Porn is in the eye of the beholder

A variant on “I’ll know it when I see it”. When the story broke yesterday that pornographic images and videos were discovered on the personal website of the Ninth Circuit’s Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, I was naturally curious to see these pictures and read about how they were discovered.

Turns out, the man who leaked these pictures has come forward and provided some of them to Patterico who, taking the man at his word, has posted some pictures purported to be downloaded from that site (the site is, wisely, no longer available).

Folks, let’s be honest. We’ve all seen porn. This is not porn. These are exactly what Judge Kozinski described them to be: funny pictures.

There’s one of a Halloween costume of a priest with a fake kid in front in the fellatio position (which I’ve seen in chain e-mails for years now, and can be found on the internet in this post from 2003 [NSFW!]) Then there’s the similar picture of the “priest as child molester” theme, this time on stained glass made to look like it’s in a cathedral, which has been available (atheist website – might offend your sensibilities) on the internet since 2005. There are others in which genitals are visible, like the picture of two naked women painted like cows (try googling that and counting the results!) but they’re just like millions of others you can find on the web with a simple google search.

That’s all that has been posted thus far, so I’m pretty disappointed at this brouhaha. They’re nothing you can’t see on collegehumor on any given day (Actually, according to this thread, the priest pic was at some point on collegehumor.)

Anywho, turning back to this “tipster”, turns out he is a lawyer who has a long-standing beef (get it?) with the Judge. Now, that’s not to say that the pictures really aren’t the ones from Judge Kozinski’s website, but it makes me look at this with a grain of salt. After all, you’d have to know the exact subdomain to type it into the URL bar to get to the directory. So the lawyer went looking for this (or was looking for the pictures and found them in a Google search).

That’s not all, though. These pictures are tasteless at worst, funny at best. They’re not meant to be sexually arousing or pornographic.

What’s the big deal? We gotta stop being fuddy-duddies.

The only serious question here, ofcourse, is the impact this has on Judge Kozinski presiding over an obscenity trial. Showing some good judgment, he’s suspended the trial until Monday, so lawyers can prepare motions to disqualify and corresponding objections.