I draw cartoons for The Los Angeles Times about issues related to California and the Southland (metro Los Angeles).
This week: A science teacher at an intermediate school in Oxnard, California was fired after students claimed to have seen her in a porn movie. No one asked why children were watching porn movies, which is illegal. (Acting in porn, on the other hand, is legal.)
BREAKING: Bachmann pledges to ban pornography | Tonight, Michelle Bachmann became the first presidential candidate to sign a pledge created by THE FAMiLY LEADER, an influential social-conservative group in Iowa. By signing the pledge Bachmann “vows” to “uphold the institution of marriage as only between one man and one woman” by committing herself to 14 specifics steps. The ninth step calls for the banning of “all forms” of pornography. The pledge also states that homosexuality is both a choice and a health risk. You can read all the details of the pledge here.
I’m already seeing this quoted around the blogosphere and on twitter. But it’s wrong.
You can read the full text of the pledge here (pdf link). It’s full of all sorts of extreme, sexist, homophobic, racist garbage, allegedly for the purpose of protecting marriage. But it doesn’t call for a blanket ban on pornography. Here’s the relevant passage, in which the candidate vows:
Humane protection of women and the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy — our next generation of American children — from human trafficking, sexual slavery, seduction into promiscuity, and all forms of pornography and prostitution, infanticide, abortion and other types of coercion or stolen innocence.
A footnote then explains:
Human trafficking, child pornography and prostitution, pimping, sexual slavery and forced abortion are inherently coercive of vulnerable females. Infanticide and abortion are inherently coercive of the babies who are killed.
Unless I’ve missed something, that’s all the document says about pornography.
Taken as a whole, this seems to be calling for a ban on child pornography and porn made using trafficked women.1 It’s a little hard for me to make out, because it’s written in Fundimentalese rather than standard English, but to conclude from this document that Bachmann has pledged to “ban pornography” is more than a bit of a stretch.
Osama bin Laden was accused of murdering thousands of Americans, yet US forces who killed him found it necessary to smear him with revelations that he had a stash of pornography in his home.
