"Is toe-licking a 'lascivious act'?"
That's what Angie, one of our Production Department staff, just showed up at my office door to ask me.
"I'm not particularly into it myself," I answered, vaguely recalling some sex scenes where Alec Metro was the male lead, "but if the woman I'm with is turned on by it, I suppose I could get into it."
After a moment's reflection, however, I realized she wasn't making a pass at me, she was just trying to figure out how to implement AVN's new art guidelines in light of — what else? — the new 2257 regulations going into effect.
Of course, AVNis a Free Speech Coalition member, so as this is written (and likely as you're reading this), the government has agreed not to inspect and/or bust Coalition members for failing to follow those requirements — but if that injunction is ever lifted, everyone who puts out any form of sexually-explicit material made since 1995 will be expected to have proper records on the stuff, properly cross-indexed, and all of product properly labeled to boot, with images attached, in compliance with the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) June 23 dictum.
Best estimates from the lawyers are that no more than 10 percent of "primary producers" — and I'm guessing even less of "secondary producers" — have all their 2257 ducks in a row, but if you ask me, I think there's a good chance that nobody is in compliance with all of the regulations, especially considering how nit-picky the government can be when it wants — and take my word for it: It wants.
The main reason, of course, is because the regulations were written so that, short of spending upwards of a million bucks or so, no one in the adult industry could comply with them — and that's because the purpose of the regs isn't "compliance," it's prosecution.
Now, admittedly, a headline like "Porn Company Charged With 25,314 Counts of Misfiled Records" doesn't have quite the punch of "Porn Company Indicted for Obscenity," but again, the objective isn't headlines (much as the DOJ does like them); it's putting adult companies out of business.
By the time you read this, I'll be 57, and I gotta admit, from this vantage point, the difference, visually, between an 18-year-old and a 25-year-old isn't that apparent to me — and between a 16- or 17-year-old and an 18-year-old is even less apparent. But guess what: That shouldn't matter.
The authors of the Free Speech lawsuit (see story this issue) put it really well, I thought: "Requiring producers to maintain information dossiers on 20-, 30-, 40-, 50-, and 60-year old performers in regulated expressive works is not a narrowly tailored means of promoting a legitimate and compelling government interest in child protection."
Indeed; nobody's going to mistake Dave Cummings, and probably not even Sharon Kane, for a minor. Which leads to what I think is the most important charge in the FSC lawsuit: "18 U.S.C. §2257 has created a presumption that otherwise lawful expressive works containing visual depictions of adult performers engaged in actual sexually explicit conduct cannot be lawfully produced or disseminated to adult consumers unless the dossier and label required by 18 U.S.C. §2257 are created and maintained."
Translation: This law makes adult material guilty of being child porn until it proves itself innocent. And that's horseshit; completely contrary to everything the American judicial system stands for — but sadly, there's a good chance the U.S. Supreme Court (which is where this will eventually wind up) won't see it that way.
John Adams is reputed to have described the U.S. as a "government of laws, not of men" — but the Bush administration's religio-reactionary attitude toward adult material has effectively reversed that wisdom, chipping away at First Amendment protections until, in a few short years, "freedom of speech" will be rendered meaningless. (I won't reiterate my recent editorial on the "judicial activism" that wrote "except sexual speech" into the First Amendment except to note that if that hadn't occurred, the industry would be in a much better position to fight this tyranny than it is right now.)
The legal way for the Justice Department to go about rooting out minors — four of them in 20 years — performing in sexually explicit features is the old-fashioned way: Look at an adult DVD; see someone you think is a minor; contact that person to see if he/she actually is a minor; if he/she is, arrest the producer for selling child porn. It takes legwork, it takes phone work; it may even take a plane ride or two — it even takes (horrors!) watching "actual human beings engaged in actual sexually-explicit conduct" — but that's how the law is supposed to work!
This reversal of the "government of laws, not of men" doctrine isn't solely the province of conservatives. They only want to take away our civil rights, but as we've seen in recent weeks, some liberal members of the judiciary — notably Justice John Paul Stevens — are ready to take away our business and property rights as well.
Justice Stevens, in June, authored two opinions that should have politically-aware left-wingers shaking in their boots: Gonzales v. Raich, which, based on a 1942 decision concerning home-grown wheat, expanded the Constitution's Commerce Clause to cover commercial and even non-commercial activities (in this case, medical marijuana growing) that don't even cross state lines (the usual requirement for the feds to step in); and Kelo v. City of New London, which expanded the government's Fifth Amendment power to take private property for "public use" when the "public use" is merely any activity that will lead to an increase, in this case, of property tax revenue to the city.
Those are two massive encroachments of government power on individual liberty from which there is no judicial appeal, since, as the saying goes, "The Supreme Court isn't final because it's right; it's 'right' because it's final." There is nowhere else to go, barring the remote possibility of federal legislation to deal with the issues — and freedom-loving Americans had better get it through their heads that when it comes to liberty, the time to "put up or shut up" is rapidly approaching.
A good start: IMPEACH BUSH!
