MITT ROMNEY, RICK SANTORUM AND NEWT GINGRICH WANT YOU TO STOP MASTURBATING TO PORN, AMERICA

ITEM: No matter who wins the Republican nomination, the candidate will do whatever it takes to ban pornography.

I’m sure yr all relieved to hear this.

This is according to Morality In Media, which says Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich have all explicitly promised to declare war on pr0n.

Granted, the actual statements themselves are a little weasel-ish.

Santorum: “Federal obscenity laws should be vigorously enforced. If elected President, I will appoint an Attorney General who will do so.”

Romney: “(I)t is imperative that we cultivate the promotion of fundamental family values. This can be accomplished with increased parental involvement and enhanced supervision of our children. It includes strict enforcement of our nation’s obscenity laws, as well as the promotion of parental software controls that guard our children from Internet pornography.”

Gingrich (who actually went the extra mile to meet with Morality In media personally): “Yes, I will appoint an Attorney General who will enforce these laws.”

All of which, strictly speaking, doesn’t add up to a promised ban on pr0n so much as a promise to step up enforcement of obscenity laws which probably includes kiddie porn (and, possibly, Truck Nutz), but probably not Playboy, Vivid Video and The Art Of Blowjob.

Unless it does. You never know. Anti-porn groups typically consider consensual hardcore to be just as obscene (and therefore illegal) as kiddie porn. Also, when they talk up the harmful effects of porn (it causes brain damage, you know), they don’t distinguish between “legal” and “illegal”, much less between kiddie porn and The Playboy Channel.

This tends to be true of Republicans in general, which is why every single Internet censorship law they’ve engineered (with Democrat help, I should add) that wasn’t written by the MPAA has failed to pass 1A muster – their mission statement was to target Really Obviously Illegal Porn, but the body text was written broadly enough to apply to everything from DH Lawrence references to breast-cancer awareness sites.

All that said, I’d be surprised if Mitt and Newt put that much effort into fulfilling this particular promise. Santorum would do it on Day 1, of course, because he knows what consenting adults get up to and he does not approve. At all. Mitt and Newt, by contrast, are really just pandering to the Family Values crowd as they’ve always done, and are probably more interested in giving tax breaks to the 1%, repealing Obamacare and defending America against Muslims, Mexicans and gay people than putting pr0n merchants out of business (unless they're gay Muslim Mexican pr0n merchants, of course).

Then again, they wouldn't be the first POTUS admins to waste govt resources by prosecuting as many obscenity cases as possible to see what sticks, even if they know they’ll lose. That way they fulfill their promise to MIM and they can blame the inevitable loss on activist judges. Everybody wins.

Mostly.

Either way, Coco is probably right.

FULL DISCLOSURE: For the record, I love pornography. Love it.

Small govt my ass,

This is dF

TENNESSEE HOMOPHOBIA WILL EAT ITSELF

Previously on Senseless Acts of Bloggery:

I’m from Tennessee, but I don’t talk about it much.

I would, mind you. But every time I mention it, people bring stuff up. Like how it’s legal to bring weapons into bars. Or our capitalist fire departments. Or Pigeon Forge, home to the Nastiest Hotel in America.

And – more recently – why we’re so afraid of gay people.

State Sen. Stacey Campfield (a Republican) has been pushing a bill for the last six years that would make it illegal for teachers to mention homosexuality in any way whatsoever at all to students in kindergarten up through the eighth grade. Last week, the bill was cleared to go to the Senate floor for a vote.

And now it’s been approved by the House Education Committee.

My opinion on the bill hasn’t changed. But it does get me wondering how this is going to play with the Other Gays Is Scary Law that state Republicans are promoting.

No, not the It’s Illegal To Make It Illegal For Businesses To Discriminate Against Gayz one.

Rather, I’m talking about the It’s Okay To Bully Gayz As Long As You Do It For Religious Reasons b/w It’s Not Okay To Bully Christian Kids For Hating Gayz bill.

It’s essentially the same bill as the one in Michigan, and I feel the same way about both.

Anyway, if both bills pass, it presents an interesting conundrum.

Basically, the Don’t Say Gay bill says you can’t mention homosexuality in school at all. The Selective Anti-Bullying bill says you have the religious freedom to express negative opinions about homosexuals in school.

Which I think means that it’s okay for Christian kids and teachers to criticize and insult gay people on religious grounds so long as they don’t actually say why they’re criticizing and insulting them.

Or something.

Well, look, no one ever said bigotry had to make sense.

Anyway, good luck with that conundrum, Tennessee.

Southern discomfort,

This is dF

IF YOU ONLY SEE TWO POLITICAL FILMS DIRECTED BY ACTORS THIS YEAR …

Indeed.

The Ides Of March

George Clooney-directed film about the campaign manager of a fictional Democratic Presidential candidate, and how they both end up selling out their ideals in the name of power.

Which may not be news to anyone, but it still makes for a fascinating film – provided you find boiler-room politics and closed-door strategy meetings fascinating (which I do). The film follows hot-shot campaign manager Stephen Meyers, who claims that he can’t do what he does unless he believes in the candidate, but has his standards put to the test after an ill-advised meeting with a rival strategist threatens to go public, and he inadvertently discovers a dark secret about his own candidate, after which things just start getting worse and worse.

There’s all kinds of things people will find flawed about a film like this – from the lack of an explosive, shocking ending to the lack of whatever partisan political statement they want it to make about Democrats and/or Republicans. But political agendas (or lack thereof) aside, it’s a tightly-written script with some excellent performances from just about everyone (particularly Ryan Gosling in the lead role). One of the best films I’ve seen so far this year.

J. Edgar

Clint Eastwood-directed biopic of J. Edgar Hoover, the famous (and infamous) director of the FBI who helped create and modernize the FBI as we know it – to include, unfortunately, the practice of spying on left-wing activists and wiretapping suspects without warrants, among other things.

Love him or hate him, Hoover’s story has all the makings of a great film (to include his secret homosexuality). But this isn’t it. Leonardo DiCaprio makes a convincing Hoover (at least in his prime – as Old Hoover, he just looks like DiCaprio in old-guy make-up), but Dustin Lance Black’s jumbled screenplay goes back and forth in time, then makes an already confusing narrative even more baffling by putting Hoover in the role of “unreliable narrator”, prone to exaggerating the details of his own life story.

Which is frustrating because if anyone’s story needs a straightforward telling, it’s Hoover’s. But I came away from this none the wiser about the man or his motivations or why his story even matters. Even the story of his secret love for his No.2 man Clyde Tolson seems to lack the punch and significance it otherwise ought to have given Hoover’s anti-subversive Puritanism. It’s not a whitewash, at least, but it still adds up to a squandered opportunity to tell one of the most fascinating stories in 20th Century America.

The love that dares not speak its name,

This is dF