Porno Pirates

Somalian pirates are not the only pirates making a big controversy this year.
A so-called hardcore porn by the name of "Pirates II: Stagnetti's Revenge" has become a catalyst for heated debate, from the storied halls of government to the dirty, sticky floors of a college theater.
The film, a multiple award winning triple-X porn that owes more then a passing resemblance to "Pirates of the Caribbean," has been shown at schools around the country and was to be played at the University of Maryland's Student Union Theatre before the Maryland Legislature got wind of the idea and promptly shot it down.
The student union was planning to show the film in the same theater that, just years before, they'd screened the legendary “Deep Throat.” Planned Parenthood members were set to talk before the screening to educate the audience on safe-sex practices, as the actors in the film tend to do their swash buckling sans buckle.
When the Maryland General Assembly heard of what was going down, they came out swinging.
"Pornography is not fun. It's poison," said Sen. Andrew Harris, a republican who led the attack, in an article from the Washington Post.
“If guys want to view triple-X movies with their buddies, that’s fine, but it doesn’t belong on a college campus in a state-funded building,” Sen. Nancy Jacobs. a fellow republican senator, said later in the same Washington Post article.

Harris and company pushed an amendment that would cut off state funding for any university screening porn, in the University of Maryland’s case, upwards of $400 million dollars.

Unsurprisingly, the school buckled, but the real issue is only now coming to a head.
Everywhere bloggers, activists and news reporters from all walks of life are weighing in on whether the government should ever have a say in what goes on in college campuses, whether the first amendment protects porn, whether the film is obscenity and just who gets to define what obscenity is.
According to Adam Kissel, a director of the Individual Rights Defense Program at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education who was interviewed by the Baltimore Sun,“[the legislature was] far out of line...I think because of the autonomy that a public university ought to have versus the legislature, the president should not have canceled the film.”
Students at UMD have been staging token protests, showing clips from the film in an ‘education’ seminar on free speech and slamming their administrations urge to bend over backward before the legislature at the slightest show of dominance.
It’s still unclear exactly what the fallout of all this will be, with nothing except gallons of free publicity for the porn flick in question being the likely answer.