By Anthony Wade
The pre-emptive action of Alabama churches and communities regarding obscenity can result in businesses complying with the moral compass of the community.
One community where aggressive action has so far kept obscene videos out of a video rental store is Fayette, located in northwest Alabama at the foot of the Appalachian mountain range. Mayor Ray Nelson said city officials and church leaders vowed to continuously picket a new Movie Gallery store coming to their town, if that store rented pornography.
“It’s just a matter of principle and convictions and [a willingness] to stand up,” he said.
“From day 1, we’ve put forth an effort here to keep our city a morally decent city and not have any evil influence in our city with pornography,” he said.
Randy Sharp, director of special programs with the American Family Association (AFA), assisted Fayette in its fight. He believes the town was successful against Movie Gallery because the town understands the impact of pornography on crime.
But in the majority of Movie Gallery, Inc. stores in Alabama — including those in Dothan, home of the company’s corporate headquarters — pornographic videos are routinely offered, the AFA claims.
Concerned mothers launched an anti-pornography, anti-Movie Gallery campaign in Dothan last December distributing 5,000 boycott cards during the annual Peanut Festival.
An airplane that pulls advertising banners was hired to conduct flyovers at the parade. The AFA assisted in these efforts.
“We continue to assist cities, groups or individuals who have a Movie Gallery that rents or sells porn in combating that practice in their communities,” Sharp said.
AFA organizes boycott awareness campaigns and offers free assistance to municipalities, groups and individuals combating obscenity in their communities. This requires a persistent effort, according to Sharp.
“Porn destroys families, breaks up marriages, leads to rape and child obscenity and destroys the spiritual heart of people. Those are our reasons for opposing it,” Sharp said.
The AFA continues its three-year boycott against Movie Gallery, alleging the movie rental chain rents videos, including XXX-rated ones that meet and exceed the legal standards for the definition of obscenity as set by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“Pornography” is a generic term, while “obscenity” is the term the law has guidelines to define and prosecute.
According to the Alabama Attorney General’s office, the obscenity test established by the U.S. Supreme Court is the law under which video rentals would fall.
The law, which applies to obscenity distributed to people of any age — adult or minor — states obscenity is when: “The average person, applying contemporary community standards would find that the material, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest; and the material depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct, actual or simulated, normal or perverted; and a reasonable person would find that the material taken as a whole lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”
Just by offering videos that meet the court’s definition of obscene is illegal.
“It’s about the legality of distribution, not whether the prospective renter is a minor or an adult, although there are additional laws prohibiting the display of obscene products to minors,” Sharp said.
Alabama has a public display law designed to protect persons under the age of 18 from seeing porn. This law stipulates that soft-core porn must have two thirds of the front of the video, magazine or book covered and the product must be displayed a minimum of five and a half feet from the floor.
Representatives from The Alabama Baptist noticed videos with the two-thirds covering in the older releases section of one central Alabama Movie Gallery store. This section is accessible to children’s eyes and reach.
According to Sharp, Movie Gallery’s rental of certain kinds of videos in all of its Alabama locations allegedly violates Alabama obscenity laws. The effect of the videos reaches into the grassroots fabric of rural life because the company’s stores are primarily in small towns (as few as 3,000 residents), whereas the other two leading video rental chains operating in the state — Blockbuster and Hollywood Video — locate only in larger towns.
In more than 400 of Movie Gallery’s 2,178 stores nationwide they have “backrooms” where they rent and sell triple XXX-rated hard-core sex videos, according to Sharp. “This is the worst rating. It’s one level down from adult-child sex and ‘snuff’ videos where there is rape and the victim is mutilated,” he said. Movie Gallery calls these their “adult galleries.”
Within the XXX-rating Movie Gallery does carry videos that show things such as bondage, homosexual and lesbian sex acts and multiple partners sex, Sharp said.
Movie ratings are assigned to movies released in theaters by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPA). But rental stores also contain movies not made for the big screen and many of these do not carry MPA ratings. Not rated videos are subject to municipal, state and federal obscenity laws like any other videos.
Sharp said four Movie Gallery stores in Alabama — all of them in Tuscaloosa — offer hard-core porn videos in back rooms. Their policy is that only people 21 years or older may enter these rooms, which are accessible through doors opening from the main showroom.
These doors are unlocked and there have been cases of minors entering the rooms where the videos are displayed openly. In one situation a parent described to Sharp how her 3-year-old child mistakenly went through the door, trying to find a restroom, Sharp said.
“In some stores female employees have been sexually harassed or propositioned for sex by male customers renting from the back rooms,” Sharp said.
“It creates an environment of sexual harassment for employees who are required to rent these videos to people,” he said.
Sharp said the response from Movie Gallery to AFA allegations is “complete silence — they refuse to talk about it,” he said.
The Alabama Baptist contacted Movie Gallery chairman and chief executive officer Joe Malugen regarding this issue, and also Jeffery Stubbs, executive vice president of operations, soon to be the company CEO, but no responses came from them or anyone else with the company.
Former Movie Gallery employees who have written to AFA say the company openly promotes illegal videos in part for economic reasons.
“We have letters from former Movie Gallery managers and district managers who talk about these [pornographic] products being celebrated because they produce a higher profit for the company,” Sharp said.
Profit margins go up for hard-core porn videos at Movie Gallery because most regular video rental costs consumers $1 for a three-day rental, while a hard-core porn video costs $5 and must be returned the next day, Sharp explained.
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