A Sedgwick County District Court grand jury began an inquiry last week into whether area sex shops are violating obscenity laws. But if this jury is like ones in other cities, nothing will happen — other than the jurors will spend a lot of time looking at porn. The reason is that most jurors are uncomfortable defining and dictating an obscenity standard for the entire community. Plus, the motive behind this grand jury seems to be shutting down the sex shops, not removing certain materials. If so, that won’t fly.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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46 Comments
Can I get on the jury?
Me too! Me too!
Get in line behind me, you cretins.
I wonder how many tax dollars the city will waste, because some conservative prudes have shitty sex lifes. BTW it seems like adult shops are the only business’s that don’t go begging the government for tax breaks and handouts.
The only time I served on a jury it was between D.A.Vern Miller’s smut trials or a drug case. Sigh, we found the guy guilt of selling drugs. Now I know why people say serving on a jury is not fun.
It was once said, “Perversion is the one thing you will not do” Though it can be interpretated several way. Generally each have there own definition of what is perverse. Be it in the bedroom, in a book or even in social intercourse. No, that does not mean “Free love”. This is the 2000 don’t you know. Sigh, Connie Morris is younger then I. But she said that she was part of the free love movement. How did I miss that, where was I? When was the sixties and seventies? I do not remember!
If it is obscene to see lingerie in Priscilla’s windows,then it’s obscene to see them at the mall.
If it’s obscene to look at a woman/man nude, it is obscene to watch telivsion and go to the theater to see a movie.
If it is obscene to read a story where sex is described, then the Libraries need to be closed. I
I think there is a difference between something “sexually graphic” and obscenity. It’s not just black or white, right or wrong. How can you lump child pornography in the same catagory with the nudes you see hanging in the art gallery?Reading a story where sex is described is not the same as viewing at a “snuff” movie (remember those?).I doubt that keeping Pricilla’s from selling sexy lingerie is what they have in mind, but we need to establish and maintain some sort of community standards. Pornography is degrading to women and children and I certainly don’t want a porn shop in my neighborhood.
Damoon,In the same token many of the movies our children go to have horrific violence and sex in them.In the begining of fatal attraction the scene shows Sharon Stone being sexual with a guy. Reaches under the pillow and pulls out a knife and kills him.
Would this mean that Fatal Attraction is a snuff movie?
Once you begin censoring a subject how far do you need to go?
Watch porn and get paid by the city, why wasn’t Rhonda and me picked for the jury.
The Wichita city council needs to get laid. Any volunteers?
Remember, a Grand Jury is county, not City, but regardless, it is a waste of taxpayer money.
Operation Southwind is not a local group, it was formed by some guy in a town north of here that got out of the military and decided his life’s work was now to rid the world of porn. I know this because I attended one of their meetings here in Wichita out of curiosity. Their documentation actually states that you CAN legislate morality, and this group is out to do so. They met at the church on S. Broadway that is next to a porn shop and had horror stories of pornographic literature trash being found on CHURCH property.
Hmmmm, I thought laws on the books already make littering illegal?
They trotted up some guy who claimed he had been addicted to pornography, spent all his money and lost a business because of it. So, because of this one guy, Southwind wants to “save” all of us.
Last time I looked, nobody has ever been forced into an adult store against their will. But, this rabid group finds these stores “objectionable” and want to get rid of them.
Fair enough–I find churches objectionable and think we should get rid of them. Same thing, yes?
The end result of this, is IF the do-gooders are successful, they will not end the demand. People will just buy online and the City will lose out on the sales tax.
Stupid, stupid, stupid. The extremists are dangerous…didn’t Hitler outlaw porn as one of his first mind control moves?
This is right wing Sedgwick County. There will be charges come out of the grand jury. That fact we all want to be on the jury and are not tells you that the right wing got selected (or we wouldn’t be here talking about it). The real question is if Nola will then prosecute or exercise her power to veto the grand jury and dismiss the charges. My money says she does not have the brass to dismiss.
Ray,Good one! Yeah, Hitler banned pornography. Then he created one of the largest obscenities ever!The problem politicians face is that competence (rare though it is) is not enough to get them reelected; they have to have fought to save the public from some menace or another. That, of course, means making enemies; something politicians also have to avoid.The traditional method for solving this dilemma is to pick a sin issue, since nobody wants to publicly admit to being a sinner, and flail away at it without being too effective, since the voters are also the sinners. This shifts the dilemma back to the voters. Unfortunately, every once in a while they’re accidentally successful, like they were with prohibition, and the results are disastrous.Our current crop of local pols picked the growing number of porn shops as the sin issue to go after, knowing full well that they were never going to more than slightly inconvenience the large number of consumers (read voters), without which the porn shops wouldn’t be growing. They will hold their grand jury, and either nothing will come of it, or at most, a few local entrepreneurs will have to hire attorneys to stay in business. Either way, the politicians will have publicly fought the good fight to protect our children and remain electable.End of story!
