No Pr0n Policy at UMD

No Pr0n Policy at UMD

A while back, I mentioned that a student group at the University of Maryland was going to show a porn flick. A state legislator got bent out of shape at the thought that 18-20-year-olds might be thinking about sex, and threatened to cut off state funding to the university. Eventually, the university was told to come up with a policy regulating which movies can be shown on campus.

According to the Post,

Regents of Maryland’s state university system voted Wednesday to defy a legislative order to regulate pornography on campus, concluding that any such rules would be impossible to enforce.
…

The review found that pornographic materials generally have constitutional protection unless they are deemed obscene. But “there are few, if any, films that have been declared obscene by any court,” the report states. As a result, top legal minds “have not been able to draft a policy that is narrowly targeted toward ‘obscene’ films.”

A broader rule to govern pornography would probably be found unconstitutional, the report states, because governmental restrictions on speech must be “content and viewpoint neutral,” and cannot be confined to adult films.

So I guess the forces of reason and untwisted panties sometimes prevail.