This is very serious: it’s looking like the firing of the Gonzales eight is connected to the Bush administration’s ‘war on porn’ — and it’s clear that it’s the war on adult porn, not cases involving minors, as the prosecutors would have preferred (after wishing that the DoJ resources had been directed at the ‘war on terror’ instead. This is a big, horrifying scandal revealing a deep religious agenda behind Justice Department policy. Aren’t we supposed to be dealing with a *real* war!? There’s a huge article in The Nation about it, but the really concise excerpts are at Dispatches from the Culture Wars, snip:
Max Blumenthal has an article in The Nation that ties the firing of the 8 US attorneys to the DOJ’s obsession with prosecuting obscenity cases for porn starring consenting adults. It revolves primarily around Brent Ward, head of the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force that John Ashcroft created at the DOJ. It was Ward who urged that Paul Charlton, the US Attorney for Arizona fired by Gonzales, be let go because he wasn’t sufficiently enthusiastic about prosecuting adult porn cases.
(…) And he quotes other sources about the completely wasted focus of Ward and the DOJ on obscenity cases, and about why they did so – solely as a sop to the religious right:
“Ward’s endless stream of mandates, the source revealed, were a source of frustration to many US Attorneys. “There were countless child obscenity cases crying out to be prosecuted,” the source told me, “but [Brent] Ward wanted to focus on cases involving consenting adults. That’s just not a good way of dedicating resources. When you have so many children being harmed, why not allocate your resources towards that?”
“Ward’s heedless prosecutions of legally available pornography reflected more than his ideology; they also defined his power within the Justice Department. Once Bush began his second term in the White House, Gonzales declared the prosecution of pornography portraying sex acts between consenting adults “one of the top priorities” of his department. He signed off on an FBI headquarters memo that recruited agents for an anti-porn task force. That memo stated that prosecutions would focus particularly on material depicting “bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior.” These acts, according to the memo, were most likely to offend local juries.
“Christian right organizations, from the Family Research Council to Concerned Women for America, lavished praise on Gonzales’s anti-porn initiative. “We will watch closely, though with a growing sense of confidence in our new Attorney General, to see who is appointed to direct the effort,” said Family Research Council President Tony Perkins.
“When Gonzales met with Phil Burress, a self-described former porn addict who directs the anti-pornography group, Citizens for Community Values, Burress praised Ward for an aggressive and single-minded attack on sexually explicit material over nearly three decades, which had earned him the adulation of the Christian right. “He’s one of my heroes,” Burress said in describing Ward to the Salt Lake Tribune . As Utah’s US Attorney during the 1980s, Ward prosecuted phone sex operators, shut down Utah’s last two porn theaters by nailing their owner on tax charges, and tried unsuccessfully to force nude art-class models to wear bikinis. When Gonzales tapped Ward as his top porn cop in 2006, the Christian right’s confidence soared.
