{"id":5814,"date":"2005-11-11T13:15:04","date_gmt":"2005-11-11T18:15:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/?p=5814"},"modified":"2005-11-11T13:15:04","modified_gmt":"2005-11-11T18:15:04","slug":"brownbacks-hard-core-hearings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/brownbacks-hard-core-hearings\/","title":{"rendered":"Brownback’s hard-core hearings"},"content":{"rendered":"

Call me crazy, but I think there’s something deeply amusing about the fact that Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), perhaps the most socially conservative member in the Senate, holds hearings with the most explicit sexual content<\/a> on the Hill.<\/p>\n

“I think most Americans agree and know that pornography is bad. They know that it involves exploitive images of men and women, and that it is morally repugnant and offensive,” Brownback said, kicking off a hearing of the Senate’s Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Property Rights, which he chairs. “What most Americans don’t know is how harmful pornography is to its users and their families.”<\/p>\n

With those words, Brownback kicked off a 90-minute discussion of hardcore sex scenes, self-gratification and its negative impacts. “This is not just a simple, benign form of expression, but rather a potentially addictive substance,” explained one of the subcommittee’s panelists, Jill Manning, a sociologist from Brigham Young University. “People watch a movie, read a book, listen to music, but they masturbate to pornography.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, for political purposes, there are a number of ways of approaching this kind of hearing. One could ask, for example, why senators don’t have anything better to do than engage in a couple of hours of official talk about masturbation. Someone else might note that the hearings are pretty wasteful since no senator, including Brownback, has even offered legislation to address the “porn problem.” A less charitable observer might note that the FBI already has this covered, asking its agents to watch more porn<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But my favorite angle on this is Brownback’s deep, personal interest in the subject. He not only called yesterday’s lengthy hearing on the subject, it is, as Salon’s Michael Scherer noted<\/a>, Brownback’s third<\/em> committee hearing in just over a year on sex.<\/p>\n

One might even call it a fixation on the subject.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Call me crazy, but I think there’s something deeply amusing about the fact that Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), perhaps the most socially conservative member in the Senate, holds hearings with the most explicit sexual content on the Hill. “I think most Americans agree and know that pornography is bad. They know that it involves exploitive […]<\/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-5814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5814","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=5814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5814\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}