Porn Yesterday -- But Barely Risqué Today

Some things must depend on what your definition of the word “in” is.

No, I’m not quoting Bill Clinton here, but rather making a reference to a speaker who appeared before the Harrisonburg City Council on Tuesday night (10/28/3) and said he lived “in Harrisonburg.” What he probably meant to say – let’s be generous here – is that he has a Harrisonburg address, even though he lives several miles outside the city. The difference is significant because he is the ringleader of a political group that wants the council to pass a resolution with unknown consequences. The only thing we know for sure about those consequences, as a matter of fact, is that the taxes of people who live outside the city won’t be paying for them.

Certainty about consequences is a good thing when you’re spending other people’s money. That fact should be self-evident in a city that’s going to be more than half a million dollars in the hole by springtime on a recreation project that was supposed to pay for itself. But that’s another story.

The story here is that last summer a bunch of people were arrested on charges of performing sex acts on one another in a public place, specifically the back rooms of a local porn shop, one of two or three in the city. To me such people are objects of pity; it’s almost a shame we have to arrest them, but it would be more of a shame if we didn’t. Some things you just can’t do in public.

To others, those arrested are objects of fear. Some members of the community see those arrested not as pathetic fringe-dwellers but rather as the vanguard of an assault on our way of life – not as people hiding in a back room but as people marching down Main Street trying to corrupt our children.

Others saw them as an opportunity.

Those are the others who came to see us Tuesday night to join the discussion of a resolution they’d presented at our previous meeting. The group, the Valley Family Forum, had circulated a petition at the county fair a month after the arrests, asking city and county governments to place zoning restrictions on porn shops. The city council referred that issue to the Planning Commission almost immediately.

Case closed, right?

Not exactly. The group, represented primarily by county residents, came right back with the resolution, asking the city government to urge businesses in the city not to place sexually oriented materials in view of children. And the group claimed that’s what the petition had asked for. (I’m sure a lot of people were surprised when they found out they’d signed a petition against Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan, a fact revealed in a wonderful DNR story.)

Why push for more after getting what they wanted? And why misrepresent what the petitioners had asked for? There are two possibilities. One is that the group was emboldened by its success, and wanted to score further victories in what it sees as a moral crusade. The other is that the group’s leader just wanted to be on television. I have no proof of that, mind you, other than the fact that he included a biographical sketch of himself in the materials he submitted to the council – the first time that particular piece of self-promotion has happened in the three and a half years I’ve been on council.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. People need attention for their political movements, and those movements don’t succeed when shy or genuinely self-deprecating people run them. But those who claim to be working for the greater good of the community need to think about something besides their own narrow interests.

I’ve had two conversations with Dean Welty that are relevant to his level of concern for the greater good of the area in his pursuit of his personal crusade. In the first conversation, soon after he latched onto this issue, I urged him to work through the system and not make it a noisy and splashy issue. I pointed out to him that shock-jocks at a Tidewater radio station were mocking Harrisonburg because of the porn shop arrests. “That’s Tidewater’s problem,” he said. Wrong. That’s Harrisonburg’s problem. Blaming the messenger blithely ignores the fact that what becomes news here can become news statewide or nationally. National businesses considering Harrisonburg should be thinking about our huge retail trading zone and our high quality of life. They shouldn’t be thinking of us as a place that bans Rolling Stone. People considering opening a store or restaurant here will not ask if the ban is non-binding. Instead they will ask which way it is to Charlottesville.

In the second conversation with Welty, a few hours before the Oct. 14 council meeting, I suggested that he hold off on his council appearance until the Planning Commission had dealt with the zoning issue. He responded that he had to show up to present his petition. And, by the way, he said, he was also showing up to present his resolution (which had nothing to do with the petition). Welty is exhibiting a single-minded determination to keep this issue alive at all costs – but don’t take my word for it. I’m writing this paragraph on Halloween, 2003. Let’s see how many more ways the Forum finds to bring this issue up between now and March, when it will come back to council as part of the zoning process.

One way the Forum could proceed is to do the hard work of dealing with businesses by themselves, instead of trying to use the government to do it. They are, after all, part of that group of right-wingers who are for limited government until they want something, and who want to pick and choose among the phrases of the First Amendment. The city council actions so far should send two messages to those outside the area. One is that the action to limit porn shops through zoning rules is moving ahead, well ahead of the spread of the two or three marginalized shops. The other is that we are not telling mainstream businesses how to run their shops. If Welty’s group wants to do that through boycotts or picketing, they are welcome to, although I’m not sure there are enough of them.

I should point out that some may view my concern about the business climate as a false excuse to cover my true feelings about this issue. That’s accurate. The issue of the business climate to me is secondary to these: we should not tell people what they can read, we should not tell businesses what mainstream magazines they can stock on their shelves, and we should not let people like the Valley Family Forum use the political system to force their religious views on others. Those who don’t share my absolute views on the First Amendment should still consider the need to be seen as progressive and not as a hick town, and the fact that it is city taxes that will pay for the consequences of the Forum’s vague resolution. Welty is spoiling for a fight, but doesn’t want to spend the Forum’s treasury fighting it.

Besides the money, they also want to spend the city’s credibility on it. But at the end of the day, the resolution has nothing whatsoever to do with pornography. They just say it does. And that’s not enough.

Last Revised: 11.17.03    Publisher: Joseph Gus Fitzgerald
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