January 3, 2007 Update
Here is the latest article in the AJC. The latest ruling from Judge Trash is interesting to say the least. On one hand he says that the Love Shack needs to get an adult business license, but he is not willing to shut him down or fine Mr. Cornetta. It seems that the City of Johns Creek will finally be getting involved starting on Friday (1/5/07) when they officially take over zoning and business licenses. Several questions that seem to be unanswered at this time:
How can the Love Shack legally operate after 30 days without a business license from Fulton County?
How will the City of Johns Creek handle this starting on Friday?
Will the Love Shack be considered a legal pre-existing non-conforming business in the City of Johns Creek?
How will the Love Shack get a sign permit without a business license?
Can the Love Shack meet the Johns Creek Adult Business Ordinance or will Mr. Cornetta challenge it in court?
Love Shack fined, but left open
Judge says amount of adult material significant but suspends penalty
A federal judge on Wednesday gave a slap on the hand to an adult video store in north Fulton, the terms of which had the owner declaring victory.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Thrash fined John Cornetta, owner of the controversial Love Shack store, for continuing to sell “a significant amount” of adult material in defiance of a court order.
Although the store had replaced much of its adult merchandise with items such as cheap purses, scarves and comic books, Thrash said the 2,000 adult videos and 1,650 sex toys still in the store was a significant amount, regardless of the total inventory.
But the judge suspended enforcement of the $1,000-per-day penalty that runs from Dec. 22.
“The judge gave with one hand and took away with the other,” said Fulton County Senior Attorney Steven Rosenberg. And while the judge ruled the store requires an adult business permit, he did not order that it close.
“We’re still open, and I’m not in jail,” Cornetta told reporters after the hearing in federal court in Atlanta.
“I’ll be selling something, and I’ll use the most adult words I can. They’re not getting rid of me.”
It was not immediately clear how the judge’s ruling would affect efforts by Fulton County to close the store.
The county maintains that Love Shack was violating the law when it opened Nov. 29 without an adult business license.
The store is located in the new city of Johns Creek, but the county has pursued the case because the store opened before the new city began legal operation on Dec. 1.
On Friday, the store will fall under Johns Creek laws.
Cornetta said that he planned to increase the store’s inventory back up to 25 percent adult, unless his lawyers tell him not to.
He said he doesn’t think the county would be able to inspect his inventory on Thursday and file a new complaint with the judge before the city takes over zoning regulations at 12:01 a.m. Friday.
But even then, he said, he would pay the fine.
Mayor Mike Bodker said the city hasn’t formulated a strategy for dealing with the Love Shack, which Bodker says is in an inappropriate location near subdivisions and school bus stops.
January 9, 2007 Update
Check out PORNOGRAPHY AS A CAUSE OF RAPE
It is an interesting website on the relationship of pornography and rape. We must remember than pornography brings with it a whole host of negative impacts that go way beyond “secondary impacts” at the actual store location. Porn destroys the lives of the women (and men) involved in making it. It destroys the lives of those that become addicted to it (and also the spouses of those that get addicted to it). And as this website documents, there is a direct connection between pornography and rape.
Some may argue that not everyone (and not most) who view pornography actually rape someone. They would say therefore pornography is not a cause of rape. This is like saying that not all people who drive drunk get into accidents, therefore drinking and driving is not a cause of accidents. The fact is that there is a connection between pornography and rape. In a study of convicted child molesters, 77 percent of those who molested boys and 87 percent of those who molested girls admitted to the habitual use of pornography in the commission of their crimes (Source: http://www.protectkids.com/effects/harms.html).
January 10, 2007 Update
Please check out the comment section for an email (and my response) from a local Johns Creek resident who thinks that I do not have the right to publicly come out against the Love Shack. The person is no fan of the Love Shack, but believes that it is a harmless business. One article that I reference is an excellent read. It is called “Just Harmless Fun?”. You can view it at www.protectkids.com/effects/justharmlessfun.pdf. It comes from a site called www.Protectkids.com.
I would also suggest reading the article “The Pornography Plague“. This article also makes several connections between pornography and rape. Here are two quotes from the article:
“In one study, researchers Dolf Zillman and Jennings Bryant investigated the effects of nonviolent pornography on sexual callousness and the trivialization of rape. They showed that continued exposure to pornography had serious adverse effects on beliefs about sexuality in general and on attitudes toward women in particular. They also found that pornography desensitizes people to rape as a criminal offense.(11) These researchers also found that massive exposure to pornography encourages a desire for increasingly deviant materials which involve violence (sadomasochism and rape).”
