Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Orgy

[dogday]

Sexual hypocrisy and the Internet.

Which are your sexual morals: the ones you preach in public, or the ones you practice in private?

Thanks to Internet search monitoring, we can now investigate private morals. If we can't do it household by household, we can do it community by community. This has a direct bearing on obscenity law. It's turning hypocrisy into a verifiable legal issue.

A case scheduled for trial next week shows how. The defendant is accused of purveying obscene material from a Florida Web site. To be judged obscene, the material has to be found patently offensive or prurient by "contemporary community standards." According to Matt Richtel of the New York Times, the defense attorney in the case, Lawrence Walters, will use Google Trends to argue that the community's standards are lower than advertised. Walters "plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like 'orgy' than for 'apple pie' or 'watermelon,'" Richtel reports. (Evidence here.) The point is "to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics—and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm."

It's a clever argument. But it assumes that morality is what people do, not what they say. "Time and time again you'll have jurors sitting on a jury panel who will condemn material that they routinely consume in private," Walters tells the Times. Thanks to Google, "we can show how people really think and feel and act in their own homes."


http://www.slate.com/id/2194336/

[Prophet 451]

1. I don't like his chances

I appreciate and agree with the arguement he's making (and I think porn should be entirely legal, subject to certain regulations) but his chances of winning are pretty minimal. In any case of this type, jurors usually choose to enforce the standards they think they should have, rather than the ones they actually practice.

[TahitiNut]

2. There I am ... upside down again.

Maybe it has something to do with being a liberal to the bone, but I publicly support and espouse far more wide-ranging accommodation for interests and activities than I personally practice. I'd hate to have restrictions designed based on my behaviors ... since that'd be far more draconian than what I support.

:shrug: