This time around, it is certain members of the Kansas State Senate and community activists who are not happy with reading material being given to students in the Blue Valley School District who appear to have missed at least one prong of the Miller test in their zeal to clean up Kansas’ classroom reading lists.

According to a report from the Kansas City Star, Sen. Karin Brownlee has proposed a measure that would “require school boards in the state to review supplemental classsroom materials that parents might challenge as obscene.”

“What’s acceptable in San Francisco may not be in Kansas,” Brownlee reportedly said to the House Education Committee. “Let the school board set the community standard.”

Fair enough — but what parents “might challenge as obscene” and what can be considered legally obscene are two very different kettles of fish, as I’ve blogged about before.

Apparently, one of the books that have drawn the ire of Blue Valley parents is Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses.” The book has some tough stuff in it, no doubt, and it is arguably not the sort of the thing that is appropriate for kids — however, there is no way one can claim the book is legally obscene.

Now, obviously I can't reproduce the work "as a whole" here, but a quick look at one of its passages will give some idea why I object to the book being termed "obscene."

”What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardent hearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.”

Clearly, these are words that appeal to the “prurient interest,” right? How much more “patently offensive” does it get?

Anybody who argues that the book “lacks serious literary value” (as a work must in order to be considered legally obscene) frankly doesn’t know the first thing about literature. To claim that McCarthy’s work is not literature is not just disingenuous, it is delusional.

This is not to say that parents are ‘wrong’ to think that McCarthy’s work is inappropriate reading for children. I’m not closed to that argument, and I do think parents should get fairly considerable say in what their children read, watch or otherwise consume, especially during their child's early, formative years.

To frame this discussion as an obscenity issue, however, is absurd — "patently" so, I’d have to say.

Some years later, a friend of mine introduced me to a game called Dungeons and Dragons. Clearly, I thought, this Gary Gygax fellow who created this game shares my obsession with Tolkien.

Soon, I had a new obsession, and I found myself playing D&D for hours - even days - at a time. Along with a small, tight-knit circle of friends, I hunched over a large wooden table and rolled the dice, over and over, with vivid visions of the fantasy world ever present in my head.

Without exaggeration, I can credit Gygax and his creations with helping my young mind develop, and helping me to become a better thinker.

Prior to getting into playing D&D, math was something I regarded as an unavoidable nuisance imposed on me in the interests of providing me a "well-rounded education." As I eventually moved into the role of Dungeon Master for my small group of D&D enthusiasts, the constant calculating of small numbers contributed to improved math skills, and an fostered an interest in math that I likely never would have developed otherwise.

D&D also cemented for me the idea that fantasies are an important part of being human. The very act of creating something, whether it be art, literature, or a body of science, is rooted it fantasy, rooted in the question “what if?” Few people have inspired more young minds to ask “what if” than did Gary Gygax.

Here’s hoping the fruits of his creativity continue to inspire, enthrall and enlighten future generations for decades to come.

May you rest in peace, Dungeon Master.

Believe it or not, that last one may not be a crime under current Wisconsin law, even though having sex with a live animal clearly is against state law.

According to a recent opinion issued by the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, Wisconsin’s law prohibiting “committing an act of sexual gratification with an animal” apparently does not cover having sex with animal carcasses.

From the court’s discussion:
“Hathaway first argues his conviction should be reversed because the term ‘animal’ in WIS. STAT. § 944.17(2)(c) does not include an animal carcass. He rather convincingly contends that ‘animal’ means a living creature.”

Fortunately for Wisconsin’s authorities, residents and yet-to-be-violated deer carcasses, Mr. Hathaway pleaded ‘no contest’ to the charge when it was first entered, and as the court observed, a “plea of guilty or no contest waives all nonjurisdictional defects and defenses.”

Rest in Peace, Bambi’s mom — you’re safe, for now.

What is curious to me is that debates about porn so often seek to answer questions that are flawed — and arguably irrelevant — to begin with.

Obviously, not porn is not “necessarily” degrading to women — a pretty decent percentage of it features no women whatsoever, after all. (Gay porn, anybody?)

Can porn be “empowering?” Let’s suppose the answer is no — is empowering people now a requirement for products and publications? Do tabloid newspapers “empower” the women that they routinely ridicule in their “worst beach bodies” and “best/worst dressed” articles? If not, should they be banned as “harmful?”

As much as I despise tabloids, I would never advocate banning or censoring them. If people choose to waste their time reading that trash, so be it. It's their time to waste, and it's not my place to stop them.

All things considered, these debate points are largely.... well, 'pointless,' I’d have to say.

Of course some porn is demeaning to women; some of it is quite demeaning to men, as well. The same can be said of many works of literature, many jobs, many laws, many religious texts — the list goes on and on.

If we were to hold all expressive products to the standards that these questions imply, we would have to kiss goodbye a great many works that are cherished by society — some of which are cherished by the same people that would like to see porn banned. The works of Charles Bukowski and Charles Baudelaire come to mind — hell, the Bible comes to mind, for that matter.

