Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski
WARSAW - Unenforceable and potentially damaging to Poland's credibility: Those were the key reasons President Aleksander Kwasniewski gave for vetoing a broad anti-porn bill which religious leaders and political conservatives fought to make law.
"That's very good," said Free Speech Coalition and porn legend Kat Sunlove, when she learned the news. "There's still hope, huh? I mean, I think it's a good sign the democratic institutions over there are beginning to find a pathway to rational governing."
Sunlove says Kwasniewski "could have stopped at" unenforceability, "but the fact that he recognized the absurdity of it and the effect that it could, in fact, have on that nation's standing in the world community, is a good sign."
Poland's Parliament approved the bill by a very slim margin March 3. It would have banned importing and distributing porn, hard- and softcore. Kwasniewski's aide, Jolanta Szymanek-Deresz, says the veto came because the president felt it went so far that it might have been ignored, thus putting Poland's democracy's credibility at risk.
Conservatives in government and in the Roman Catholic Church pushed for the bill. "But somewhere underneath it all," Sunlove said, "there are some structures and systems that we put into place to run our societies and, just once in awhile, they actually perform the way we want them to."
Poland is said to have had a growing and thriving sex industry since the fall of Communism in 1989, as more liberal influences were allowed to reach the country.
"Once the walls started falling down," Sunlove said, "there was a momentum about it, but Poland, with the (Solidarity) trade union movement, had led the way in a lot of ways. It makes an interesting backdrop in this turn of events. The passage of the law (in Parliament) in the first place was an act of extraordinary conservatism... and yet (Polish democracy) comes from this short but revolutionary history."
Other opponents to the bill feared it not only limited free expression, but might have produced a fat black market in porn. Solidarity's coalition partner, the Freedom Union, has said the bill would have left defining porn to the courts.
But had Kwasniewski signed the bill into law, it would have imposed fines and up to two years imprisonment on violators, with five-year terms if child porn were involved. For now, only hardcore porn involving violence, children, or animals draws up to five years in prison.
