| Adult Book Review | |
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This is an important book. It chronicles some of the worst abuses of the justice system, and what happens when the Justice Department is given free reign to go on an anti-sex campaign. It shows how our most basic Constitutional rights get trampled in the name of morality. In the mid-1980's, the Meese Justice Department decided to wipe out all mail order adult companies. They hit upon a clever and fool-proof idea: simultaneous prosecutions in multiple jurisdictions. The game was simple. They would threaten a mail order company with prosecution. They explained that they would take them to court in the most conservative areas of the country. And in more than one area at the same time. If they failed to get prosecutions there, they would then prosecute them somewhere else. It did not matter if they were ever found guilty of obscenity. Just fighting the multiple prosecutions would generally be enough to bankrupt them. And the government could keep going with unlimited money. All you had to do was lose once, drawing from jury pools already rigged against you, and you would spend many years behind bars. You could get more jail time than if you killed someone. Most companies plea bargained. They shut down, promised never to be involved in selling any adult material, including Constitutionally protected magazines such as Playboy, and many got jail time. It was that or go completely broke and face very long prison terms. One man had the resources and the balls to say no. This is the story of how Philip D. Harvey, founder of Adam & Eve, fought the government and won. Sort of. The battle alone cost him a fortune and eight years of his life spent fighting the government. On a personal level, the cost he paid was great. He did manage, though, to get a court to agree that the Justice Department's tactics were unconstitutional, making it more difficult for them to try this sort of thing again. That is especially important in this era of the Ashcroft Justice Department, which is philosophically to the right of Edwin Meese. You need to know how your tax dollars have been spent trying to censor and destroy adult sexual expression. The Justice Department had a scorched earth policy. Their goal was to completely destroy the businesses and their owners, Constitutional rights and the First Amendment be damned. It is a frightening story of the abuse of power by religious fanatics who used the immense power of the government to inflict their views of sexual morality on all of us, and it could very well happen again. I read this book in one sitting. It is a very personal, engaging story, and difficult to put down. A number of the people who have been at the center of First Amendment battles have come across as somewhat less than sympathetic, such as the self destructive antics of Larry Flynt. Here, Harvey is one of the good guys, an ordinary family man who got started selling adult products after his involvement with helping get birth control and condoms into third world countries, something he is still active in. It is a heroic tale, and well told. He faced an almost unimaginable power that used every dirty trick it could think of to legally destroy him. It is also an appalling tale, making it clear just how few legal protections we have when it comes to sexuality. Obscenity laws are the only laws on the books where a crime has not been committed until after a jury decides something is obscene, and then you can face very severe penalties for something that you could not know, by the very nature of the law, was illegal ahead of time. Our obscenity laws and laws restricting sexual activities between consenting adults are blunt instruments used by law enforcement to harass and coerce. In the hands of religious fanatics, as happened during the Reagan years, they become powerful and dangerous tools of personal destruction. You can purchase this book directly from Amazon. -JB |
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