'We the People' Petition Seeks 'Opt-in' Only Porn Sites in U.S.

CYBERSPACE—Taking a page from the David Cameron playbook, a Greenbrae, California resident with the initials M.G. has started a petition on the White House's "We the People" site that seeks enough signatures to petition the government to "Require Porn to be an 'Opt In' feature with Internet Service Providers rather than a standard feature." In the United Kingdom, as readers of this site may know, Prime Minister Cameron has been trying to mandate an "opt-in" scheme as well, and of course the Aussies also flirted with the idea for many years, too. No one in fact has yet successfully implemented it, though, and if the operative word is "successfully," no one ever will, but that won't stop the censorious from trying. Indeed, the White House petition is replete with the same sorts of absurd assertions that plague so many of the anti-porners' claims about the inescapability of online porn, but it also goes a step farther to blame the porn industry for search results! The petition reads: In its current state, Internet porn seeks out users by email solicitations and massive amounts of free content throughout Internet browser searches. The average person, even children, can type in the word 'cat' or 'home' or 'soup' and instantly be inundated with offensive and disturbing pornographic images. Parents and individuals have to go to great lengths to install Internet filters that often don't weed out all porn. We are asking for greater protection and responsibility from Internet Service providers and our country. We are asking that people who are interested in porn should have to seek it and choose it. They should have to 'Opt In' for it by making arrangements to receive it with their Internet Service Provider. Everyone else should be free from it and assumed 'Opt Out.' We just tried putting "soup" into Google and to our surprise were instantly inundated with "offensive and disturbing" porn... soup porn! Hot, steaming images of bowl after bowl of fucking soup, without one penis or vagina in sight. M.G. only has 3,724 signatures thus far out of the 100,000 s/he needs before the deadline of November 23, if the petition is to be sent on to the White House for consideration. That leaves 97,276 equally moronic signatories who need to step up to the plate, something we think is quite possible, especially given the fact that a number of socially conservative leaders read AVN's site and regularly react to its positions with pleadings to their various flock. Should the petition meet its quota and be delivered to the White House, however, our hope is that, soup-to-nuts(-to-home-to-cat), it will make its way to the nearest circular filing cabinet.