LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

Americablog leads off with this thought:

The theocrats are all about taking away privacy rights: a woman's right to choose, contraception, sodomy, porn. It's all about sex. Their sex obsession is just out of control...and it affects all of our privacy on so many levels.

ThinkProgress picks up the thread:

Just three days after President Bush enlisted porn star Mary Carey and pornographer Mark Kulkis to help him raise $23 million, I was surprised to receive this message from Family Research Council President Tony Perkins:

I just met with Attorney General Gonzales and right now he is launching a major effort to prosecute the porn industry. He intends to smash these criminal enterprises on the Internet and elsewhere with a special new obscenity strike force.

The first step to crippling the porn industry: drain their resources by encouraging large political contributions.

And here's the Family Research Council's take on the whole mess:

Unless we stop it, hardcore pornographers will soon be allowed to expand their evil empires on the Internet. They will be given even more opportunities to flood our homes, libraries and society with pornography. The Internet Corporation for Assigning Names and Numbers (ICANN), the Internet's governing body, has indicated that it will establish an ".XXX domain" for porn Web sites. This may seem at first like a good idea but it has been considered and rejected as ineffectual for years. Some think is that it will clean up the .com domain where thousands of porn sites are located. But it will NOT require pornographers who are on the .com domain to relocate to the .xxx domain. Instead, they will keep their current .com porn sites and EXPAND their empires to the .XXX domain.

Others naively suggest that passing a new law to force pornographer to move to .XXX will solve the problem but let me assure you that that won't work either. Law means nothing to hardcore pornographers. There already is a law prohibiting them from selling hardcore porn on the Internet - anywhere on the Internet -- yet they've been doing it for years. They can be prosecuted under federal obscenity or RICO laws which not only provide very heavy fines and jail time but also forfeiture of all their assets. So what is needed is not another new law -- which will likely be tied up in the courts for years -- but vigorous prosecution under current laws, and a good filter on your computer. I just met with Attorney General Gonzales and right now he is launching a major effort to prosecute the porn industry. He intends to smash these criminal enterprises on the Internet and elsewhere with a special new obscenity strike force. That is the only way to handle hardcore pornographers! Also, our legal experts say that a law telling pornographers to move out of .com would be struck down as unconstitutional. The .XXX proposal gives false hope to parents that the problem of Internet porn will be solved. It will increase, not decrease porn, on the Internet.

I agree with Americablog- it isn't about porn, it's about privacy and control- especially the control of women. Even when the porn industry creates its own safehaven, the religious ranters won't back down. They won't back down until every sexual act is regulated in a hetrosexual, monogomous, unprotected manner, not for pleasure but to produce children. Anything else- if they gain complete control of our government- will be punishable up to and including death.