Jed’s right. The eilmination of porn shops isn’t going to help Wichita’s economy any more than the prohibition of Sunday take-home alcohol will. Wichitans are treated like fish who are shown artificial lures to bite on. Meanwhile, young Wichitans are not being educated to succeed in the 21st century. Somebody has decided to spend $150 million, plus interest, on an arena, instead of a biotech, infotech, nanotech, energytech research and education center. Think about why this is. Then think different Or let your kids suffer.
Hey, Puny,
It’s spelled “Galahad,” not “Galihad.”
You can’t even slander somebody by posting over their name right.
You remain a lying POS and pathetic loser.
Loser.
And what would Puny do if the city really outlawed porn including internet porn?
Sex as he knows it would be gone from his life . . .
BTW, great post, Heartland . . .
Wasn’t our “esteemed” mayor a while ago that claimed the adult stores hurt tourism? Now, there is a laugh.
I used to live in southern California, and there is a city there with LOTS of porn shops that doesn’t hurt for tourism..San Diego.
I also recently lived in Tampa, close to Orlando–which also has many, many porn shops and LOTS of tourists.
Scratch that argument!
My boyfriend likes to watch porn movies a lot. I think they just make that stuff up and fake it. It’s boring, I mean how can anybody peter out that quickly, even with Viagra? The grand jury ought to look into truth in porn, I think.
Sum1, “Snuff” movies are videos that show a man having sex with a woman and then killing her. It’s not a Hollywood movie, it’s a real video with a woman really getting killed. They were mostly made with Mexican prostitutes.So you think that if the powers that be ban one type of sexual expression, they won’t know when to stop and everything will get banned? Does that mean you think child porn shouldn’t be banned?Why is this an all or nothing proposition? I think community standards should be established. Maybe we should be able to vote on this issue. It would only be fair because we all have to live with the consequences of having sex shops in our community.
Damoon,Snuff films are sort of like bigfoot. Lots of people talk about them, but tracking down anyone credible who’s actually seen one is difficult, to say the least. In any case, the rumor is many, many times larger than the reality.
Actually, Snuff films are about filming a real murder and alot less about sex. And the existance of a real snuff film is suspect at best
Damoon,This isn’t the way to stop child predators. Child porn is already illegal and we still have the problem.
Hollywood and cable has the most violent and sexual explicit films. Do we censor them as well? Only g and pg rated movies are allowed? There are people who are pushing for just this sort of censorship.Parents should be the ones to police their children.
If it’s illegal to have books that are sexually explicit than dont’ go to the library. When I was a teenager historical romances that are very explicit sexually.
When a group has decided that sex shops should be closed, how long before they come into the privacy of our homes and create laws?Once you start censoring material, where do you stop?
Sum1, By your own argument then, why should child porn be outlawed? It’s not going to stop child abuse, maybe if perpetrators can collect child porn, it will give them an outlet for their sexual tension and they won’t be as likely to act it out.Where does this logic begin and end? If you think degrading women isn’t harmful to our sociey, then I’d suggest you open your eyes. Perpetrators feed their sexual perversion with porn. Dennis Rader had a great collection of porn. Ask any mental health professional whether or not it’s harmful to a person’s mental health. I’m not talking about “sexaully explicit”, I’m talking about porn, there IS a difference. Why shouldn’t we establish community standards if that’s what the community wants?
Something I find really funny, though. Whenever you hear someone say that they don’t agree with censorship or regulating sex shops, they always qualify their statement with “I don’t go to sex shops, but….”. If you don’t go there, how do you know what they’re selling? Maybe you should investigate. I have.
Damoon, banning sex shops is not going to stop people from watching porn. Thousands upon thousands of websites online people can visit. There are sex shops online. The only thing this will cause is more problems. At adult shops you have to be 18 to enter but online you do not have to be that age, sure your supposed to but how do the really know… Honestly. Once you ban sex shops you will start to ban other things. What is to stop people from banning books like “Where’s Waldo”. Nothing because this book has already been banned. Have you ever looked at the banned book list, if not take a look at the banned/challenged book list for 2004-2005 http://www.marshall.edu/library/bannedbooks/Index/titleindex2005.asp (this list is not a completed list). You could also check out this list of books that have been banned in the past(Just a few years ago) and may continue to be banned. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banned_books. The books that are banned/challenged have received more notice than they most likly would not have received otherwise. My english teacher once said that they wished all books were banned because more people would read them then. What is to stop this from happening to the sex shops, i ask?