Forget about free speech for a minute; we’re supposed to have a free market in this country. We can buy products that gradually turn our lungs into cancer-riddled sacks, products that turn our livers into useless lumps of Swiss cheese, and food products that hardly meet the definition of “food.”

And some people actually think that providing “empowerment” is a hurdle that porn must clear? Please.

Update: AVN has corrected their article since I originally posted this entry. The headline now reads "China Shut Down 44,000 Porn Sites in 2007."

Normally, I opt out of criticizing XBIZ's competition; everybody makes mistakes, and it likely wouldn't take long to find errors and problems in my own work. Having said that, a situation arose today that simply begged for comment....

I was a bit surprised to find a headline on AVN this morning stating "U.K. Shut Down 44,000 Porn Sites in 2007." One reason for my surprise was that I had researched and written a piece for XBIZ stating the same thing -- only in reference to the Chinese government.

"In 2007, the United Kingdom shut down 44,000 pornographic websites, arrested 868 people and penalized nearly 2,000 people involved in Internet porn activities, BBC News reported Wednesday," stated the lead in AVN's article.

That's odd... the Chinese government shut down precisely the same number of websites, and arrested exactly the same number of people in 2007, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency.

For that matter, the only article I could find on the subject from the BBC reported the same facts, citing Xinhua as its source.

Unless one of the most staggering statistical coincidences in the history of mankind has taken place, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that AVN's reporter got it wrong.

On top of the reporting from Xinhua that served as my primary source of information, the Associated Press and other mainstream news outlets reported the same thing - China is where the crackdown in question took place.

It's a bit baffling to me how someone could confuse the U.K. and China, really. Among other things, while the U.K. has implemented some fairly stringent retrictions regarding "violent pornography," I suspect we would all have heard by now if there were a nationwide crackdown on Internet porn happening in the U.K.

This situation also highlights an interesting aspect of misinformation in the Digital Age; because AVN's article was broadcast via their RSS feed, that same inaccurate story may well be replicated on other sites that carry the feed.

The moral of the story is "check your facts" - especially if you plan to pass those facts along in automated fashion.

Danny Baugh, Redding’s former construction manager, referred to City Hall as a “cornucopia of inappropriate e-mail” and essentially put the blame for his own work affairs with three women, and his around-work distribution of pornography on the existing highly sexualized work environment that he stepped into when he took the job.

This paragraph of a report from the Redding Record Searchlight stood out in particular:

“Baugh told investigators he was "weaned on pornography" from the moment he arrived at City Hall in October 2002 to supervise Big League Dreams sports park construction. The porn circulated among managers, top administrators and even City Council members, Baugh told private investigator Diane Davis, declining to name names.”

He was “weaned on pornography” at City Hall, eh? That claim sounds pretty dubious, but more details that have emerged do tend to support Baugh’s general assertions concerning the workplace climate there. Consider this gem from the same Record Searchlight report:

“Randy Bachman, the former assistant city manager, was in the porn loop along with Bachman's lover at City Hall, who was also a friend of Baugh’s, documents show. Bachman, who had regularly played tennis and golf with Baugh, resigned in September after admitting to having an affair on city property.”

What is it with the Redding City Hall and all these love affairs? Are they pumping pheromones through the HVAC system?

Don’t fret, though; according to Baugh, current City Manager Kurt Starman knew nothing of the circulating porn or percolating love affairs. Indeed, Baugh was insistent that Starman is a “stellar individual and a good Christian man” — and we all know that good Christian men never get involved in sexual hanky panky…. just ask Ted Haggard.

There is a substantial difference between doing something that you regret and being forced to do something against your will. The former is unfortunate — and we’ve all been there — but the latter is… well, often criminal.

The lesson of the ‘warning’ thread posted about Kink.com on GFY, in my opinion, is that if you have remorse about a decision or series of decisions that you have made, your best option is to suck it up and learn from the experience — not to make half-baked accusations that someone else has wronged you.

I suppose it’s possible that Kink.com and its representatives are inaccurately characterizing what took place, but the pre- and post-scene interviews clearly create a great deal of doubt as to the model’s (or, more accurately, the model’s friend’s) claims.

Oh – and there is a ‘sub-lesson’ (so to speak) to be learned here, as well: videotaping pre- and post-scene interviews is very, very wise.... ;)

Romney pledged that if elected, he’ll “make sure that every computer has an easy-to-engage filter to stop pornography.”

Unless Romney’s plan involves engaging in a widespread campaign of surreptitious forced downloads targeting the existing personal computers of millions of Americans, I think we can assume that he didn’t intend that promise to be taken literally.

Setting aside the practical impossibility of Romney’s pledge, it is a useless promise at its core, anyway. Online content filters already are very easy to come by. The efficacy of these filters is debatable, but availability of filters certainly is not the problem.

If Romney really wants to help parents to address the ‘problem’ of Internet porn, he should be encouraging parents to take a more active role in the lives of their children, and take certain preventative measures to reduce the likelihood of their kids looking at porn online, or communicating with a supposed 12 year-old who turns out to be a middle-aged creep with bad intent. Some simple actions and practices that Mitt might consider endorsing include:

* Don’t allow your young children to have a PC in their own room. Place a computer in a common area where you can keep an eye on what your child is doing. A lurking parent and lack of opportunity to surf the web in private might be the most effective “filters” available.

* Your 9 year-old doesn’t need an iPhone. Why is it that every child appears to have a web-enabled mobile device these days? If you don’t want to increase the chance that your child will be exposed to pornography, harassed by cyber-bullies or stalked by online predators, perhaps increasing the number of opportunities for such things to occur is not the way to go? Just a thought.

* Teach your children a little something about sex BEFORE they start to learn about it on their own. I know this is a frightening suggestion for many parents, and it can be very “difficult;” but if someone along the way gave you the idea that raising kids would be a cinch, you have been profoundly misled. Raising your child is hard work and a big responsibility — but it is YOUR responsibility, and nobody forced you to have your kids. Get over your self-pity and talk to the little runts about something important every once in a while.

In the end, it is incumbent upon parents to prepare their children for the threats and risks associated with living in the real world, and to think that one can shelter kids from that world until they are adults is (a) wishful thinking and (b) a really lousy idea, even were it not wishful thinking.

There is no value in raising a child in denial of reality. There is no such thing as total safety; not from predators, not from terrorists — not even from ourselves. The sad fact is that the majority of abused children are abused by someone close to them, usually a family member. That is a truth that no filter can preempt and no law can address, unfortunately.

Rhetorical panaceas like Romney’s filter pledge are a distraction, another example of wishful thinking, and such fanciful notions detract from the crafting of real solutions to the challenges that face us in the Digital Age. In the end, the dilemma of how to keep kids as safe as they possibly can be when they are online might indeed involve technology, but technology alone will never be sufficient.

With the exponential increase in the amount of adult content being produced, distributed and consumed since the rise of the Internet, one would assume that there would also be general agreement as to which side is ‘winning’ this war — the adult industry, right?

Not so fast, says Focus on the Family’s Daniel Weiss. In a recent article on CitizenLink.com, Weiss echoes the words of James Dobson in calling his organization’s efforts part of a “winnable war” against pornography. As examples of recent successes, Weiss cites the following:

* “The state of Ohio recently passed a law banning lap dances and requiring sex shops to close by midnight. The strip clubs sued in federal court because, if the law stands, it will put many of them out of business. “

* “This year, an appeals court in Kentucky found a law regulating sexually oriented businesses in Louisville to be constitutional, clearing the path to clean up the more than 200 sex shops in the city. Similar laws have been upheld this year in Michigan, Florida and Texas.”

* “Churches in the Kansas City area have circulated petitions to convene grand juries to investigate porn shops over violations of obscenity law.”

Fair enough. The ‘decency’ side has had a few recent ‘victories’ in the brick and mortar space. How did the battle go for their side on other fronts? Well….

* In October, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals found 2257 unconstitutional

* Also in October, a jury found only one of the four JM Productions DVDs at issue in a major obscenity case to be legally obscene, determining that neither “Filthy Things 6,” nor “American Bukkake 13” was obscene under the community standards of Phoenix, AZ.

* This month, Brigham Young University reported the results of their survey indicating that 49 percent of female college students surveyed find pornography acceptable.

With all due respect to the voices on either side of the issue, I’m not so sure this back-and-forth over adult entertainment and adult businesses is a “war,” or that if it is a war, that it can be “won.”

Adult entertainment will continue to be in high demand, regardless of how many white ribbons Focus on the Family and their peers string up in protest of porn’s popularity. On the flip side, adult businesses will continue to be subject to regulation and restriction under the law, no matter how loudly we proclaim such regulations to be unconstitutional, unfair or unnecessary.

In my view, this tussle between decency crusaders and adult entertainment advocates isn’t a war so much as it is a tug-of-war, with each side occasionally pulling a few inches of the slack in one direction, and then losing some portion of that rope back — and back and forth it goes, over years, decades, even centuries.

The overall trend of recent decades is a winning one for the adult industry, but in my opinion there will never be a decisive "tug;" one last pull that shields adult businesses from the prospects of obscenity prosecution and zoning restrictions, or that results in porn being banned, outright.

The good news here for both sides of the conflict, I think, is that "victory" is in the fight itself.

So long as both porn’s adversaries and its advocates are permitted to put their free speech rights to full use, firing rhetorical, legal and political guns at each other in pursuit of their own vision, society wins in the bargain. We get to hear from passionate people on both sides of the issue, and then - in classic, free market fashion - we let the chips fall where they may.

Where I come from, that’s not a “war,” it’s “democracy.”

From WMTW.com:

“Police in Lewiston say they will not pursue the obscenity complaint filed by a local resident over a sex education book.”

Although the article itself doesn’t state such, the headline indicates that the police believed the complaint to be “groundless.”

Chalk up a point for rationality — or maybe it is just plain “literacy.” Even if you agree with the woman who stole the book from the library in order to prevent it from falling into the hands of children, and believe that “It’s Perfectly Normal” is inappropriate for children, it’s clear that the book falls well short of meeting the legal definition of “obscene.”

Kudos are due to the Lewiston police for setting aside the hysteria and coming to the proper conclusion regarding “It’s Perfectly Normal.”