So I was a little curious why Walt Disney Company sponsored a booth at CPAC. It’s the only notable corporate booth at the conference. My first thought was that maybe Disney’s trying to win back family values crusaders still pissed off about the whole (ridiculous) “gay day” thing.

Turns out, Disney’s presence at CPAC is a Grover Norquist project, and represents a soul-selling symbiotic effort between cultural conservatives and the Mouse to ban peer-to-peer technology. The Disney booth is lined with op-eds, Heritage backgrounders, and dire warnings to conservative parents about how their children are utilizing peer-to-peer to download pornography.

A pox on both their houses. Disney’s playing with fire, here. Just this week, conservative activists took out a full-page ad in USA Today. The ad used the proposed merger between the Movie Gallery and Hollywood Video home video chains as a jumping off point (Movie Gallery stores apparently have an adult section) to for an anti-porn campaign.

The ad’s pretty scary. It doesn’t just call for a consumer boycot. It’s calling for federal prosecution of the porn industry on obscenity charges. Disney’s allying itself with unapologetic censors.

As for conservatives, I’ve heard lots of fiscal issues panelists today talk about how we need roll back the regulatory state, roll back government, and open the doors to innovation, technology, and the power of markets. Except, I guess, if said techonology can be utilized by pornographers. Then, we gotta’ step on it. Hard.

Of course, were it not for porn, the Internet would likely still be little more than a couple hundred academics and military stragegists posting to BBS’s. Porn drives techology.

Luddites and prudes unite.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 18th, 2005 at 1:10 pm by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.