WASHINGTON -- If you're a dot-com sex star, if you lurk on alt.sex.stories, or if your home page happens to be thehun.net, then you may be a "victim" of pornography.
No, don't laugh. An entirely serious coalition of antiporn groups is celebrating "Victims of Pornography" month in May, and they're hoping their efforts will climax with more prosecutions of smut sellers.
It may seem unseemly to toast a month that's by design a dour affair, but now that a Republican lives in the White House, conservatives are mounting an unadulterated campaign to save the sexploited.
On the victimsofpornography.org site, visitors are urged to become active against ostensibly unwholesome erotica by meeting with religious leaders, planning a motorcade with white ribbons and writing letters to local newspapers.
The festivities began Wednesday on Capitol Hill with an event attended by Reps. Steve Largent (R-Oklahoma) and Jim Ryun (R-Kansas), along with groups and individuals who offered testimonials to the perils of prurience.
Largent took the opportunity to fault former President Bill Clinton for not enforcing obscenity statutes. "It's a disease that has to be stopped," Largent said. "And we have the cure."
The cure, Largent and his allies believe, is enforcement of federal laws already on the books -- especially increased prosecution of "obscene" websites. (Antiporn activists in the past have lobbied the Clinton administration to file more online obscenity cases, saying that the relatively few federal lawsuits against pornographers demonstrates that the administration has neglected to protect children online.)
"The attorney general has made both public and private statements that he intends to enforce all the laws, including the obscenity laws," said Bruce Taylor, president of the National Law Center for Children and Families.
"Nothing will probably change at the department for a few months," predicts Taylor, a former Justice Department lawyer. "They haven't hired obscenity prosecutors." But once they get going, "they'll start with the bigger fish."
What that means, most likely, is a rash of lawsuits aimed at sites that meet a number of criteria: high traffic, for-profit, and really, really, raunchy.
Fortunately for the sex hounds out there, it's not illegal to download or store "obscene" material on your computer -- the law only applies to people distributing it. (Unless it's child pornography, of course.)
A U.S. court can only rule a publication or website to be obscene if it meets standards described in the Supreme Court's 1973 Miller v. California case. The court said obscene publications are those that appeal to the "prurient interest," depict offensive sexual conduct, and lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
Critics say such laws violate free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.
Edward de Grazia, one of the founders of Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, outlines in Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius how obscenity prosecutions imperiled James Joyce's Ulysses, Lenny Bruce's monologues, and 2 Live Crew's lyrics. Obscenity law was even broad enough to convict Mike Diana, a cartoonist, for gruesome drawings.
Victims of Pornography month is "a very thinly veiled attempt to censor the reading and entertainment choices of a vast majority of Americans," says Gary Daniels, a spokesman for the National Coalition Against Censorship.
Daniels argues that activists should worry about themselves rather than trying to regulate the lives of others. "The great thing about living in America is that if you don't want to look at something you don't have to," he said.
The antiporn activists don't see it quite the same way. In recent years, activists from groups such as the Family Research Council and Morality in Media have been trying to make the case that pornography affects not just its consumers, but society as a whole.
Vickie Burress, national coordinator for the Victims of Pornography Campaign, defends research that has often been faulted as anecdotal, linking pornography consumption to rape and child abuse.
"People who are counseling sex addicts can tell you first hand, and that's our biggest proof," Burress says. She adds: "When you find a child that has been molested and pornography that mimics that molestation, it's obvious what happened."
When the Justice Department will start obscenity prosecutions is not yet clear, but both sides are already gearing up for a fight.
NLC's Taylor hopes that the government will target some pornography consumers to make examples out of them.
As for how the government could find targets for such a prosecution without spying on the public, Taylor muses: "They can investigate complaints. Maybe a wife or a girlfriend could find this stuff on a guy's computer and turn it into the cops."
And what about someone speaking out for the rights of the porn enthusiast? "No one's going to stand up and say 'I view pornography, I'm one of the silent majority,'" said Daniels, a free speech advocate -- who probably hasn't spent much time on Usenet.
"But if people didn't want these things and buy them, they would cease to exist."
- Ryan Sager contributed to this report.*