Another real problem with censorship; sexual deviancy is, by definition, unpredictable. What turns on the freaks is usually something that doesn’t do that much for the rest of us. Some guys (and a few women) are excited by spike heels (which should probably be banned on other grounds, such as safety), others by a specific color or cut of dress or hairstyle, voice etc. These are the ones most likely to act out their fantasies in awful ways. The people turned on by watching normal or semi-normal sex are probably the least dangerous of the lot.
Damoon,If banning child porn didn’t stop the problem of child pedophiles, than banning adult stores won’t solve the obscenity problems either.
If you want to talk about degrading woman I’d say the culprit could easily be argued to be society.
Many teach their children that the girls roles in life is to stay home and raise the children. We have college administrators who don’t believe women can have science and math careers.Child sex abuse most often begins at home. Society often looks the other way. What are the options for the child? To be removed from the home and add to the list of foster children each state passes around? Have the abuser removed from the home so the mother can go on food stamps because she has no job skills and the bread winner is gone? In both options the child can easily become the victim again.Porn in my eyes is a very small piece of the big problems that are out there.It’s easier to focus and draw attention to them because they are hot button issues.Instead of letting your buttons be pushed, think of answers to solve the real problems.
So what is your solution to the problem? Encourage the sexual exploitation of women and children because we can’t do anything about it anyway? I remember growing up in a community where no “sex shops” existed and it’s funny how no one complained about their freedoms being violated. In fact, in my neighborhood, “sex shops” wouldn’t have been tolerated. Our society has lost it’s values in the name of “freedom” and now our children can’t even play outside unsupervised because we worry that some pervert may grab them. We have to start drawing the line somewhere, and to me, this is as good a place as any. When are we going to start being accountable for the deterioration of our society?None of you adressed my points. What about the affects of porn on mental health? Where should we draw the line? Should we just legitimize all of it, including child porn? After all, using your arguments, if child porn remains illegal, maybe I won’t be able to buy lingerie at Victoria’s Secret in a few years, because it may get outlawed too.
A point you are missing entirely Damoon. In most cases the sex shops were already in the neighborhoods before the people and many of the churches.While you don’t live in the neighborhoods with the sex shops you generalize that children can’t play outside here. You create problems that DON’T exist and try to play them as facts.
All the years I’ve lived in Wichita I have yet to hear of a child being abducted by a customer of an adult book store.
If a pedophile is going to pick up your child it would be much easier to do it with the hundreds of children that get dropped off at the mall for daycare.
Damoon raises good points. I am pretty sure there are people who meet a reasonable definition of addiction when it comes to porn: 1) they continue to use when they don’t want to – it seems out of control to them; and 2) it interferes with important life areas – e.g. establishing a satisfying intimate relationship. I suspect that many people who have porn addictions also have co-existing other addictions (alcohol, etc.). On the other hand there are also likely people who get a porn video once a year, watch it and suffer no ill effects.
A friend of mine owned a bar and made pretty good money. He told me that his profit margin came from people who were there every day and every night. He felt in operating that business he contributed to the ill health and early deaths of some people. He got out of it for these reasons.
I can’t see where purveyors of porn contribute to the death of anyone, but I can see that their goods might not enhance the well-being of some people.
Concerning the contribution of porn to mental health problems – I don’t know that anyone knows the answer to that question and I am not sure I would believe anyone who claims they do know.
Damoon & Steven are on to the problems caused by porn addictions. Great thoughts both of you.
Is there anything left that isn’t addictive? Maybe the worst addiction is avoiding admitting your problems by telling everybody else that they are addicts of whatever it is they do.
Sum1, I think I’m probably older than you. There were no sex shops in Wichita when I was growing up, not even on the outskirts of the city. There was nothing objectionable on TV or radio. I didn’t grow up in an X rated world the way kids do today. I feel like porn is a backlash to the women’s movement, a way to objectify women and “keep them in their place”. I remember when for the most part, women were treated with more respect than they are today. We’re not better off as a society because of our national obsession with sex, actually it’s because it’s such a money maker that it’s so prolific, it really has nothing to do with holding true to first amendment rights.It adds nothing positive to our society and it does have a negative affect on the human psyche.
Go ahead, patronize the sex shops all you want, but I’ll continue to fight against the sexual exploitation of women and children in any way I can.
Damoon,One of the most important lessons I learned raising kids was to pick my fights; choose the ones I could win and let go of the ones I couldn’t, because losing fights cost me much-needed respect.When people say “there ought to be a law,” usually they haven’t thought it through to the end. How important is this issue? What are the chances of getting it passed? How effectively can this law be enforced? Who else, other than the intended target will this law hurt? If they don’t have satisfactory answers to these questions, then there shouldn’t be a law!
The laws already exist. The people protesting the sex shops are concerned that the shops are breaking the laws.
Damoon, you’re on target again.