“Nevertheless, there are a number of compelling statistics that suggest that pornography does have profound social consequences. For example, of the 1400 child sexual molestation cases in Louisville, Kentucky, between July 1980 and February 1984, adult pornography was connected with each incident and child pornography with the majority of them.(21) Extensive interviews with sex offenders (rapists, incest offenders, and child molesters) have uncovered a sizable percentage of offenders who use pornography to arouse themselves prior to and during their assaults.(22) Police officers have seen the impact pornography has had on serial murders. In fact, pornography consumption is one of the most common profile characteristics of serial murders and rapists.”
You can also check out US Senate testimony on “The Science Behind Pornography Addiction“. Here is an interesting quote:
“Pornography, by its very nature, is an equal opportunity toxin. It damages the viewer, the performer, and the spouses and the children of the viewers and the performers. It is toxic mis-education about sex and relationships. It is more toxic the more you consume, the “harder” the variety you consume and the younger and more vulnerable the consumer. ”
January 11, 2007 Update
Here is the latest Love Shack update from Mayor Bodker. Plesae email Mayor Bodker and let him know that you support the city’s actions against the Love Shack. Mayor Bodker can be emailed at mike.bodker@cityofjohnscreekga.us
Fellow citizens,
On Jan. 3, 2007 U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Thrash found that the operators of the adult bookstore located at the intersection of Jones Bridge and State Bridge Roads in the City of Johns Creek was in contempt of the court order of Dec. 20. In that order the store was directed to shut its doors as long as the store continued to sell a significant amount of adult materials.
In the ruling, Judge Thrash found that Fulton County had shown “by clear and convincing evidence that the Plaintiffs currently offer a significant amount of adult, sexually explicit material for sale at the Love Shack and that they are “in contempt” of the court’s earlier ruling.
The store was ordered to close its doors or comply with the ruling by 3:00 p.m. Jan. 4. However, the order terminated at 12:01 a.m. Jan. 5, due to the fact that the City of Johns Creek took over business licensing and zoning from Fulton County at that time.
On Jan. 5 the City of Johns Creek began accepting applications for business licenses. The City maintains that the store is operating as a sexually-oriented business as defined by our City Code and as such is operating illegally.
The City will seek all legal remedies to see that proper zoning and licensing procedures are followed. Additionally, the City has filed a motion asking the federal court to reconsider its decision to deny our motion to intervene in the case. It is our position that the citizens of Johns Creek have a clear interest in the outcome of this case.
Despite media reports that the owner of the store intended to file suit against the City of Johns Creek, as of Jan. 9, no such action has been filed.
Thank you for your continued interest in the proceedings and in all that affects our citizens. Please continue to check back here for updates. We will do our best to notify the public as events unfold.
Respectfully,
Mike Bodker
anuary 13, 2007 Update
Please check out the comment section for a second email (and my response) from a local Johns Creek resident who thinks that I do not have the right to publicly come out against the Love Shack. Also here are additional links with excellent information on on-line and off-line porn:
Victims of Pornography
The Porn Problem & Solutions
January 16, 2007 Update
Over the next few days we will be presenting a summary of numerous studies that show a direct connection between the viewing of pornography and devient behavior in certain indivduals. This data was collected from a website called www.familyfacts.org
Study Overview
This meta-analysis examines the relationship between pornography consumption and sexual aggression.
Findings
A relationship exists between frequent pornography consumption and sexually aggressive behavior. This relationship is especially strong for those with the highest “predisposing” risk level for sexual aggression. Those who are at high risk for sexual aggression and who frequently consume pornography have sexual aggression levels that are four times higher than those who do not consume pornography frequently.
Sample or Data Description
Article includes a thorough review of empirical data regarding pornography’s effects. Multiple studies are referenced.
Source
“Pornography and Sexual Aggression: Are there Reliable Effects and Can We Understand Them?” Malamuth, Neil M. Addison, T., and Koss, J., Annual Review of Sex Research Vol. 11, Number _ , 2000. Page(s) 26-94.
January 17, 2007 Update
A sad but relevant article regarding the impacts of pornography. A central Florida man was acting out what he saw in pornography by hanging, torturing and raping a woman. This article is posted to show that the statistics provided on this site are real and should be taken seriously.
Police: Woman Hung From Tree, Tortured For Bondage-Porn Video
Man Planned To Sell Video After Declaring Bankruptcy, Investigators Say
A 31-year-old Central Florida man accused of hanging a woman from a tree and videotaping her torture and rape was attempting to create a bondage-porn video for cash after recently declaring bankruptcy, police told Local 6 News.
