Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood - It sure has changed

Meet Tom Rogers.

Mr. Rogers is a retired Indianapolis police detective.

Thanks to your tax money, Mr. Rogers has a job where he spends most of each workday looking at porn websites and other adult materials to "see whether they qualify as obscene material whose purveyors should be prosecuted by the Justice Department."

About $150,000 annually of money that is taken from you on pain of imprisonment is used to finance Mr. Rogers's and another retired officer's daily forays into other people's private sexual matters. This story about the program states that over the last two years, these two fellows have deemed 67,000 sites that citizens have complained about "obscene", and have referred them to the Justice Department for possible prosecution.

The total number of prosecutions that have been made under the program? Zero.

That's right, the whole shebang is a colossal waste of your hard-earned money. To make matters much worse, when you click the link on the Justice Department web site to make a complaint, you are taken to a private website run by Morality In Media, a conservative religious group whose stated goal is "ridding the world of pornography". Not obscenity. All pornography. Of course, to these guys, anything having remotely to do with sex is obscene, so it fits that they wish to see all of it go away, and any adult who wants some can just go pound sand.

Separation of church and state? Not here, it seems.

Isn't it comforting to know that the federal government is watching out for you, as you obviously aren't capable of deciding for yourself as a consenting adult what you want to purchase from other consenting adults to watch, or listen to, or use on yourself or other consenting adults? How about leaving people alone to live their own lives without interference?

By the way, this program is the result of an "earmark" by Congressman Frank Wolf, R-VA, who is apparently too chicken to comment on his own works.

"Mr. Wolf would not comment. Over several days, his aides said he was too busy to do so."

Wuss.

Congratulations are due to Professor Stephen Bates of UNLV, who used the Freedom of Information Act to uncover this little gem.