If you believe an attorney allied with the Free Speech Coalition, Internet pornography is an economic steroid shot. If you believe the woman whose affair with Gary Hart sank his Presidential hopes in 1988, online porn is a threat to children. And, if you believe a leading libertarian think tank attorney, the broadest possible interpretation of the First Amendment is not going to send the country down the primrose path.
That was the drift last Friday at a heated National Press Club debate on Internet pornography, a forum which included anti-porn representatives, free speech attorney Jeffrey Douglas, Hart's former mistress Donna Rice Hughes, and others on both sides of the issue.
Net porn, Douglas says, is a good thing. It is "a home-grown American product" which provides work, tax dollars, and billions for the economy, says the Free Speech Coalition attorney. Meanwhile, he and the FSC have a standing $10,000 offer for the conviction of anyone producing child porn --with the group already paying that reward at least once, he says.
That wasn't good enough for Hughes. "Children are not safe on the Internet," she says. "The innocence of children continues to be sacrificed on the altar of the First Amendment." About the only thing on which Douglas and Hughes agreed, Reuters says, is the value of the online porn business - over $1 billion.
And there's an excellent reason why the industry is so large, says former adult film star and current Free Speech Coalition president Gloria Leonard. "We've got what everybody wants," she told the panel, "regardless of whether they want to admit they want it."
But Leonard, too, is concerned about protecting children from porn, echoing remarks she made in various settings during last week's East Coast Video Show in Atlantic City. "If you haven't consented, it's an invasion of privacy," Leonard says, adding parents must be able to prevent their children's access to online and other porn.
However, says Solveig Singleton, an attorney with the libertarian Cato Institute, there are limits to what a parent can control, even if they're using filtering software and putting their computer in the living room. "That probably isn't going to stop a really determined teenage boy," she says. "On the other hand, one can question whether anything would."