Deputies said Christopher Joseph Wood brought a woman to a river bank in a wooded area west of Interstate 95 in Brevard County and attacked her.
“Once they were out in the wooded area he proceeded to force sex on her and then he used a knife to kind of keep her under his control,” Brevard County sheriff’s Officer Marlin Buggs said.
After the attack, the woman was released to her parents and Wood was taken into custody a short time later.
Investigators went into the Brevard County woods and found ropes used to hang the woman still on a tree and a video camera apparently belonging to Woods. “(Wood) was arrested and confessed to attempting to make bondage porn,” Local 6’s Samantha Knapp said. “He planned to sell the video he made. Deputies declared this a heinous crime, saying he will never have that chance.”
“We found where he had taken items off the Internet and actually scripted out a bondage-type rape scenario,” Buggs said.
Documents obtained by Local 6 showed that Wood declared bankruptcy in November and banks foreclosed on his home.
“We charged him with just about every charge we could charge him with: False imprisonment, kidnapping and sexually battery,” Buggs said. “The sexually battery was done with a deadly weapon so there will be an enhancement, making it a life felony.”
Watch Local 6 News for more on this story.
January 19, 2007 Update
Here is another study that demonstrates the impacts of pornography:
Study Overview
This findings looks at the relationship between pornography consumption and sexual deviancy, sexual perpetration, attitudes regarding intimate relationships, and attitudes regarding rape myths.
Findings
According to this meta-analysis, exposure to pornographic material puts one at increased risk for developing sexually deviant tendencies, committing sexual offenses, experiencing difficulties in one’s intimate relationships, and accepting rape myths (i.e. beliefs that trivialize rape or blame the victim for the crime). Specifically, there is a 31% increase in sexual deviancy; a 22% increase in sexual perpetration; a 20% increase in negative intimate relationships; and a 31% increase in believing rape myths.
Sample or Data Description
46 published studies conducted between 1962 and 1995, with a total sample size of 12,323 people.
Source
Oddone-Paolucci, Elizabeth, The Changing Family and Child Development, (Aldershot: Ashgate 2000), pp. 48-59.
January 23, 2007 Update
Another interesting article that presents both sides of the debate on the impacts of pornography:
Battle Brews As Porn Moves Into Mainstream
- By DAVID CRARY, AP National Writer
Saturday, April 1, 2006 (04-01) New York (AP)
The industry’s VIPs mingle at political galas and Super Bowl parties. Their product is available on cell phones, podcasts, and particularly the Internet — there it’s an attraction like no other, patronized by tens of millions of Americans.
It’s pornography. And if you’re a consumer, John Harmer thinks you’re damaging your brain.
Harmer is part of a cadre of anti-porn activists seeking new tactics to fight an unprecedented deluge of porn which they see as wrecking countless marriages and warping human sexuality. They are urging federal prosecutors to pursue more obscenity cases and raising funds for high-tech brain research that they hope will fuel lawsuits against porn magnates.
“We don’t think it’s a lost cause,” said Harmer, a Utah-based auto executive and former politician who’s been fighting porn for 40 years.
“It’s the most profitable industry in the world,” he said. “But I’m convinced we’ll demonstrate in the not-too-distant future the actual physical harm that pornography causes and hold them financially accountable. That could be the straw that breaks their back.”
The activists’ adversary is a sprawling industry that, by some counts, offers more than 4 million porn sites on the Internet, that in the United States alone is estimated to be worth $12 billion a year. A tracking firm, comScore Media Metrix, says about 40 percent of Internet users in the United States visit adult sites each month.
Porn products are featured at popular sex expositions and retail chains such as Hustler Hollywood. Major hotels provide in-room porn, and adult film stars are now mainstream celebrities. Mary Carey attended a VIP Republican fundraiser in Washington in mid-March; Jenna Jameson’s “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star” hit the best-seller lists and she hosted a racy pre-Super Bowl party in Detroit in February.
As much as there is national consensus on the evils of child pornography, there is none whatever on porn featuring adults and marketed to them. It’s more pervasive than ever, yet activists and experts disagree bitterly over the extent of harm it causes.
“The form of entertainment is no problem,” said Paul Cambria, general counsel for the porn industry’s Adult Freedom Foundation. “There are individuals who are going to react abnormally to normal material, but it’s not a problem for the average person.”
For every couple driven apart by porn, there are others whose relationship is enlivened, Cambria argued. He dismissed contentions that porn is highly addictive or brain-damaging.
