I do not favor open-carry for pornography.
Last edited Tue Sep 24, 2013, 03:11 PM - Edit history (1)
I am a 1st Amendment zealot. Something of a crackpot on the topic.
And, since porn is the most commonly abridged form of expression, I have been in the position of defending porn a zillion times.
I also favor other sexual freedoms. Do what you want with consenting adults. Gay. Straight. Kink. Vanilla. It's your deal.
At no point, however, have I felt that there is no limit on public display. I do not feel that I have an absolute right to put up a sexually explicit billboard. I also feel no absolute right to promote a candidate of my choice with a blaring sound-truck driving through your neighborhood in the middle of the night.
A person has an absolute right to masturbate... somewhere. But not on the subway.
Strip joints typically have the windows painted opaque. Seems reasonable to me, even though I feel they have an absolute right to exist. Barring incidental public view is much less outrageous than a legal dress code for dancers who are seen only by willing adults and not visible to passers-by, for instance. (If a sexually non-hostile workplace is an obvious right then some relative desexualization of the in-your-face public sphere is not, to me, intrinsically outrageous. In some cases outrageous, surely. But not intrinsically.)
Even stipulating a right to be a gun-owner doesn't confer an absolute right to the gun-owner "lifestyle" of carrying a gun everywhere, any more than I have a right to masturbate at the grocery store. And I am not being snarky in talking about gun rights. I am more sympathetic to gun rights than 90% of gun control advocates. I am troubled by banning things. Almost all things. Words. Drugs. Guns. Pictures. It troubles and concerns me.
But carrying a gun everywhere? We have a right to "bear" arms. Cool. That doesn't mean everywhere. We also have a right, IMO, to dance naked... but not nessecarily everywhere. (If "well regulated" doesn't imply control of gun ownership it certainly implies something. Time and place regulation is not obviously a screaming 2nd Amendment violation.)
I have a lot of admiration for nudists. It is an intriguing point of view. And they can be as nude a jay-birds at the nude-range... sorry, nude beach. I have no problem with a specified area where they can be nude while shooting at targets... sorry, I meant be nude while playing volleyball.
But if a person just don't feel comfortable wearing clothes (a reasonable POV, IMO) that is kind of in the "tough shit" category when it comes to some reaches of public life.
Seriously... am I supposed to be less sympathetic to the desire to go about the city streets as God made you than to the desire to go about the streets carrying a deadly weapon?
(And I, unlike the Supreme Court, do feel dancing nude to be a 1st Amendment protected expression.)
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Nevertheless, I've never walked into our neighborhood Starbucks nude.
When our kids were young we saw inflated scrotum guy.
(If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area you may know... 
)
As parents our response was, "No, that's a bad idea."
In our family ordinary naked people are unremarkable. Skinny dipping is fine, babies are openly nursed, and clothes are changed anywhere. I saw my great grandma's boobs. She didn't care and ten year old me didn't care either. In her two room house full of people there was not much expectation of privacy. A sibling of mine remembers taking a bath with her. The water was hauled into the house in buckets and heated on the wood stove. You didn't waste it.
I'm not one who would get nipple piercings or tattoos (I don't like needles) but tattoos and piercing surely are an adult human right and I admire art.
Guns are something worse for me. These "open carry" guys might as well be masturbating in public. Or worse than that.
Keep it in your pants, morons.
