Kaimi,

I wouldn’t be surprised if magazines like Maxim are the best selling, given that they’re sold in Albertsons, Target and RiteAid. Their business strategy is to be as sexual as possible (since that’s what the market wants) yet not cross the line (raise the temperature too high) so that grocery and convenience stores won’t carry them. Playboy’s mistake, as they see it, was becoming a lightning rod and inviting boycots against retailers that carried them. To my knowledge, the only major retailer to have dropped Maxim is Wal-Mart. And even though these magazines may be the best selling, they would still be small players in the multi-billion dollar porn industry, which now consists of many more mediums than print magazines.

Arguments as to founding intent have never been entirely convincing, in my book, for two major reasons: 1. we cannot be assured as to the intent of long-dead individuals, and 2. their viewpoints are irrelevant to a society that has long-since gone beyond their world. It has always seemed to me that those most in favor of exhuming the Founders for their arguments do so because they long for the moral conservatism of the Founders’ world. That’s a disingenuous appeal to original intent, IMHO.

I’m not convinced that reading statistics that a majority of men use porn (of an unspecified type), and one apparent CNN discussion about porn (again, of an unspecified type), support your original claim that “hard-core porn [is] widely accepted in our society.”

How “accepted” must something to be to be “widely accepted”? I think that most porn use remains furtive, suggesting that it is _not_ widely accepted in society. And a number of other factors also suggest a lack of “wide acceptance”: Porn magazines remain behind paper-bag covers, porn-blocking is common in every workplace, viewing porn on the job will often get you fired, porn actors and actresses are not considered serious actors.

And I think one has to ask whether any increase in porn viewing over the past ten years is due to availability rather than acceptance. My guess is that that is exactly the case. Internet porn, which is available to many more people than plain old magazine or movie-theater porn was, may have changed actual porn viewership in ways that “social acceptance” never could.

I’ve read statistics that seem to imply that a majority of men use porn. At least Cooper Anderson of CNN seems to think so. It was so obvious to him that everyone looks at porn that for him it was just a matter of who is honest about it.

I do believe that there are a lot of people who are disgusted by porn and its exploitative industry. But I don’t agree that “most everyone” thinks that.

As to Lochner, I think it is a bad example. Property rights are among the rights that the Founders envisioned in creating our Republic; rights to homosexuality, sodomy, and abortion are not. Thus, when Parrish overturned Lochner it can be seen as liberal activist judges engaging in social legislation from the bench in contravention of founding intent, rather than as a court properly executing its Article III responsibilities (see Federalist 78) and curtailing a penumbra that has embraced rights outside the purview of founding intent.

Randy: I think that you make a good point. My experience has not been any different.