Attorney Jan LaRue has made the rounds as legal counsel to several pro-censorship organizations, including the Family Research Council, but recently, she seems to have settled in at Concerned Women for America. She's also the author of what appears to be an ongoing series for Human Events, the old line religio-reactionary tabloid that's offering Ann Coulter's forthcoming book "Godless: The Church of Liberalism" free with each subscription, called "The Road to Perversion Is Paved With Pornography."
Long-time readers may recall that LaRue is the one who told attendees at the April, 2000 National Pro-Family Conference on Pornography, Sexually Oriented Businesses and Material Harmful to Children that, "I met a family that lives directly behind one of the [Orange County, CA, sexually-oriented] businesses. There’s just a little alley in-between them, and there was a five-year-old girl going outside, into her front yard; comes into the house carrying a used hypodermic needle and a used condom and said, 'Mommy, what is this?' Now, I submit to you that no five-year-old, no child should have that kind of experience. And the parents showing me hardcore video box covers with explicit sex acts on the cover, and people go into these businesses and purchase these materials or rent them and rip the cover off and throw them into the neighboring residential yards around these kinds of businesses. Men sit on the curb in front of these businesses, masturbating in the middle of the afternoon. Garden Grove Boulevard is the boulevard of male prostitutes and Beach Boulevard, which are both major thoroughfares in southern California — it's the boulevard for female prostitutes. Why are they there? Because there are seven of these businesses strung together on that boulevard."
Men masturbating in broad daylight on the curb in front of adult businesses?
To say that LaRue is not wrapped too tight (or perhaps is wrapped too tight) therefore may not be an exaggeration.
What's also clear is that she has little understanding of adult video and its place in the lives of adults' fantasies.
For instance, in Part II of her article, LaRue asks her readers to ask themselves:
"1 What kind of 'adult' markets a product that portrays 'kids' as sex objects?"
"2 Who is the porn industry pandering to by producing and distributing 'teen porn'?"
"3 Who believes that what we feed our minds doesn't affect our behavior?"
The answers aren't that difficult. Since adult videos are fantasies, and since fantasizing about sex with minors – or with sheep, or dead bodies, or being raped – are just that – fantasies – the producers of same aren't much different than mainstream movies and TV shows that depict kids as superheroes, as spies, as martial arts experts or in innumerable other roles – and Hollywood uses actual kids for this. Adult videos don't.
But that answer wouldn't suffice for LaRue, who makes her living bashing adult entertainment producers – and the one lined up in her sights in this article is Extreme Associates, which was busted for allegedly transporting obscene material across state lines ... including its production, Extreme Teen 24.
"The promo for No. 24 describes 'young "suzie" donned in pink pajamas, pigtails, and sucking on a pacifier.' Do you know any 'teen' that sucks a pacifier?" LaRue asks.
Indeed; who has those kinds of fantasies, and why don't they have more "normal" ones where the teen is, say, smoking a joint?
But then, LaRue gets to one of her main points: An attack on AVN.
"When the Extreme indictment was announced, the 'mainstream adult' industry tried to distance itself by feigning criticism of Rob Zicari, also known as Rob Black, co-owner of Extreme Associates," LaRue claimed.
Of course, there was nothing "feigned" about it. Most people in the industry really did dislike Rob Black, not only for the more stomach-churning aspects of some of his company's videos, but because of his poor business practices and his directors' occasional mistreatment of talent. AVN publisher Paul Fishbein was among Black's critics, for those and other good reasons – and LaRue quotes some of Fishbein's statements on that score from a 2005 ABC News article.
"Paul Fishbein, president of Adult Video News [AVN], the trade journal of the pornographic film industry, said Zicari produced 'horrible, unwatchable, disgusting, aberrant movies'," LaRue relates. "Nonetheless, Fishbein said were he judging the case he'd have to rule that they 'were not obscene, because the First Amendment is pure and has to remain pure'."
It's interesting (and saddening) the difficulty LaRue and many other religio-conservatives have in understanding this concept. The First Amendment says, in pertinent part, "Congress shall make no law ... abridging freedom of speech, or of the press," and the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas thought highly enough of that simple concept that he wrote, in the 1954 case Superior Films v. Department of Education of the State of Ohio, "The First and Fourteenth Amendments say that Congress and the States shall make 'no law' which abridges freedom of speech or of the press. In order to sanction a system of censorship I would have to say that 'no law' does not mean what it says, that 'no law' is qualified to mean 'some' laws. I cannot take this step."
(Justices Scalia, Alito and Chief Justice Roberts, are you listening?)
Those who hold the First Amendment in high regard realize that inevitably, they will be offended by some speech at some time, and that the urge to censor that speech will always be present. However, they also realize that censorship is a very slippery slope whose end-point is tyranny, and thus prefer, depending on the situation, to change the channel, use the "off" switch, close the book, or take the advice of Justice Louis Brandeis, who wrote in 1927, "the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence."
Apparently, that's not a concept with which LaRue is familiar.
"Fishbein exposed AVN's purely hypocritical backside," LaRue claims, "by presenting its '2006 Adult Video News Reuben Sturman Award' to none other than Robert and Janet Zicari (also known as Lizzie Borden). AVN also presented the 2006 award for 'Most Outrageous Sex Scene' to 'Burning Angel/VCA,' for 'Blood, Disembowelment and F****** … What Fun.' Do the AVN awards mean that Fishbein has been desensitized by his porn consumption or is he just a fraud?"
