Amidst a reported renewed crackdown on "adult obscenity," the Justice Department is said to be 25-for-25: as in, 25 obscenity cases filed, mostly in conservative communities around the country, and 25 convictions, two by verdict and 23 by guilty pleas.
"It's so transparently political," adult entertainment attorney and Free Speech Coalition chairman Jeffrey Douglas told a reporter about the crackdown renewal. "With this administration, if the results of other kinds of wars aren't working you go to the culture wars."
Attorney General John Ashcroft brought Bruce Taylor back to the Justice Department earlier this year as a senior counsel for the department's criminal division, assigned to cover obscenity issues, according to Knight-Ridder Newspapers, while President Bush's 2005 budget is said to include $4 million for hiring more obscenity prosecutors and FBI agents.
But one Justice official, Andrew Oosterbaan, who runs the department's child exploitation and obscenitiy division, told Knight-Ridder this isn't the morality police, this is merely enforcing the law as it is now.
"(Obscenity) law has been on the books forever," he said. "It's been weighed and determined and considered by the Supreme Court long, long ago. None of it has changed. The Internet has changed the way the law is broken but it hasn't changed the law."
