The Blowfish Blog

[The Pro Circuit] Meet David Ogden

A guy named David Ogden is President Barack Obama’s nominee for Deputy Attorney General, which is why the fun is about to start.

The Deputy Attorney General, according to Wikipedia, oversees the day-to-day operations of the Justice Department. It was Deputy AG Paul McNulty who was responsible for the 2006 firings of US Attorneys, allegedly because they showed insufficient enthusiasm for prosecuting porn. No wonder, then, that the anti-porn commandos are howling: Ogden has represented Playboy and Penthouse, among others. He also was instrumental in sinking the government’s obscenity case against Adam & Eve for mailing porn to Utah. If you had asked me a year ago if Barack Obama would show this kind of pro-First-Amendment audacity, I would have laughed my ass off.

In fact, Ogden’s pro-freedom stance is obvious well beyond his representing Adam & Eve. He wrote a brief for the plaintiff Lawrence v. Texas, the case that struck down the Texas sodomy law, in which he not only discussed widespread anti-gay prejudice but specifically argued for the rights of bisexuals. As if Eric Holder’s controversial admission that waterboarding is torture isn’t enough—now we’re actually advocating rights—for bisexuals!?!? of all people?

The anti-sex lobby is not amused.

A great AVN article on this topic leads me to some truly amazing comments in a press release from right-wing Catholic group Fidelis.org that claims, among other things, that Ogden “ . . .successfully defended the right of pornographers to produce material with underage children,” which certainly would have been hard to miss, had it happened. But the most entertaining comments so far come from commentator Judith Reisman, in an article in WorldNetDaily (a publication devoted to “revitalizing the role of the free press as a guardian of liberty.”):

Harvard lawyer President O would never expect justice for blacks from lawyers whose income derived from wealthy Klansmen—nor could he expect justice for women and children from lawyers whose income is derived from wealthy pornographers. No Ogden team lawyer has ever defended a single woman, man or child alleging victimization by Big Porno.

Which is doubtless a good thing to most readers of this blog, but—wait a minute, did she just equate prosecuting porn with prosecuting wealthy Klansmen? That’s the comic book “Wha-haaa!?” sound I’m making, but it really shouldn’t surprise me, since she also called the nation’s first African American President “President O.” I’m surprised Reisman didn’t call him “The Big O,” a nickname with a rather saucy ring to it.

Funny thing about Judith Reisman; I managed to avoid knowing her by name for most of my adult life, until a couple years ago I stumbled upon her book Kinsey: Crime and Consequences, a weird book published by something called the “Institute for Media Education”; with a bizarrely amateur print job it looks kind of like a Cajun cookbook self-published by a Meemaw in northern Louisiana.

The amusing quantity and peculiarity of the accusations Resiman levels at sex researcher Alfred Kinsey is seriously not worth braving the vitriol this woman feels toward anything even remotely connected to sexual liberty or inquiry; you’ll walk away feeling icky, so just don’t. You can, however, get a feel for Ms Reisman’s acolytes by reading some of the lengthier Amazon reader’s comments, in which Kinsey is alleged to have died of “homosexual and bisexual” acts. Incidentally, Reisman’s main assertion is that Kinsey was a child molester, something no biographer has found evidence of.

Turns out Reisman was also given a grant of $734,000 by the Justice Department to come up with research that would support the antiporn stance of the Meese Commission.

Is your mind blown? Have I got my Jimmy Olsen jock strap on right now? Is it breaking news that someone like Reisman, an organization like Fidelis, and all the other antisex spaz-cases are pooping themselves over David Ogden’s nomination as Deputy AG?

No, it’s really not. I just wanted to gloat.

Thomas Roche blogs about echolocation and oneirological advertising at Thomasroche.com.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, 10 February 2009 at 6:40 pm and is filed under Industry. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.