Long-time readers may recall a report from way back in 2005 about Bush’s [tag]Justice Department[/tag] taking [tag]pornography[/tag] prosecutions seriously. After several far-right groups complained that the administration failed to take on porn aggressively in its first term, Alberto Gonzales announced that the DoJ would devote considerable resources to a war on smut, described at the time as “one of the top priorities” of Gonzales and [tag]FBI[/tag] Director Robert Mueller.
The crackdown was separate and independent from child pornography, and was intended to specifically target materials for consenting adults.
Whatever happened to this initiative? The Salt Lake Tribune fills us in with a profile on [tag]Brent Ward[/tag], the “nation’s porn prosecutor.”
Anti-pornography crusaders are glad to have Ward on the job.
“He’s one of my heroes,” said Phil Burress, president of Citizens for Community Values. “I wish the Department of Justice was full of Brent Wards.” […]
The way Ward sees it, American culture is saturated with pornography, and it has profound consequences, eroding families, increasing violence against women, warping perceptions of sex and helping child predators groom victims.
“We’re not going to prosecute it away, but it’s important, I think, that Americans see their government trying to do something about it,” he said.
In other words, federal agents can’t use the power of the government to interfere with what adults want to watch — but they can try.
And to help in this endeavor, Ward heads a federal task force with four prosecutors, 10 FBI agents, and a postal inspector, which is an even bigger squad than the Republican Congress initially asked the administration to put together.
As one exasperated FBI agent noted when the task force was being put together, “I guess this means we’ve won the war on terror. We must not need any more resources for espionage.”
Two other quick thoughts. One, Ward seems intent on not just prosecuting obscenity violations, but actually eliminating adult materials from the marketplace.
In a case Ward says opened his eyes to pornography’s harm, he battled “dial-a-porn” phone sex lines that allowed children to make countless calls to hear explicit material. And he essentially closed the last two X-rated theaters in Utah after convicting their owner on tax charges.
He testified about pornography’s dangers before a commission created by Attorney General Edwin Meese and in 1985 recommended a strategy for “testing the endurance” of pornographers by charging them in several states to crush them financially.
“As profitable as these enterprises may be, there is a limit to the prison terms, fines and forfeiture of assets to which obscenity distributors will subject themselves,” Ward wrote. Meese launched a major pornography crackdown and Ward was picked to lead a group of U.S. attorneys, advising the attorney general on obscenity matters.
Several companies buckled and closed, but P.H.E., Inc., a North Carolina-based mail-order company, fought back, arguing the anti-porn strategy was an abuse of prosecutorial power.
Wade Smith, a lawyer who defended P.H.E., said Ward took a hard line in his distaste for pornography.
“He was unwilling to acknowledge that there was a place for any kind of adult material in the framework of the First Amendment,” including publications like Playboy, Smith said. “As a matter of fact, he was extremely and completely rigid in wanting us out of business.”
And second, this seems destined to fail. Miserably. By some estimates, this is a $12 billion industry, suggesting that the free market has spoken.
Ward may not like it, but it seems there are a whole lot of Americans spending a whole lot of money on this stuff. Some of them are probably even religious and conservative — because there aren’t enough heathens with enough disposable income to bolster this kind of lucrative industry.