XX-: Safe-Porn Dreaming USA

To think as a young man I longed to live in southern California. Today, the state is one big caricature of Political Correctness.

News item: The Los Angeles City Council passed an ordinance requiring porn actors to wear condoms. Presumably, they can perform their on-air sex acts outside Los Angeles. What is the point? The “educative purpose of law,” they say. By Nanny State standards, an encased sausage is kosher. The city’s rating has been downgraded from XXX to XX-. And the porn industry is already relatively safe due to self-regulation, not coercive push-the-porn out of town Regulation.

Consider the goofiness of the whole thing: L.A. mandates wrappers on human wieners but has done nothing to shut down gay bathhouses, in contrast to San Francisco which shut them down after a bitter intra-gay political battle over the issue. I also doubt whether LA cops bother those enjoying sex in bathroom stalls. In fact, the state even has a guide “Sexual Orientation Training for Law Enforcement” discussing proper “patrol contact” with gays, lesbians, and bi-sexuals having sex in public. And there are plenty of guides to the stars . . . er, I mean bathroom stalls. Larry Craig (R-ID) would love this place but porn stars stay away.

I still dream of warm places in the sun but no more “California dreaming.” Not because of porn but because of the regulate-anything-that-moves attitude that killed “Hotel California.” As The Eagles sang, the free-spirited years are over and done: “We haven’t had that spirit here since 1969. . . .”

If porn producers have a sense of humor, they will set up shop in the Virgin Islands and give California the proverbial middle finger. So to speak.

Jonathan Bean is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, Professor of History at Southern Illinois University, and editor of the Independent book, Race & Liberty in America: The Essential Reader.
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