Debate intensifies on proposed porn shop
The Top Story by Chris Graham
Staunton is known for its Victorian architecture, its downtown shops, its love for Shakespeare.
But how about … its porn shop?
The news that a porn business is preparing to open its doors in the Queen City has many residents up in arms – and frustrated that there’s really nothing that they can do legally to prevent the store from opening.
“It concerns me that the city of Staunton doesn’t have any ordinances regarding this issue. I know it’s been referred to the planning commission to draft something, and I know that Ray Robertson has said he will cite the Virginia code with regard to obscenity laws to prevent it. But this is one of those cases where the city hasn’t been as diligent as it should be in regards to the laws to protect its community,” said Anne Taetszch, the chair of the Staunton Republican Committee, which is hosting a public forum on the porn shop Tuesday night.
One of the panelists at the forum will be City Councilman Dickie Bell, who agrees with Taetszch’s assessment that the city government dropped the ball in regard to the lack of followup to a similar attempt to open an adult-themed business in Staunton two years ago.
“What we should have done at that time was take a hard look at the zoning ordinances then – but when the business went away, we didn’t. That was probably – we probably should have been a little more diligent in taking that look. That’s probably where we made a mistake,” Bell told The Augusta Free Press.
Robertson, the city Commonwealth’s attorney, will also be a panelist at next week’s forum. He has said in newspaper interviews that he plans to use a state statute defining obscenity to make arrests and undertake prosecutions related to the operation of the business.
The prosecutor could run himself and the city into a legal quagmire should he follow up his plans with actions to that end.
“The statute that he cites authorizes him to prosecute somebody for distributing what is determined to be obscene material. Obscenity has a specific legal definition that has to be met – and it’s a pretty high standard to meet. Nudity or representations of sexual acts by itself do not constitute obscenity under the law,” said Josh Wheeler, the associate director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression in Charlottesville.
Wheeler referenced a quote in a local newspaper story in which it seemed that Robertson was hinting that he could stop the store from opening using the state law on obscenity as a legal weapon.
“There’s no way that he can stop the store from opening on the basis that they claim to sell adult-themed materials. You can’t prosecute somebody for obscene material without actually seeing the material. So as a general matter for him to say that he can stop the store from opening up is simply incorrect,” Wheeler said.
“It has to be an act of selling, say, a magazine that is itself deemed to be obscene. And what would have to happen is he would have to find a particular magazine or video or whatever, and he would have to claim that this work meets the legal definition of obscenity. And he would then have to take it to court, and a jury would then have to find that it met the legal definition of obscenity,” Wheeler said.
“You can’t just blindly in broad strokes say that all this adult material is obscene. He’s going to have to look at individual items that the store is selling and make a claim that one or more of those items is obscene,” Wheeler told the AFP.
Anne Taetszch understands the legal and constitutional issues in the case. But more important to her – “As a woman, I’m very offended by pornography – because I think that it makes women out to be nothing more than sheer objects. It takes away the fact that we are humans,” Taetszch said.
“Just look at the data. Fifty-six percent of divorce cases involve at least one party having obsessive interest in pornography. Criminals are more likely than noncriminals to perform sex acts after viewing pornography. We have a high rate of sexual offenders in Staunton. If you look at the Virginia Sex Offender Registry, in Staunton alone there are 72 registered sex offenders. Compare that to Waynesboro, which has 55, and Harrisonburg, which has 66. Obviously, we have a high rate of sex offenders in the city. And you’re adding fuel to the fire when you have something like that come to town,” Taetszch said.
“You add pornography to the mix, and you reduce sex to nothing more than sheer animal desire – and you objectify women to the point where they’re not even human anymore. And I think that’s a huge problem that sex offenders have – is that they don’t see women as people, but as objects for their indulgences,” Taetszch told the AFP.
Wheaton College neuropsychologist Bill Struthers adds some scientific teeth to those suppositions.
“When you look at historically what we might consider to be pornography, you see pictures of sexual activity being depicted all the way to the earliest cave drawings and through antiquity. But what you see relatively recently, in the last 150 years, is as the technology has gotten better, and the media has gotten better, what happens is that the depictions of sexuality have become much more realistic. And so what happens is as you get photographs and as you get motion pictures, it acts on the brain in a different way than just looking at pictures drawn in the sandbox,” Struthers told the AFP.
“What’s happening with pornography most likely is that when you view a movie, you view an image or something like that, you activate parts of your brain that basically are the mirrors of that activity. So by watching the pornography, you are vicariously experiencing the pornography as well,” Struthers said.
“Sex in our culture is very much taboo. We’re much more open about watching violence on television, but when it comes to nakedness, we’re much more sensitive to those kinds of things,” Struthers said. “So you have the added burden of sexuality being a taboo subject – and with many men, they just really don’t have a place to deal with their sexuality in our culture, they feel very threatened by things, so what they do is they go do something that’s easy. They go to an image that’s there and doesn’t require anything from them. They know that the movies that they watch and the pictures that they view don’t require that they emotionally invest in the women that are there – they’re just objects that are there for their consumption.
“That’s why pornography has such a strong hold on men – is that you have neurological and cultural forces that are driving men toward this being a legitimate way in the minds of many to meet their sexual needs in a way that is very cost-effective. They don’t have to take a woman out on a date. They don’t have to emotionally invest themselves in a woman who might reject them. So what they do is they use pornography as a way to escape the stress in their lives or medicate their depression through it. And so what happens is the pornography becomes a very unhealthy way of meeting the very healthy sexual needs that most men have – and it actually substitutes itself for them being men in a healthy way,” Struthers said.
That said, “I would not want to go to the extent to say that if you view pornography, you’re going to become some kind of sex offender,” Struthers said.
“You do see that there are many sex offenders who do have patterns of viewing pornography. That’s not to say that everyone who views pornography is going to become a pedophile or sex offender – but the relationship is there, and at the very least should be acknowledged,” Struthers said.
Dickie Bell doesn’t need scientific evidence to tell him that he doesn’t want to see an adult-themed store open up in his city. Nor does he need a First Amendment expert to tell him that the city’s hands are tied with respect to dealing with the issue at hand.
“I don’t know that there’s a delicate way to say this – the city has just not done a good job in reviewing some of the loopholes that exist in our zoning ordinances that allows this type of business. But I say that, and I feel like that these aren’t the kinds of businesses that we necessarily want – but at the same time, you don’t want zoning laws that are so restrictive that they discourage anything from coming. This sort of straddles that line,” Bell said.
“Morally, I’m as opposed to this kind of business as anyone can be. I think it’s one of those things that tears away at the moral fabric of our cities and our country. I really don’t like them – and I’m offended by them, to be honest with you. At the same time, we don’t live in some kind of police state where nobody can get a license to operate a business. So I think what you do is you have to examine your existing zoning laws and see if you have protected neighborhoods and protected your citizens – because that may be the only responsibility government really has, to protect its citizens,” Bell said.
“You have to admit – if there wasn’t a market for this kind of thing, nobody would be interested in opening one of these kinds of stores. And that’s troubling – but obviously a market exists. We can’t do anything about that so much – but I think we can take some steps to protect our citizens,” Bell said.
Details
WHAT: Staunton Republican Committee forum on the proposed adult video store
WHEN: Tuesday, Sept. 18, 7 p.m.
WHERE: Staunton City Hall, City Council Chambers
Chris Graham is the executive editor of The Augusta Free Press.