“Some people lie about it,” Cambria said. “It’s their way of excusing personally unacceptable conduct — ‘It wasn’t me, it was porn.’”
Such attitudes infuriate experts on the other side who say online porn is as addictive as crack cocaine.
“The Internet is the perfect delivery system for anti-social behavior — it’s free, it’s piped into your house,” said Mary Anne Layden, a psychologist and addiction expert at the University of Pennsylvania. “Internet porn is probably the biggest miseducation system we can devise in terms of sexuality, misuse of women.”
She says many of her patients, rather than improving their sex lives with porn, suffer sexual dysfunction.
Interest in porn is age-old and normal, says psychologist David Greenfield of West Hartford, Conn., an expert on Internet behaviors, but it can become a destructive obsession for a minority who indulge in it at the expense of healthy relationships. Easy availability is part of the issue.
“It’s not your father’s porn,” he said. “With little or no effort, as long as you have a computer, you can access some of the most stimulating content on the planet. There’s no delay, no person watching. It’s designed to very quickly get to a point where you’re not in full control.”
He estimates that for up to 10 percent of porn users, relationships suffer — with many husbands spending so much time online that they cease to have sex with their wives.
Divorce lawyers report that porn use is an increasingly common factor in marriage breakups: It can cause immense pain when a wife discovers her husband’s porn habit.
“I compare it to your house burning down,” said Laurie Hall, who divorced her husband after writing a book called “An Affair of the Mind,” about his 20-year obsession with porn.
“It destroys your sense of personhood when you bring all that you are into a relationship and someone chooses to ignore that,” she said. “It eats away at the heart of the family.”
Across America, compulsive porn use has spawned hundreds of support groups, treatment programs and Web sites where heartbroken spouses — mostly wives — swap stories of their mates’ obsessions.
Polls suggest most Americans believe porn should be off-limits to minors and available legally for adults. But groups such as Morality in Media think the public favors tougher enforcement of obscenity laws against hard-core porn; it operates a Web site that forwards obscenity complaints to federal officials.
“We’re not going to get rid of all of it, but we can push it back into the gutter as far as humanly possible,” said Morality in Media president Robert Peters, a Dartmouth-educated attorney who struggled in his 20s to kick a porn habit that started in grade school.
“It was hell,” said Peters, recalling a six-year stretch where he regularly visited porn outlets on New York’s 42nd Street. “It’s a very hard habit to break.”
Mark Laaser of Eden Prairie, Minn., says he frequently sought out pornography and engaged in extramarital sex for more than 20 years, starting in college and continuing through a career as pastor and counselor. He now runs workshops, and consults with church congregations on the issue.
“I’ve seen the damage it does to marriages, to families,” he said.
Though he stressed the need for individual willpower, Laaser also faulted the porn industry for employing aggressive online technologies that “besiege you.”
“Sometimes it’s not a matter of free will,” he said. “It’s a matter of invasion.”
Another self-described former addict is Phil Burress, head of a Cincinnati-based conservative group called Citizens for Community Values.
Like many conservatives, he had hopes that the Bush administration would reverse Clinton White House policy and step up prosecutions of adult-porn obscenity cases as well as child porn cases. Thus far, Burress is disappointed.
“Five years into this administration, they get an F,” he said.
Still, Burress is encouraged by the recent formation of an FBI anti-obscenity squad and the appointment of Brent Ward, a former U.S. attorney who combatted porn in Utah, to head an obscenity prosecution task force.
The Justice Department defends its record, saying it has indicted dozens of people on obscenity charges since 2001 and suggesting the pace will increase. But with a vast array of potential targets, and many other priorities, prosecutors must choose their battles carefully.
One pending case involves obscenity charges against a California couple whose company sold pornographic videos depicting simulated rape and murder. The charges carry a maximum penalty of 50 years in prison plus $7.5 million in fines.
The bottom line, perhaps, is that each side in the debate can make points that seem unassailable.
“Everyone agrees that tens of millions of Americans consume porn. … ministers, PTA members, policemen, teachers, soldiers, dentists and Boy Scout leaders,” argues California sex therapist Marty Klein. “The overwhelming majority of them don’t rape strangers or emotionally abandon their wives.”
But Layden, the Penn addiction expert, refuses to see porn as mostly harmless.
“When I ask men who are sex addicts if they would want their wife or daughter to be in porn, 100 percent say, ‘No,’” she said. “They want it to be somebody else’s wife or daughter. They know this material is damaging.”