There may have been good reasons, as some have suggested, not to give Black and wife Lizzy Borden this year's Sturman award, but the fact they put out "horrible, unwatchable, disgusting, aberrant movies" isn't one of them. In fact, it was because the couple put out those videos and, when busted for it, decided to fight for their right to do so that they received the award. Hence, they were being honored for their will to fight for the First Amendment, not for the particular speech that led to that fight. Likewise, the 2006 Most Outrageous Sex Scene award recognizes that there can be artistry even in the grotesque; nothing hypocritical about it, and art critics throughout history would agree.
Which is not to say that Fishbein hasn't had his weaker moments, as have others. He did indeed write, in a 2002 editorial, which LaRue quotes, "Why does the industry need to simulate child pornography by depicting 18-year-olds, or even 25-year-olds, as underage? Just because the United States Supreme Court ruled this past April that depictions of people under the age of 18 having explicit sex, as long as they actually are not minors, are not child porn, does that mean producers really have to push that envelope. … Why do we always have to sink to the lowest level possible to try to titillate? Is this what our society needs?"
"Need"? Probably not. But "need" is a pretty strong word, implying obsession. Phrased another way, do some people enjoy watching young-looking adults in sexually explicit situations? You betcha, Red Ryder! Do they fantasize about being in such situations? Undoubtedly some do, just as many women fantasize about being raped. Do those women want to be raped? Absolutely not! Likewise, most of those who get off on watching "underage" women having sex don't actually want to have sex with underage women; that's why it's a fantasy!
But, quoth LaRue, "The consequences to kids couldn't count less to an industry driven by insatiable greed and depraved indifference."
Trouble is, that's nonsense. Anyone who knows anything about pedophiles knows that sexually explicit material that features adults who merely look like minors is a major turn-off to them. Hence, no matter how the adults in XXX are marketed, the pedophile market isn't interested. Sales of adult videos, featuring adults, are a "no sale" to pedophiles; therefore, their "consequences to kids" are non-existent.
LaRue also selectively quotes from my May, 2004 article "Chronic Youth," about the marketing of teen-theme videos, to attempt to prove her point, but all she can come up with are admissions from industry leaders and lawyers that, yes, the young-looking performers in such videos are all adults, and that producers (including the much-vilified Max Hardcore) go out of their way to make sure customers know that.
Indeed, try as she might, LaRue can't make the connection between adult porn and child molestation. The best she can come up with is an opinion from FBI profiler Kenneth Lanning that "many offenders have harbored — and suppressed — deviant urges for years. 'They may never have acted out. They were able to control it, and along comes the Internet ... which is like pouring fuel on smoldering embers.'"
But clearly, Lanning was talking about actual child pornography, something the adult industry doesn't make, and which it actively fights through organizations like Free Speech Coalition and Adult Sites Advocating Child Protection.
And then, of course, there's the Bible, from which LaRue takes, "Can a man scoop fire into his lap without his clothes being burned?" But LaRue can't even get that right; the quoted passage (Proverbs 6:27) refers to the temptations of adultery, not child molestation.
None of this stops LaRue from dragging in tales of pedophiles molesting actual children and sometimes recording their acts for future stimulation – but the closest she can connect that to the adult industry is the vague assertion by a Minnesota newspaper reporter that in one molester's home were found "several computers and disks containing child and adult pornography."
In fact, if anything, LaRue shoots herself in the foot by noting, "A judge in a child pornography case opined that 'if it were necessary for literary or artistic value, a person over the statutory age who perhaps looked younger could be utilized' in a sex scene." That "judge in a child pornography case" would be U.S. Supreme Court Justice Byron White, a relatively conservative justice appointed by John F. Kennedy in the days before ideology trumped judiciousness.
White was one of the dissenters in Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion, and he actually wrote the opinion in the Bowers v. Hardwick anti-sodomy decision (later overturned by Lawrence v. Texas). The quote cited is from New York v. Ferber, the seminal federal anti-child porn decision whose basic conclusions, including specifically the one LaRue cites, were reaffirmed in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition.
After briefly suggesting that prosecutors should continue to attempt to taint juries in obscenity cases by holding up the video's box if it features young-looking adults, she concludes Part II with, "Whether one of you 'regular guys' ends up running over a child, your drive down the dead-end porn road is hurting you and those you care about. Every mile defiles your thoughts about women and girls and affects the way you treat your mother, sister, friend, co-worker, wife, daughter and the rest of us. You can't consume degrading depictions and descriptions of women and 'teens' and continue to treat us with respect as human beings."
LaRue would do better to look to her own "house" for the sources of disrespect for women, starting with Genesis 3:15-17 – "And I will put enmity between thee and the woman ... [b]ecause thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it" – or Genesis 19:8, where Lot, the holy guy, whose visit by a couple of angels is disturbed by the crowd outside, says, "Behold now, I have two daughters which have not known man; let me, I pray you, bring them out unto you, and do ye to them as is good in your eyes; only unto these men do nothing" – in other words, "take my virgin daughters and do whatever you want with them as long as you leave my guests alone" – or the fact that even today, one sect of Christianity won't allow women to become priests – or the Promise Keepers organization, which treats women as second-class citizens.
While we're gratified that LaRue actually reads AVN articles, we're saddened that she doesn't appear to understand some of them.
