DUBYA's HOLY WAR

Four more years of George W. Bush will bring the Christian Right's war against pornography into full bloom. With America inching closer to his sexophobic Attorney General's wet dream of restoring a Puritan society, MARK CROMER looks into the eyes of the enemy.

On a late-summer afternoon I find myself on a stage at the swank Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pasadena, California, tucked between voluptuous Internet mogul Danni Ashe and a former federal prosecutor named Bruce Taylor. We face an auditorium packed with journalists who have assembled for a massive media event called the "critics tour," where broadcast and cable networks and major production companies debut their fall programming for entertainment and news reporters.

It is from this vantage point that I first observe the true blossoming of Attorney General John Ashcroft's dream of waging a total war against commercial pornography in the United States-a strategy aimed at laying waste to virtually all depictions of consenting adults having sex. And it is here that I am treated to the surreal sight of the mainstream media eagerly, if perhaps somewhat unwittingly, striking up the band and enlisting in Ashcroft's holy war.

Only moments before, the producers of the Public Broadcasting Service's legendary Frontline had treated journalists to a trailer of its documentary "American Porn" (based on an essay I'd penned for The Nation), which was scheduled to air on PBS. Central to Frontline's footage was a scene from a controversial XXX movie in which a woman is kidnapped, brutally raped and then murdered. The narrator's voice ominously ponders whether the camera crew had just witnessed an actual sexual assault. In a few short minutes the jump was seamlessly made from Debbie Does Dallas to a snuff film.

When the lights came up, Bruce Taylor was practically salivating, gleeful that Frontline had conveniently framed the issue by taking a page right out of the playbook of his old bluenose group, Citizens for Decency Through Law. The message was clear: Porn is rape. Porn is murder. Porn is evil. Thus, porn viewers are deviants.

Taylor hammered that message home as the media dutifully scribbled it all down for regurgitation to the masses. That was three years ago, just weeks before hijacked jetliners slammed into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, irrevocably altering Bush's agenda and derailing Ashcroft's crusade against porn in the process.

Now, with the prospect of a second term looming, Ashcroft has again bolstered the Justice Department's anti-obscenity unit, spending millions of dollars and employing a nexus of federal prosecutors, FBI agents and U.S. postal inspectors in as many as 50 current investigations. Ashcroft has also brought Taylor back into the fold, hiring him to quarterback the impending glut of obscenity cases. Taylor, who has prosecuted more than 700 obscenity cases since the early 1970s, clearly sees the dawn of Ashcroft's jihad as the defining moment in his personal struggle against pornography.

The stakes are far higher for the adult-entertainment industry than they were during the Reagan-Meese prosecutions in the mid-1980s or Bush the First's legal assaults in the early 1990s. Ashcroft, Taylor and their cohorts instinctively understand that a second George Dubya term will possibly be their last, best chance to inflict a fatal blow to a commercial behemoth that now touches nearly every corner of American society.

In the opening salvo, Ashcroft has targeted, not coincidentally, Robert Zicari and Janet Ramano in a ten-count federal indictment. While his prosecutors are confident they'll get a more sympathetic judge and jury in Pennsylvania-the case stems from a postal sting in Pittsburgh, exemplifying a classic federal tactic of venue-shopping-they also know that regardless of the verdict the experience will prove to be a costly one for the defendants.

The couple, who are engaged, make movies for Zicari's company Extreme Associates-with Zicari shooting under the name Rob Black, and Ramano using the nom de lens Lizzie Borden. It was Ramano's XXX opus simulating the rape and murder of a kidnap victim that Frontline's previously mentioned documentary zeroed in on, much to Taylor's delight.

As Ashcroft's prosecutorial war machine unleashes its attacks on sexual depictions, the corporate-owned and self-described mainstream media will dutifully keep score. (Incidentally, film and video aren't the only targets; Taylor has indicated that magazines, Web sites and books are all fair game as well.) The number of busts, the names of the indicted, the venues of every proceeding and, of course, sordid descriptions of the allegedly obscene material will all become a matter of record. Yet the fundamental question that rests at the core of Ashcroft's war has nothing to do with statistics or the how or who. Rather, it has everything to do with the why-i.e., motive. This primary question has largely been unexplored by the corporate press (a more accurate usage than mainstream), whose beat reporters often resemble tittering adolescents as they write superficially about a complex billion-dollar industry.

That suits Ashcroft and Taylor just fine. The more refracted the light shining on the Justice Department's true motive for its jihad, the better for them. Given network and cable news divisions' penchant for allotting considerable time to the synergy of cross-promoting entertainment fare at the expense of actual investigative reporting, Ashcroft needn't start worrying anytime soon. If Frontline dropped the ball-and it did, badly-don't expect the likes of CBS to dig much deeper.

Ironically, it doesn't take a tremendous amount of digging to reveal the foundation of the war against porn. Attorney General Ashcroft, prosecutor Taylor and their minions in the ranks of enforcement and bureaucratic agencies (not to mention a swarm of paramilitary-like antiporn groups around the nation) all operate from a single premise: They fear sex.

These people are afraid of it, and thus they hate it. Because they hate it, they seek to stamp it out anywhere and everywhere. But because they fear and hate it, they are equally obsessed by it.

