HuffPo Delves Into Congress' 'Pointless Anti-Porn Rider'

LOS ANGELES—AVN has published many articles, like this one from 2010, about the travails of government bureaucracies unable to prevent some of their employees from spending copious amounts of hours watching porn at work, instead of, say, investigating corporate malfeasance on Wall Street. We have also kept track of the extent to which the porn watching has been a hot topic for some legislators. And though we knew that specific language had been used in subsequent bills that threatened the loss of funding if the departments didn't do something to stop it, we had no idea there was actually such a thing as an "anti-porn rider," until HuffPo brought it to our attention late yesterday. But there is such a thing, and according to HuffPo's Zach Carter, it's a "toothless terror" that has been inserted into about half a dozen bills passed by the House, though none have apparently made it to the Senate floor. The language of the rider reads, "None of the funds made available in this Act may be used to maintain or establish a computer network unless such network blocks the viewing, downloading, and exchanging of pornography." The words are real, but as Carter notes, not much else about it is. "Alas," he writes, "the anti-porn language is unnecessary and essentially unenforceable. It can't actually change bureaucratic behavior." More specifically, he observes, "The actual language of the rider doesn't even specify what people using federal computer networks shouldn't be able to view. The term 'obscenity' is vaguely defined in federal law, but the word 'pornography' is not. The closest things have come is Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's famous 'I know it when I see it' concurring opinion from 1964." Pornography, adds James Tyre, special counsel with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is "just a layperson's term. It's not a legal term." That makes the entire effort an exercise in futility. "If some anti-porn crusader tried to enforce the rider in court," adds Carter, "the court would have to wade through a jurisprudential swamp to determine its legal substance. And that is assuming the case wasn't simply thrown out first. In order to sue the government over the rider, a private citizen would need to show that he or she had been personally harmed by its lax implementation. That would be quite difficult." But in a House that has prided itself on its years-long ability to basically do nothing, how surprised should we be that the same Congress has remained assiduously loyal to language that is equally flaccid.