Yahoo pulls porn (fwd)

[Heiko Recktenwald <uzs106@ibm.rhrz.uni-bonn.de>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2001 20:12:12 -0500
Subject: Re: Yahoo pulls porn

Yeah, I hate it when that happens, these business decisions
made without regard for my 1A right to buy porn.  While we're
on the subject it disturbs me deeply that WalMart won't sell
me skin mags or most of the ingredients to make crystal meth,
so I have to go to some Walgreen's to get the goods.  I mean,
hey, isn't there something in 1A about one-stop-shopping? If
there's not, there oughta be.

And I know what you mean about those religious right wingnuts.
Always petitioning their government for redress of something
or other. I'm sure you'd agree we oughta take that part of the
constitution out. In fact, I just now covered it up with white
out in my copy.  If enough of us do the same, maybe Yahoo! will
start selling dirty pictures again?

Yours in solidarity,

>> Yahoo pulls porn from network
>>         By Susan Lerner, CBS.MarketWatch.com Last Update: 9:43 AM ET
>
>>         SANTA CLARA, CALIF. (CBS.MW) - Bowing to pressure from users,
>>         Yahoo will remove adult-related products from its network and
>also
>>         will not enter into new contracts for adult-related banner
>>         advertisements, the Web giant said Friday.
>
>>         The company may also have been influenced by the American
>Family
>>         Association, which, on Thursday said it was urging Attorney
>General
>> John Ashcroft to prosecute Yahoo "for its direct involvement in the
>sale
>> and distribution of obscene material and child pornography."
>
>This seriously disturbs me, though it's no surprise.
>
>I seriously dislike the predatory nature of the porn industry, but no
>more so than the nature of Yahoo's TOS and use of Web bugs, referal
>cookies, html ad tags that spy on readers of listservers they host who
>may not know they're subjects of such monitoring, or equivalent or worse
>practices of AOL et al.
>
>Catering to the extortion of AFA, and the general Rabid Religious Reich
>efforts to define adjudicated as protected speech coffee table life
>figure art such as that of Jock Sturges as if child porn, amounts to
>outright promotion of institutionalization of bigotry for commercial
>gain.  In effect, whether the AFA's actions as a morality predator, or
>Ashcroft et al as political predators, we're seeing essentially the worst
>of abuses of the porn industry being force fed at us as if somehow that
>amounts to protection, rather than further abuse in attempts to erode
>rights.
>
>Much so-called porn is not predatory.  So is Religious Right, but not
>Rabid Religious Reich, religion.
>
>If we somehow manage to draw new legal lines that protect Constitutional
>speech but ban predatory abuses, many past actions of Don Wildmon and the
>AFA would fall outside the bounds of criminal predation, often moreso
>than that on which they call porn and prey themselves.  It would be a
>peculiar twist were such a consistent new line drawn through the whole of
>the 1st Amendment, to protect religion, speech, and petitioning
>government (noting the Nuremburg decision and recent Jim Bell trial not
>yet appealed in the same 9th Circuit).  That line would have to include
>not just artists and predator church groups (the Rabid of RRR,
>distinguishing ideas from acting on them to abuse others), but would need
>to apply to government figures which engage in the prosecutions AFA and
>Ashcroft advocate, or who prosecute speakers against corrupt government
>to the limits of the Nuremburg case, or maybe beyond for officials who
>are public figures and government agents, unlike private doctors.