Exhibit A is prosecutor Bruce Taylor, a bespectacled, bookish blend of tax attorney-meets-Frank Burns. (Remember the condescending major from M*A*S*H?) Taylor's own extremely narrow view of sexuality drives his lifelong prosecutorial crusade-a fact hinted at in rare interviews.

"[Does] the material appeal to the prurient interest?" Taylor asks, warming up to elaborate. "Meaning, does it appeal to that shameful, morbid, lustful, lascivious, erotic interest in sex?"

Shameful. Morbid. Lustful. Lascivious. Erotic. All "prurient" according to Taylor-and thus, all legally obscene.

Depictions of sex between consenting adults, Taylor maintains, are legal only if they appeal to "sort of a normal, healthy, educational, reproductive interest." Apparently, a high-school biology-class film that shows wiggly tailed spermatozoa penetrating an egg for DNA transfer would pass muster.

In case there's any doubt, Taylor matter-of-factly notes that such cable television shows as Sex and the City could face prosecution for obscenity, and he more than hints that they should be targeted.

Taylor's cringing reaction to healthy human impulses of lust and erotic sensations becomes even more evident when he drifts into his philosophy on explicit sexual depictions between consenting adults. Echoing the mantra of archfeminist Andrea Dworkin (who once famously declared that heterosexual intercourse was an act of rape in and of itself), Taylor states: "Pornography…is like the training manual for how guys get to be chauvinist jerks. I mean, you don't treat a woman well if you treat her like she is treated in a porn movie."

Taylor's view is essentially the same as Dworkin's, since his blanket statements on pornography cover all "hard-core" depictions of a penis entering a vagina-not bothering to discern between storylines, plot or environment. Both believe depicting a penis in a vagina or a mouth-or a tongue on a nipple or clitoris-is a crime.

And that is precisely why John Ashcroft has tapped Taylor to be his top commander in his war on porn-the Attorney General feels the same way. The mere idea of depicting sex for pleasure inspires an utterly visceral reaction in Ashcroft. While many people know of his decision to cover the exposed breasts of the Spirit of Justice statue where he works, fewer know that the man does not believe in dancing with his own wife. It is against his beliefs.

"Pornography invades our homes persistently through the mail, phone, VCR, cable TV and the Internet," Ashcroft told supporters in 2002. "It has strewn its victims from coast to coast."

Apparently, not a single mainstream reporter has asked the attorney general just how a videotape "invades" a VCR without a consumer putting it there. Evidently, not a single reporter has asked Ashcroft why dancing with his wife is wrong. As for President Bush, who does indeed dance with the First Lady, unleashing Ashcroft and his dogs of war on the producers of commercial pornography is likely a pragmatic matter of shoring up his Christian Right base. Troubled that Dubya waffled on gay marriage and wasn't as vocally enthusiastic on abortion as they'd have liked, Pat Robertson, Lou Sheldon, James Dobson and Jerry Falwell are demanding total action against porn this time around.

While Ashcroft and Taylor plot their attacks from the nation's capital, their shock troops from coast to coast will provide ground cover for the war. Listening to them expound on pornography, the fanaticism of their views comes into full relief. Foot soldiers like Michelle Emard perhaps best exemplify the absolutist, kamikazelike zeal brought to this battle. A Southern California television news producer, she was a campaign staffer for Republican Presidential candidate Alan Keyes and served eight months as media-relations director for Orange County District Attorney Tony Rackauckas. Emard embodies the most dangerous type of Ashcroft-Taylor warrior, as she's attractive, intelligent and disarming enough to not immediately raise alarm bells. At least until she starts spouting off her feelings about porn and what should happen to its masterminds and consumers.

While I have only had lunch with Bruce Taylor, my relationship with Michelle Emard spanned the better part of a year and was much more involved. Smiling and with her eyes sparkling, she details how pornography is, by definition, "evil" and simply must be destroyed. Creators of porn (which, in her opinion, includes everyone from Larry Flynt to the producers of soft-core fluff like Red Shoe Diaries) are worse than drug dealers who peddle heroin to children-and should be dealt with accordingly. People who find enjoyment in viewing consenting adults having sex for pleasure are, in her same vernacular, "sick addicts" who "use" pornography like a drug. These people (probably numbering well over 100 million adults in the U.S.), she reasons, need psychological treatment and "recovery."

As she waxes unabashedly, one senses the quasi-Zen of a blindly devoted Manson family member as she advocates "eradicating this filth" from our planet. And how does one explain Emard's hauntingly beatific smile? It could only stem from a blissful embrace of Total Certainty and the serenity that comes in knowing your corner on truth is absolute and irrevocable.

When asked whether the fabled nude scene in the 1968 Broadway smash musical Hair would qualify as flotsam in this "sewer of filth," Emard sours slightly. She states that such questions amount to "philosophical hair-splitting" designed to "avoid the real issue"-that porn must be destroyed.

Pushed, Emard finally makes a concession: Yes, any depiction of nipples, pubic hair or human sexuality portrayed in a manner outside the perimeters of a biblically sanctioned union for the purpose of procreation is "dirty" and should be legislated out of the culture.

That day may be closer than most people suspect. The reelection of President George W. Bush would provide Ashcroft, Taylor and their minions with enough momentum to fully engage in a war against pornography. But they will not stop at prosecuting the likes of Debbie Does Dallas off the shelves. It is clear that they have every intention of going after all sexual depictions that they deem offensive. The front line of porn is simply phase one.

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