Around the adult Internet and elsewhere in cyberspace, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's intended special obscenity unit is being called everything from a waste of resources to a potential new attack on legal content, adult content providers charge, when the focus should be on crimes like child pornography.
"He should be spending his resources chasing something like child porn," Kevin Godbee, the longtime SmutDrs.com executive producer tells AVNOnline.com. "That's illegal. There's no ambiguity there. But there's ambiguity with obscenity. What's obscene to one person isn't obscene to another person. This is just pandering to the lowest common denominator. Welcome to American politics."
Free Speech Coalition executive director Michelle Freridge agrees. "The real point of this kind of unit would be to pick legal content and try to prove that it is obscene,” she says. “So they're wasting the taxpayers' money attacking legal content and legitimate legal companies doing legitimate legal business, instead of focusing on the real crime that happens—like child pornography. We would urge them to turn their resources toward real crime instead of trying to enforce the fundamentalist values in the mainstream public with bad public policy."
"I think I probably have the same opinion as most people have in this business," Godbee says. "I don't know why he's wasting resources on something like obscenity, where everybody has their own personal definition of what that is."
Freridge said the Extreme Associates case showed that companies have the right to distribute even merely obscene material "when [it's] distributed in a manner or by a company that takes precautions to prevent the materials from being accessed by minors, and when that same company is not exposing people who don't want to see it to that material."
The Associated Press reported this week that the Justice Department would announce the new unit "soon," with Gonzales quoted as telling a group of federal prosecutors and law enforcement officials recently that obscenity enforcement is "absolutely necessary if we are going to protect citizens from unwanted exposure to obscene materials." He ordered prosecutors to report by July on how to crack down on obscenity and with what tools.
Electronic Frontier Foundation staff attorney Kurt Opsahl says that his group hopes the Justice Department is not looking to go after protected speech, particularly considering the inevitable contrasts between the community standards of one area against those of another. He, too, said that the Justice Department should think about putting the priority on child porn and not legal adult content.
"There's a difficulty associated with obscenity [through] community standards [and] determining whether material is offensive or obscene within constitutional protection,” Opsahl says. “When you have the Internet, where people can view content from any community, it creates the possibility that someone will choose a very conservative community and say something is obscene under those standards while limiting people's access to protected speech in other communities.
"If you make it so that anything which has nationwide access has to be satisfactory to every community in the nation, what you're left with is [the lowest common denominator]," Opsahl continued. "The community standards of [a large city] would be very different from those of some of the smaller rural communities."
Opsahl added that it is "really challenging" to distinguish obscenity from legal content in terms of someone knowing ahead of time whether he or she is within the bounds of what is or is not obscene. "You're left to hope for the best when you get the case against you," he says.
