Porn Industry Fears Mitt Romney's Desire to Suppress It (and Suppress Americans' Choices)
Susannah Breslin at Forbes talks to some people in the porn industry about what a Mitt Romney presidency might mean, including John Stagliano (who supports the Reason Foundation, which owns Reason magazine):
"They want to put me in jail, basically."
That's how porn director John Stagliano responds when I ask him what he thinks of the 2012 GOP platform, in particular one newly added sentence:
"Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced."
Two years ago, Stagliano was sitting in a Washington, D.C., courtroom, charged with seven counts of distributing obscenity.
Today, he's a free man, after federal court judge Richard J. Leon "dismissed with prejudice" several of the counts and for the remaining counts "granted the defendants' motion for judgment of acquittal under Rule 29."
But an anti-porn crusader says Mitt Romney has vowed if he's elected president, he'll ramp up obscenity prosecutions….
According to Patrick Trueman, who ran the Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section at the Department of Justice under President Reagan and President George H. W. Bush and who now runs Morality in Media, an anti-porn organization, Romney intends to launch a war on porn.
In a meeting with Alex Wong, Romney's foreign and legal policy director, Trueman says Wong told him, "Romney is sincere about this. He's convinced this has now had a terrible effect on society, and he will enforce the law."….
In 2007, Romney swore that if he were elected president, he would put a porn filter on every computer…..
This is the "small government" of Romney and too much of the modern Republican Party: a government big enough to violate the First Amendment blatantly and waste taxpayer money and lives trying to stop people from making and consuming products they enjoy.
A Reason.tv interview from July 2010 with Stagliano about the Feds failed attempt to prosecute convict him: