Barack H. Obama has nominated David Ogden, an accomplished lawyer for the "skin-flick" industry, for the important job of Deputy Attorney General of the United States. The Deputy AG serves as the prime manager of the Agency and the Administration’s justice policy. The Deputy AG post is also seen as a stepping stone and has been held by a number of prominent lawyers on their way up in government including William P. Rogers (later Nixon’s Secretary of State), Lawrence Walsh (later Iran-Contra prosecutor), Richard Kleindienst (who went on to be Attorney General), Ramsey Clark (another Democrat mistake), Warren Christopher (later Carter’s Secretary of State), Benjamin Civiletti (who also went on to be Attorney General), and Eric Holder, the current Attorney General.
Ogden’s legal skills as a porn lawyer include representation of the biggest distributor of hard-core pornographic films, as well as raunchy Penthouse magazine and tamer Playboy. His cases include opposition to spam filters on computers in public libraries, even where unsupervised children have access to them. He apparently doesn’t do just porn. He has also successfully represented a murderer before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Porn lawyers call themselves "First Amendment" lawyers, so you can be sure that the ACLU and other various groups will be shaking their wilted copies of the constitution at the hearings in favor of Ogden’s Senate confirmation.
Will the Odgen nomination be another Obama "train wreck," like his nominations for HHS secretary and the Commerce department, who both withdrew amid financial controversies? For Ogden’s sake, I hope he paid his taxes on all that porn income.
February 5th, 2009 at 12:00 am
Doesn’t porn also fall under the right to privacy you are a big supporter of? Or does that only apply to people you like?
February 5th, 2009 at 12:00 am
Privacy is indeed a right derived from the First Amendment, and it applies to people offended by porn, for sure. “Intrusion upon seclusion,” a privacy right, does not mean the right applies only to someone who sits in their basement all day. The concept of a magazine rack in Albertson’s with magazines that depict people having explicit sex is actually a good example of privacy rights at work. The “intrusion on seclusion” of all those technicolor naked people can offend a reasonable shopper’s sensibilities, and might be harmful to vulnerable populations, like children. That is why many ordinances exist that ban such materials for sale in public places, and require the guy, for example, who works the cash register at the Circle K, to reach under the counter to hand you your copy of Hustler and put it in a brown paper bag. Such rights also figure in zoning laws that balance the First Amendment to allow porn shops to operate, but not next to a church or school. What is so bad about that?
There is indeed a tension in the rights the First Amendment gives rise to for both porn distributors and those offended by porn. However, there is less baloney associated with the privacy right than the so-called “Free Speech” right of the pornographer. Porn, really, is not characterized by speech, it is characterized by the “prurient interest.” I personally don’t think it is “free speech” at all, rather, I think it is commercial speech, and therefore shouldn’t have the same constitutional standing as someone trying to publish a real magazine that includes real information. But that’s just me.
When Ogden claims to be a First Amendment lawyer, one must realize he is not standing up in court for some noble purpose to decry fascism or the slave trade, or even for the right of Communists to participate in elections. Instead, what he is advocating is to destroy reasonable regulation of pictures of people engaging in hard core sex acts that unsupervised children will end up seeing as a result of his success. There is nothing uplifting in that. I don’t see the justice in it. But that’s just me.
It is a pity that Obama couldn’t find a lawyer, even at the Legal Services Corporation, dedicated to “community activism,” instead of this stud.
February 8th, 2009 at 12:00 am
there is a sort of poetic justice to have a lawyer for the porn industry become part of the obscenity that is the federal government