In the Clinton years, the Justice Department just didn’t care much about getting obscenity prosecutions. Janet Reno & Co. went after the most serious incidents — child pornography, for example — but were largely unconcerned with the more traditional adult fare.<\/p>\n
When John Ashcroft became attorney general, the right assumed it’d be a new day. Finally, they thought, we’d have a Justice Department that took federal pornography laws seriously. To a certain extent, they were right. The Justice Department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) has won 37 convictions since 2001. But as my friend PWalker mentioned to me this morning, Bush’s far-right friends aren’t even close to satisfied<\/a>.<\/p>\n When Attorney General John Ashcroft was lampooned for shrouding the bare-breasted statue at the Department of Justice, many expected he would reverse the eight-year decline in obscenity prosecutions under former President Bill Clinton. <\/p>\n But today, as Mr. Ashcroft prepares to vacate the highest law enforcement office in the land, anti-porn advocates are deeply disappointed with the Bush administration’s record — under Mr. Ashcroft’s guidance — for pursuing peddlers of smut.<\/p>\n President Bush “has a worse record in his first term than Clinton had,” says Patrick A. Trueman, who served as chief of the Justice Department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section (CEOS) under Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Some people are just never happy. “[The Bush administration’s Justice Department’s] philosophy has been to prosecute the most obscene material,” says Mr. Trueman, now a lawyer with the Family Research Council. Left untargeted, he says, is the more run-of-the-mill hard-core pornography that saturates the Internet and is easily purchased on hotel room television sets.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Yes, in an age of terrorism, the religious right is publicly condemning an arch-conservative attorney general for not going after federal prosecutions of pay-per-view porn in hotels.<\/p>\n The worst part of stories like these is that it makes the Bush gang seem moderate by comparison.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the Clinton years, the Justice Department just didn’t care much about getting obscenity prosecutions. Janet Reno & Co. went after the most serious incidents — child pornography, for example — but were largely unconcerned with the more traditional adult fare. When John Ashcroft became attorney general, the right assumed it’d be a new day. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3239","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\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3239\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nWhat, exactly, would activists like Patrick Trueman prefer to see from Ashcroft and his replacement?<\/p>\n