Fear of Obscenity Prosecution Also Behind Adelphia's Decision?
by Bill Fancher and Jody Brown
March 3, 2005
(AgapePress) - A pro-family leader is praising the fact that a national cable company has listened to consumers and changed its mind on providing pornography.Earlier this year, Colorado-based Adelphia Communications Corp. announced plans to make hard-core porn available on its system to those who wished to subscribe. When the cable provider added the Playboy Enterprises-supplied triple-X porn, several pro-family groups voiced their strong displeasure and launched a grassroots call for the federal government to consider intervention.
But on February 10 -- after making the service available for only a few weeks -- Adelphia said it was pulling the porn. Two weeks later, The Denver Post reported that announcement and quoted Adelphia spokesman as saying, "Some concern has been expressed over this type of adult programming." At least one pro-family group, the American Family Association, reports its supporters transmitted more than 130,000 e-mails about Adelphia to the Department of Justice in the days leading up to the company's reversal. (See earlier article)
While the Post story only implied that AFA and other groups may have played a role in Adelphia's decision, Robert Knight with the Culture and Family Institute (CFI) gives credit to the public storm of protest.
Bob Knight | |
"This is was a direct result of consumer uprising," Knight says. "A lot of people told Adelphia 'You can cancel my service if you're going to go for hard-core porn -- I've had it.' And they heard from people all over the country."Knight says he was pleased to see how quickly people responded to the announcement -- and how quickly the company reacted to their protests. But there may have been additional impetus as well. "They also heard from people who warned them that what they were doing was potentially illegal," says the CFI spokesman. "Obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment. So if they showed hard-core porn, they could be liable to prosecution."
A Premonition of Persecution?
When those legal ramifications were pointed out, perhaps company officials at Adelphia had a hunch that things were about to change on the prosecution front. Speaking at a Hoover Institution conference on Monday (February 28), U.S. Attorney General Roberto Gonzales -- who had been installed in his new post just two weeks earlier -- said he is planning what he describes as "aggressive prosecution of purveyors of obscene materials."
"I am strongly committed to ensuring the right of free speech; the right of ordinary citizens and of the press to speak out and to express their views and ideas is one of the greatest strengths of our form of government," Gonzales said, "but obscene materials are not protected by the First Amendment, and I am committed to prosecuting these crimes aggressively."
The AG cited a recent example of that commitment, noting the Department of Justice's appeal in an important obscenity prosecution in Pittsburgh, which involved materials that depicted rape, sexual assault, and "a variety of other degrading conduct," he said.
In announcing that appeal, the DOJ said if the ruling by U.S. District Judge Gary Lancaster were to be upheld, it would "undermine" not just the federal obscenity statutes, but also "all laws based on shared views of public morality, such as laws against prostitution, bestiality, and bigamy."
"I have directed Department officials to carefully review federal laws to see how we might strengthen our hand in prosecuting obscenity," Gonzales told the conferees at the Hoover Institution.
