The Anti-Sam Brownback Blog

Another day, another mention of Brownback in the Family Research Council’s newsletter. This time it is about a porn survey conducted by Morality in Media. With a name like that, I am sure they are completely non biased. In any case, here is what they found:

…three quarters of Americans want the Justice Department to strictly enforce laws against pornography. Bob Peters is with the media watchdog.

“77 percent of the public support this new effort and over 60 percent said that they strongly supported it. I think that’s an indication that the American people are not, on the whole, pleased with this proliferation of hardcore pornography in our society.”

At the same time, child pornography is a multi-billion dollar commercial enterprise, and is among the fastest growing businesses on the Internet. Kansas Senator Sam Brownback says the proliferation of obscenity bears careful scrutiny.

“We’re seeing this now impact marriages in such a significant way and society overall and yet it continues to spread and we have not been as concerned about it as we need to be.”

They do not include the questions asked in the survey, nor do they include a data chart so that we can see the raw numbers. On the basis of this alone, I would not consider this survey to be scientific or at all accurate. The first rule of fundamentalist Christian polling? Do not let the peons view polling data for they may draw conclusions not sanctioned by the Holy One, James Dobson.

Looking past the glaring statistical omissions, there is another problem with this poll. Most Americans will rail against porn in public and then consume it in private. Perhaps the most famous case is Utah v. Larry Peterman. Peterman was a video rental store owner who has a section of the store devoted to “adult” titles. He was charged under a Utah obscenity law and subsequently acquitted after it was shown that his store did not run afoul of the Miller Test. What was the most important piece of evidence? The NYT explains:

The 1973 Supreme Court case Miller v. California established a threshold for defining illegal pornography; a major test was that it had to be considered obscene to the “average person, applying contemporary community standards.”

[Mr. Peterman’s] lawyer argued that Mr. Peterman was not violating community standards, because people in Utah County bought 20,000 adult sex videos from one satellite programmer alone in the period that Mr. Peterman was said to have broken the law; it was double the volume in most cities the size of Provo. And in the Provo Marriott, guests were paying for nearly 3,000 explicit adult videos every year, according to court testimony.

Hmmmm. So the largest public opponents of pornography are likely its largest private consumers. That’s why I don’t believe this survey. People aren’t going to support pornography over the phone to a stranger.

I mentioned at the beginning of the post that Brownback get yet another mention in the FRC’s newsletter. These hearings on pornography have garnered him a decent amount of attention in religious circles. This is a continuation of his strategy to inflame his base. Brownback needs to scare his base into voting for him so he uses themes that scare and validate the concerns of religious fundamentalists. His campaign slogan could be “Gays, Abortion Doctors and Porn… They’re Commin’ to git ya!”