We had our monthly managers’ meeting today. I assumed it would be the standard yawn-fest, but it turned out to be considerably more eventful than that.
Our great state has passed a pornography law. The reason they haven’t passed one before now is that no one actually wanted to define pornography. In defining “pornography,” the lawmakers would have to go into detail about what constitutes sexy, what constitutes erotic, what constitutes kinky, etc. Which would logically mean that anyone reading the law might gain some insight into the sex lives of the people who wrote the law. Which would imply that the lawmakers have sex, and no one wants to encourage citizens to imagine their state senators having sex.
So they got over this hurdle (or “hump,” if you will) by refusing to give a definition. Instead, they said that the actual definition of “pornography” is up to each individual community’s standards. Then they proceeded to define in no uncertain terms the penalties that await people who are convicted of “selling, renting or otherwise disseminating” pornographic materials.
(Am I the only one who finds irony in the use of the word “disseminating” in this context? I asked this at the managers’ meeting, and no one laughed, although Paula later told me that she wanted to laugh, and that she couldn’t believe I actually said that out loud in a managers’ meeting.)
Everyone’s worried that this could be the death of home video rental stores. Adult entertainment easily accounts for one quarter of our revenues, if not more. Equal to Barney and Disney combined, easily. We all had to go back to our stores and shut down our adult rooms until further notice.
General discussion produced some interesting speculation. The consensus seemed to be that the rat bastards had used “community standards” as a dodge. Everyone agreed that in shifting the burden to “community standards,” the lawmakers had assumed that no one in their right mind would stand up and say “here’s what will be this community’s standards regarding pornography.” I mean, if a lack of a definition of "pornography" stopped them from legislating pornography for all these years, then they have now caused it to become the reason not to distribute pornography. The only safe response anyone could have to the new law would be to take all adult-oriented materials off the shelves entirely.
Phil [Ed: the owner of the chain] has been thinking about the local politics of the situation. Based on what he knows about the D.A.’s in our counties, he feels that Whitman County will get their adult sections open first, Norman County will be second and Maycomb County [Ed: the county that I lived and worked in] will be last because our D.A. is the sternest and strictest D.A. of the three.
