Policing Porn Is Not Part of Job Description
As about one hundred fifty blogs and national media have it, Homeland Security, that omnipresent Orwellian agency of Big Brother is up to no good on pornography. Certainly our former Attorney General spent far too many resources on the subject of pornography and its sibling, indecency. Power corrupts, and one of the first priorities of a certain mindset is supression of sexuality. Thus it is not surprising that cops of all stripes abuse their power in this way.What is heartening, however, is that, in the instant case at least, the librarian had the Homeland Security operatives arrested, or at least removed from the premises by the police, and they seem to have had some career reverses as a result of their officious action. In spite of the concerns in some quarters over Howard Stern's flight from free radio in an attempt to be free of the brain police, there seems to be some sort of a balance between the sexually repressed Ashcrofts and the Libertines of the Left.
There will always be those who break the rules in pursuit of their own agenda. Cops will arrest masturbators, and Stern will claim that it is the brain police, and not the five hundred million dollars, that made him begin to charge for his show. But this is the everpresent struggle - to find a balance. In the case of the librarian vs Homeland Security, our right to view adult content won.