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While not a staunch believer in the free market, I think that this is one case where Americans have voted with their dollars.

The Adult industry is a multi-billion dollar industry, supported by millions of Americans. I have yet to see any kind of report that links pornography to any social ills (unless you consider pornography to be, in and of itself, a social ill, which I don't), whether it be sexual assault, high divorce rates, bankruptcy or just tired arms.

While there should certainly be measures in place to ensure that illicit materials don't reach the hands of children, I see no reason whatsoever why consenting adults should not be able to make pornographic material and distribute it to other consenting adults.

Well, obscenity is confusing because the courts have hopelessly confused it. There might be something to be said for an older definition of obscenity, which historian Rochelle Gurstein discusses at length in her 1996 book, The Repeal of Reticence. Obscenity exposes to the public what is and should be private.

"While the democratization of culture, sexual emanancipation, and the triumph of the avant-garde are usually presented as signs of progress... that story is only a partial one," Gurstein writes. "For there have been unexpected consequences of those victories. One of the most suprising and devastating is the way that intimacy -- which, for moderns is supposed to provide the deepest meanings -- has been stripped of the privacy it needs in order to flourish."

If that's too prude for you, I love how H.L. Mencken defined the limits of public expression in 1916. Mencken, as avid a crusader for free speech as this country has ever known, had strongly discouraged Theodore Dreiser from staging his play, "The Hand of the Potter." The protagonist of Dreiser's four-act tragedy rapes and murders a child, then commits suicide.

Mencken wrote:

I say the subject is forbidden on the stage, and I mean it. It is all very well enough to talk of artistic freedom, but it must be plain that there must be a limit in the theatre, as in books. You and I, if we are lucky, visit the bowel pot daily; as for me, I often have to leave a high-class social gathering to go out and piss; you, at least, have been known to roll a working girl on the couch. But such things, however natural, however interesting, are not for the stage....

...I daresay you will accuse me of a lingering prudishness. Accuse all you please; it is not so. If the thing were possible, I'd advocate absolutely unlimited freedom in speech, written and spoken. I think think world would be better off if I could tell a strange woman, met at a church social, that I have diarrhoea;

-- if the stage could be used to set up a more humane attitude toward sexual perverts, who are helpless and unhappy folks;

-- if novels and other books could describe the precise process of reproduction, beginning with the hand-shake and ending with lactation, and so show the young what a bore it is. But these things are forbidden. The overwhelming weight of opinion is against them. The man who fights for them is as absurd as the man who fights for the right to walk down Broadway naked, and with his gospel pipe in his hand. Both waste themselves upon futile things while sound and valuable things remain to be done.

(From The Dreiser-Mencken Letters, vol. 1, pp. 281-282, edited by Thomas P. Riggio)

Suffice to say, I agree. But the "overwhelming weight of opinion" has gone the other way. And clearly we're well beyond the point of no return.

Chief is right that obscenity is still illegal in America. However, if you can look at two pictures of nekkid growups doing naughty things and tell me which one is legally "obscene" and which one merely "indecent" -- and you can't file charges on indecency -- well, I'll give you a cigar.

Ben and I spent a little time talking about this today, and we ended up possibly more confused than when we started the conversation. Why?

Because here is the so-called "Miller" test created by the Supreme Court to determine the standard for obscene material:

# Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
# Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions [2] specifically defined by applicable state law,
# Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

This is all very much "eye of the beholder" stuff -- or, more famously, "I know it when I see it" territory. How you bring charges, then, is beyond me -- unless, of course, you're a federal prosecutor (or Justice Department) more interested in racking up political points than easy convictions. It's a mess.

I am SO SICK AND TIRED of pornography and
of HOW MANY homes it is destroying!! It has caused massive amounts of divorce, bankruptcy,addictions and SO many more problems. If people REALLY need it then maybe they should at least try to keep it outside of the home. Not that the word NEED really fits there it's more of a want either way you get the picture.