It's a holiday!

[yendi]

Hey, kids! It's Send George Bush an Issue of Barely Legal Week!

Seriously, could someone please tell me what the fuck pornography's "debilitating" effect on communities and families is? I mean, if they just want to protect us from bad porn (and porn takes Sturgeon's Law to the extreme), that's fine. Ditto child porn, or any other instance in which consent is lacking. But this is horseshit.

Remember: When anyone claims that they're "doing it for the children" (or any variant on that phrase), they often as not using the children as an excuse to do something they shouldn't.

Comments

[kaine-maxwell.livejournal.com]

Gotta love scapegoating.

[dslartoo.livejournal.com]

What I find particularly amusing about that page is the way "exploi-ta-tion" is spelled hyphenated (it's in the third paragraph). I read that, and I think about our shrub of a president struggling to pronounce the word without the hyphens to make it clear where the syllables are, and the reason for writing it that way becomes clear.

What an idiot. I may put up my own disgusted entry about this later.

cheers,
Phil

[reprobayt.livejournal.com]

I just think if it was poorly named....should have been 'Protection Against Child Pornography"

[bardiphouka.livejournal.com]

Can we declare a protection against Bush week? oh wait..that is next November

[melanie.livejournal.com]

what is debilitating to families and communities is the stark lack of JOBS, hello.


god, i hate that man.

[yendi]

I'm actually surprised it wasn't. It would be much more effective to start with something no one opposes, and then bury comments about real porn in the text itself.

[morenasangre.livejournal.com]

I think it's in how different groups of readers are defining pornography. This is a really hot button for me and I stopped reading comments in shadesong's journal because I was getting too pissed.

I do know people who have pornography addictions that are destroying their lives and marriages. Pornongraphy is not, for the most part, evil in and of itself any more than gambling is, but, like gambling, it can have severly damaging effects.

I have no problem with most pornography (barring that which involves serious bondage and forcible sexual acts and child pornography), but I do think that it, like most other things, should be made available to those who want it rather than being public. Internet porn is frequently disturbingly intrusive. On computers here at work, students doing research frequently come up with popups involving close-ups of genitalia, and our work email is flooded with solicitations for websites, again frequently involving colorful images.

I'm a libertarian. Pretty muchly whatever you want to look at/ do in your own space is lovely with me, as long as it doesn't violate someone else's rights. I think Playboy is rather artistic most of the time, and I hate the American Puritanical association of all nudity with sexuality. But treating people as objects and forcing the entire notion of sexuality on every aspect of our lives is offensive to me.

And we won't even go into kiddie porn and the impact of pop-up pornography on children under the age of 5 or 6.

Hell, the rant probably doesn't even make sense, but shrugging off "porn" as a category without a clear, if personal, definition of what it means and without a delineation between Playboy and Penis popups (not a snack food) as many folks are doing just, quite frankly, pisses me off.

[amokk]

The problem is that the "protection week" is actually against child pornography. The first sentence says "families are affected by porn" and then everything else is all about stronger protection of children protection laws against child pornography, not general porn.

That's my problem with it. It should be "Protection from Child Porn Week" and then it'd actually be called what it is.

It's mislabeled to pander to the Religious zealots who hate all porn and can't be bothered to actually read the text anyway. "See, he's protecting us from porn! Praise Bush!" when it's not what they'll claim it is.

[amokk]

Actually it's easier to make the headline general that the base constituents want and put the actual meaning in the text that zealots aren't going to bother to read, anyway.

Why call it "Infringe on the Civil Rights of American Citizens Week" when they can call it "Protection of Marriage Week" ? Why specialize when now the preachers can get out and say "See, Bush is protecting us from the evils of the pornography business! They're all a target now!" when in fact they're not, but zealots can't read (they can't read the bible obviously, or they ignore the "love thy neighbor" bits).

It's the base pandering that annoys me on this one.

[sibylla.livejournal.com]

Ooh! Thanks for reminding me! I've put you back on my sex and kink filters. :)

[jerel.livejournal.com]

You make perfect sense to me. I'm extremely liberal when it comes to doing whatever you want as long as no harm comes to any children, animals, other people's property, or non-involved adult parties.

I have no interest in porn. I get pissed off as all hell when it finds me, whether it's in the form of popups or spam. I know not to open the e-mail, but sometimes those popups are impossible to get rid of--although 12 Ghosts has stopped all that. I think more needs to be done for those of us who don't want to be advertised to, while at the same time not restricting access to adults.

[yendi]

Makes sense to me. The term "porn" really is too broad to be addressed this cavalierly. My big problem with the way the proclamation reads is that Bush is taking the term "porn," and basically treating it as if it were child porn. That manages to obfuscate any potential cautions that might need to actually be made about porn (the potential addiction factor). He's not doing anyone any favors here.

And I've got to agree on the whole pop-up situation. I really do believe that the flip side of free speech is being able to choose to not have it forced upon you.