{"id":436,"date":"2003-11-10T13:50:53","date_gmt":"2003-11-10T21:50:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2003\/11\/10\/censorship-of-porn-sites-why-should-we-care\/"},"modified":"2003-11-10T13:50:53","modified_gmt":"2003-11-10T21:50:53","slug":"censorship-of-porn-sites-why-should-we-care","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=436","title":{"rendered":"Censorship of porn sites: Why should we care?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jim Leitzel – normally of Vice Squad<\/a>, but in this instance <\/a>guest-blogging on Crescat Sententia – reports that the Federal Government is cracking down on the owners of “Extreme Associates.” According to an ABC News report <\/a>from August:<\/p>\n

One of the confiscated movies, Forced Entry<\/i>, features three graphic scenes of women being spat upon, raped and murdered. Extreme Teens #24 <\/i>has adult women dressed up and acting like little girls in various hard-core pornographic scenes. We can’t even tell you the title of one of the films.<\/div>\n

Jim also links to the case of a couple in Dallas who were “found guilty of three federal obscenity charges last month.” Following the link Jim provides<\/a>, we learn that<\/p>\n

Garry Layne Ragsdale and Tamara Michelle Ragsdale conspired together, and with others, to sell and distribute obscene video tapes depicting rape scenes through the Internet and the United States mail. The Ragsdales, doing business as G Rags, Inc., owned, managed and maintained a World Wide Web site on the Internet called “geschlecht.com.” The web page was named “The Rape Video Store,” where the
\nRagsdales offered obscene video tapes depicting rape scenes, which they categorized on the website as the “Real Rape Video Series” and the “Brutally Raped Video Series.”<\/div>\n

And in an earlier post on Crecat<\/a>, Jim links to “an amazing case”<\/a> of “a couple in California who ran an Internet bulletin board was found guilty in Tennessee of purveying obscenity. (The same material might not have been considered to be obscene in California, which has different “community standards.”)” Following the link, it turns out that once again the material being prosecuted involved pornographic depictions of rape.<\/p>\n

I wonder, is there a pattern here?<\/p>\n

First Amendment lawyer Lawrence Walters, discussing the Extreme Associates case<\/a>, fails to provide any independent reason we should care if Extreme’s customers are deprived of the chance to jack off to images of women being brutalized and raped. Instead, Lawrence suggests a “slippery slope” argument: we must defend Extreme Associates or Playboy <\/i>magazine will be next! This argument assumes two things: first, that censorship of Extreme Associates will reliably (or even probably) lead to the censorship of Playboy<\/i>, and second, that it would be an unbearable loss to culture if Playboy<\/i> was unavailable.<\/p>\n

Putting aside the question of why we should care if Playboy<\/i> ceases to exist, I have to wonder – is there any evidence to support the theory that censorship of extreme rape porn will inevitably lead to the censorship of soft porn? After all, child pornography has been aggressively censored for decades, without any apparent “slippery slope” effect completely destroying our other free speech rights. If child pornography is any example, it should be possible to aggressively censor rape pornography without suffering any unbearable slippery slope effects..<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jim Leitzel – normally of Vice Squad, but in this instance guest-blogging on Crescat Sententia – reports that the Federal Government is cracking down on the owners of “Extreme Associates.” According to an ABC News report from August: One of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[91,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-436","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-free-speech-censorship-copyright-law-etc","category-sex-work-porn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=436"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/436\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=436"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=436"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=436"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}