.