Damoon,No, there weren’t sex shops and X rated movies, but porn was just as available as it is now. When I was in school, way back in the 1950’s, kids who’s fathers were in the aircraft business and delivered planes to Cuba regularly came back with suitcases full of the most vile porn you could imagine, and sold it out of their lockers. It certainly wasn’t as high-tech as today’s crop, but it did the job.Porn has been around at least since the Venus of Willendorf (Playmate of the Year, 26,000 BC), so any links to a backlash against the women’s movement are somewhat specious. It’s increase is due much more to technology than sociology, and it’s emergence from underground venues due much more to Freud and Kinsey than Abzug and Steinem.
NoJo,Yes, the laws exist; that’s the problem! When a law is unenforcible, and vice laws are rarely effectively enforcible, it undermines the public’s respect for law in general. In other words, vice laws tend to not just be unproductive, but counterproductive.Banning porn shops does very little to limit porn in a society where more than half the households have internet connections to porn sites worldwide, and is probably a waste of resources, since porn shops are rapidly becoming obsolete anyway. The real solution for porn, or at least the worst of it, is on the demand side, the root, with education and an end to sexism.
Sorry, Jed, I don’t agree that porn was as available when I was growing up as it is today. At least someone had to make an effort to get it back then. Nowadays, all one had to do is turn on the computer. Kids are having too easy access to it. Several of my friends have had a heck of a time with their kids, if they take the internet out of the house, then the kid just goes over to a friend’s. I wish parents weren’t in the position of having to be security guards in their own home, the only alternative is to take out the TV, radio, and internet. I don’t think we’re better off as a society because we’re providing a sewer for our kids to grow up in, do you? How are they supposed to learn about healthy relationships when all this garbage is thrown at them? Don’t say it’s a parent’s responsibility to teach them, thats a cop out because the age when teens are most impressionable is the same age that they look more to their peers than their parents for their value system.I can’t stand the tired argument that “it’s always been this way, so noboby can do anything to stop it”, THAT’S another cop out and it doesn’t make it right. Slavery lasted hundreds of years, but it was abolished even though “that’s the way it had always been”. We need to get back to having some standards in our society and start having respect for each other. Porn doen’t promote a civilized society.
OK, I’m done. I’ve said all I have to say on this subject.
Damoon,Of course it’s a parent’s responsibility to teach values to their kids! And yes, the teenage years are not the time to do it. That’s why you start as soon as the kid can talk. If you form those basic attitudes then, and teach them to think about what they see in the world, they’ll learn to cope with the shit when it comes along. You can’t protect them from the world; it’s always going to be out there. What you have to do is prepare them to deal with it.
Right Jed, tell that to the parents of Ted Bundy’s victims. I heard he was addicted to porn, also.Sorry, I wasn’t going to say anymore about this, but your approach to keeping kids on the right path is a tad simplistic. It takes a village, not a sewer to raise kids.Now take your dirty magazines and get lost. (just kidding, you know I like ya!)
Damoon,Ted Bundy was a manipulative bastard of the first water. I get rather put off by people who take his attempts to avoid responsibility at face value because he says what they want to hear. Why do you think he said them? It certainly wasn’t contrition!Building a fortress around your kid simply becomes his prison. At some point he’ll get out, and be just as unprepared to deal with the world as he was when he was a child. Armor-plating him early allows him to function safely in the larger world. He’ll never learn to swim if you’re afraid to let him near the water.
I just wish kids today could keep their innocence a little longer, they grow up too quick. Too often, they’re thrown into adult situations before they have the maturity to handle it.I never sheltered my kids from reality, but I didn’t allow trash in my house either. Sure, I knew they could see it elsewhere, but I wanted to drive home the point that values and standards were important in our family.My kids are all grown now with little ones of their own, but none of my kids even have a TV in their house and my grandkids don’t play video games. Of course, getting to watch TV at my house is a real treat. I’m proud of my kids, it takes guts to go in a different direction from what most parents are willing to allow. I know my grandkids will be better off for it.
Damoon,Sounds like you did all right!A few thoughts though; television is certainly full of a lot of crap, but it can be used as a window on the world too. Video games are rightly maligned for sex and violence, but lately they’ve been shown to be of value too, in stimulating decisiveness and coordination. An outright ban on either is probably not a good idea. Just keep an eye on what they’re watching and playing, and watch TV and play the games with them enough to gain both an idea of what they’re about, and your kid’s respect. I’ve found that in most cases, example is a better teacher than edict, and respect a better control than fear.
You’re right, example and respect go a long way when it comes to influencing anyone, especially kids.
everyone who is oppsed to the mayor new attempt to close down porn shops should write him a letter. Please be tactful about it he does read his email. He wrote me back a letter with various stupid responses to my arguments and made very little sense but he did read it. I heard they had a pettition signed by like 2,000 people saying pornography is obscene but i have a feeling they passed the petition out in church or something, why dont they post one in an adult store and see how many signatures it gets. send me an email if you would like to see his email.