In
January 2005, a federal judge threw out the Bush administration’s most prominent prosecution against obscenity, in an opinion that cast doubt on the constitutionality of every obscenity prosecution in the country. The Court of Appeals reversed that decision in December, but it did not question the judge’s conclusion that the U.S. Supreme Court had undercut the foundations of obscenity law. The Court may soon have to confront, for the first time in decades, the question of whether it makes any sense to say that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment. The answer to that question sheds light on an apparently unrelated issue: the peculiar self-deceptions that underlie the practice of the “war on terror.”
The obscenity case,
United States v. Extreme Associates, is the first high-profile federal obscenity prosecution in years. The video on which the charges are based,
Forced Entry, shows rape-murders in a way that is clearly intended to be arousing to...
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