Be heard on the issues that matter most to you!
I was shocked when I saw this billboard on I 65 near Jeffersonville Indiana. (Jeffersonville about two hours south of Indianapolis and across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky). The photo above isn't mine - I wasn't quick enough - but is an image of the same billboard from the sponsoring organization's web site. The organization is called Reclaiming our Culture (ROCK) and their mission is to fight adult businesses in southern Indiana and north central Kentucky ("Kentuckiana" in their parlance).
The ROCK web site explains:
The focus of this billboard’s message is the threat pornography and the sex industry pose to our most vulnerable citizens – our children.
As you might expect, their web site offers no specific evidence of harm to communities and no specific data on porn addiction.
From their web site I gather that their strategy is to corral repentant sex offenders who attribute their offenses to pornography addiction and have them tell their stories at press conferences and community meetings in order to heighten community outrage about adult businesses and attempt to keep them from opening or shut down those that exist.
Does anybody else have examples of anti-adult-biz billboards? I'd love to see them. If they're linked to any local policy initiatives that'd be helpful to know about, too.
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
I just saw that same billboard last week. The interesting part is that they're putting these things up right in front of adult bookstores, which winds up being further advertising for said bookstores.
At least one of the two I saw was across the highway from an adult bookstore sign, also. And you know, there is something about a billboard with a child gazing out at you with big doe-like eyes and XXX in enormous letters that also risks sending a mixed message when you zip past at 70mph.
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
LOL! Life imitates parody!
I can't help but read into this a message that if you vote republican you too can terrify children and tear apart the fabric (social) that protects their communities!
...because public space really matters!
Elizabeth
They put their mixed messages up with big pictures because they assume no one reads anymore. I don't have a billboard to post because I can't see them anymore. But I can still have my computer read to me and still remember what I have read. I wonder if any of the ROCKbrains and their ilk ever consdered this:
A recent decision of the Supreme Court leaves to each community the right to decide what is pornography. Speaking for the majority of the Court, Chief Justice Warren Burger admitted that although no link has yet been found between the consumption of pornography and anti-social behavior, any community may assume that such a connection exists if it wants to -- in other words, an outraged community may burn a witch even though, properly speaking, witches do not exist.
The Court's decision has of course alarmed and confused the peddlers of smut, who claim, disingenuously, that guidelines are now lacking. They complain that the elders of Drake, North Dakota, may object to the word "damn" in a novel while the swingers of L.A. may want to read even worse words. Must the publisher, they ask, bring out two editions, one for permissive L.A. with the word "damn" and another for hightoned Drake with the word "darn"? Or settle the matter by publishing only for Drake?
This is a deep problem which I have solved. Wanting in every way to conform with the letter as well as the spirit of the Court's decision, I have carefully eliminated from this book those words that might cause distress to any one. Since books are nothing but words, a book is pornographic if it contains "bad" or "dirty" words. Eliminate those "bad" or "dirty" words and you have made' the work "clean."
In this novel I have replaced the missing bad words with some very good words indeed: the names of the justices who concurred in the Court's majority decision. Burger, Rehnquist, Powell, Whizzer White and Blackmun fill, ,as it were, the breach; their names replace the "bad" or "dirty" words. I have also appropriated the names of Father Morton Hill S. J. and Mr. Edward Keating, two well-known warriors in the battle against smut. I believe that these substitutions are not only socially edifying and redemptive but tend to revitalize a language gone stale and inexact from too much burgering around with meaning.
Gore Vidal, Myron (opening comment to the book)
In reference to my last post:
The next time I get Bushed, I hope there is some K-Y Jelly at hand...
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