In the last few years, 67,000 citizens’ complaints have been deemed legitimate under the program and passed on to the Justice Department and federal prosecutors.<\/p>\n
That may help explain why no one — not Justice Department officials, not Mr. Wolf, not even the religious antipornography crusader who runs the program — seems eager to call the project a shining success.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
As it turns out, the Justice Department didn’t even want to launch this program, but had no choice because of Rep. Wolf’s unwelcome earmark. As a result, the agency has outsourced online obscenity searches to some retired law-enforcement officials, who apparently can’t find anything worth prosecuting.<\/p>\n
It’s not for a lack of effort.
\n<\/p>\n
The department Web site invites citizens to report material that they believe is obscene so it can be investigated and, perhaps, prosecuted. Clicking on the site to make a report takes the user to ObscenityCrimes.org, which is run by Morality in Media, the grant recipient.<\/p>\n
Morality in Media is a conservative religious group that has worked since 1962 to “rid the world of pornography” and whose headquarters is, improbably, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.<\/p>\n
Morality in Media has received two annual grants from Mr. Wolf’s earmarks and is hoping that Justice Department officials decide on their own to award a third, as Mr. Wolf’s ability to obtain an earmark for the program has apparently waned with the Democrats’ control of Congress.<\/p>\n
Department officials, however, seemed less than keen to talk about ObscenityCrimes.org.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Apparently, the whole thing is rather embarrassing. The Justice Department doesn’t take ObscenityCrimes.org very seriously, but does warn would-be complainants not to go looking for obscene content, in part because “men are particularly vulnerable to pornographic addiction.”<\/p>\n
It’s best left to the professionals — who, at last count, haven’t prosecuted anyone.<\/p>\n
Your tax dollars at work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Thanks to the efforts of Rep. Frank Wolf, a conservative Republican from Virginia, the Justice Department spends $150,000 a year to pay a handful of people to spend their afternoons reviewing sexual websites, to see whether they qualify as obscene material whose purveyors should be prosecuted. How’s that working out for the Bush administration? Not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12507","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12507\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}