With the moral decline in society and the rise of cameras everywhere, people have been choosing not just to consume pornography, but to produce it themselves. When relationships become sour and bad breakups lead to hard feelings, some people out of spite will release their pornographic wares for public consumption to embarrass the other person. This social phenomenon, called ‘revenge porn’, has attracted the attention of the courts and has become a major target of popular discussion. Some states have banned the practice, others have remained silent on it.
But this topic may have its day in the Supreme Court due to a recent case.
The Constitution protects freedom of speech, even when it is “offensive or disagreeable.” But rules have exceptions; the First Amendment does not protect certain speech, such as threats, obscenity, incitement of violence and public disclosure of private information.
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When the government imposes a content-based restriction on a specific statement or image, it must satisfy the strictest, and often insurmountable, level of legal scrutiny. The restriction must serve a “compelling government interest” and must be as minimal as possible.
Many revenge porn laws have survived these legal challenges.
Appeals courts in Wisconsin and Vermont rejected the First Amendment challenges and ruled that sexually explicit images deserved as much privacy as other forms of sensitive information, such as medical records and financial data.
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“Sometimes it is an ex-boyfriend trying to destroy the life of his former partner, but the vast majority of cases is because people want to make money or engage in voyeurism or for a number of reasons that don’t involve harassing the victim,” she said. “You need a nonconsensual pornography law to cover the gap between harassment and privacy violations.”
According to Igor Bozic, attorney for Austin, the Illinois revenge porn statute, which is broader than similar laws in many other states, “went too far.”
Bozic, in requesting that the Illinois Supreme Court stay the decision until he files a petition for a writ of certiorari at the U.S. Supreme Court, wrote of the statute: “It covers the woman who reacts to an unwanted sexual text message by showing a friend. It covers the woman who tries to deter that toxic behavior by forwarding the unsolicited image to the sender’s mother or girlfriend. . . . And of course, it gives controlling men – like Bethany Austin’s ex-fiancé – yet another legal tool for victimizing their intimate partners.”
“Where do you draw the line with this law?” he said to The Washington Post.
But even if the Supreme Court does agree to take Austin’s case, many legal experts sat she faces an uphill battle.
Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern University who wrote a law review article on the constitutionality of revenge porn statutes, explained that the First Amendment allows the government to limit public disclosure of private, often intimate information without consent – such as medical or financial information.
The Illinois statute, he said, targets the specific harm it’s trying to remedy: distributing material when the disseminator knows, or should have known, that the person in the image did not consent to its distribution.
“There’s no good reason to construe free speech to protect malicious people who want to hurt people unless there’s no way to draw a line,” he said. “The Illinois statute shows there is a sensible way to draw a line.” (source)
As I have noted before, one of the most significant changes to “free speech” laws took place in 1957 in the Roth v. United States case, in which Jewish sodomite and pornographic book peddler Samuel Roth won a case that opened the way for the legal production and distribution of pornography in the US. The most significant cases in recent times have been supported by the largely Jewish-created and administered “Free Speech Coalition” in the case Ashcroft v. FSC (2003), which allowed for the legal purchase, production, and consumption of child pornography of all kinds so long as actual children are not in the production. Thus it is legal in the US to make cartoons- even highly realistic ones -that show children being sexually assaulted in any way and in graphic detail, just as long as there is not a real person involved.
Right now, the FSC is fighting another case, FSC v. Gonzales, that is about attempting to effectively abolish the federal mandatory reporting requirements on all pornographic material that requires pornographers to verify and keep indefinite copies on file, subject to inspection by any member of the public at any time, showing that any pornographic material produced after 1995 does not contain any “performers” under the age of eighteen. These regulations can be found in 18 USC 2257, and is known as the “2257 regulation” that can be found on the bottom of any adult website. Instead, the FSC wants a verbal declaration or paper signed by the performer saying that he or she is of legal age. The significance of this is that the 2257 regulation was instituted because of a notorious porn whore, Nora Louise Kuzma (“Traci Lords”), who caused public outrage when it was discovered that all but one of her many pornographic films were made when she was between the ages of 13 and 17, and she was only caught because some boys where she went to high school saw her videos.
Right now, the legal cases are very close to bringing about, within the next decade, the legal permissions to allow for a significant lowering of the age of consent and the progressive legalization of child pornography. Much of this is being driven by the sodomites because of their well-known proclivity for sexually abusing young men and boys, and given the power of the sodomite lobby it certainly has bolstered any efforts which support their cause.
This is where the questions about “revenge porn” become so interesting, as this is a direct question over what constitutes “free speech” under the current social paradigm, which since the post-World War II era has continually meant a liberalization of laws to the point of near anarchy.
Likewise, as I recently noted, there is a conscious “anti-pornography” movement taking place among the “conservative” movement.
Are we seeing the formation of a “strategy of tension” here? It certainly is possible, and if not so, it could easily be exploited by means of a strategy of tension in order to advance various social objectives.
Some fundamentals we can remember are that:
-America has become progressively immoral
-Americans overwhelmingly support sodom and sodomite behavior, and there are no major social trends that propose to abate this for the future.
-Christianity is in serious decline, and it is expected this trend will continue for the future as the Boomers pass into history.
-Attempting to strive to live a Christian life and express objectively Christian viewpoints makes one a social outcast and is now manifesting as legal threats against such people
-The concept of the “strategy of tension” has been used for decades to advance said immorality for the purpose of expanding social control.
It will be interesting to see if the Supreme Court takes this case, and if so, what the ruling will be and what the consequences from this will yield.
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