Coming to a Neighborhood Near You

This past Easter, something different was happening on a quiet street in California.

Two weeks ago today, inside the million-dollar-plus houses on a quiet
cul-de-sac in Encino, the neighborhood kids delighted in what the
Easter Bunny had brought.Then, about 10 a.m., the porn stars started showing up.

Helaine Gesas, who has lived on Hayvenhurst Avenue for 38 years, was in
her kitchen cooking Passover supper when she noticed men hauling
cameras and lights into the two-story house across the street.

Her neighbor Kerry Cohen, a paralegal and mother, was on her way out to
organize a charity event. As she squeezed past several large production
trucks, Cohen looked in her rear-view mirror and saw “scantily clad”
young women parking their cars and heading toward the same house.

As far as John R. Johnson was concerned, “that was the end of Easter
Sunday.” Johnson, another neighbor, told his 9-year-old daughter to
stay inside while what he described as a “prison-yard break” — a large
film crew, many of its members covered in tattoos — entered the iron
gates of the house in the 3600 block of Hayvenhurst.

Outraged, Johnson called the city seeking to shut the porn shoot down. But everything, he was told, was perfectly legal.

In any given year, about 3,900 adult films are shot in Los Angeles,
according to industry estimates. As with any other shoot, those films
are supposed to obtain permits from the city. But the city doesn’t
restrict the content of the projects it approves.

Which means that if one of your neighbors decides, as Johnson’s did, to
rent out his house for the filming of “The Alphabet” — in which sexual
acts are performed in alphabetical order by 21-year-old identical twins
— there’s not much you can do to stop him.

At first they thought that it was just a normal photo shoot, with which one might not have a problem. Once they found out the kind of shoot, and that multiple “companies” were planning to use this building, they were furious.

This is one of the side effects of our culture that accepts porn as free speech. I was just reading back to January 2005 while copying some posts over where I had some discussion with Wendy about decriminalization of prostitution, and this is yet another argument about why it should never happen. The unitended consequences…

Let’s say that prostition was decriminalized. What’s to stop the two family house next door from becoming a brothel for a weekend– rented out by neighbors on vacation?

I was reading last night a commentary on Psalm 2 and it said that the leaders of the vain Earth are going to try to remove more and more of God from this Earth, but God is going to laugh at their attempts to keep Him out. He will win– as He states: In His perspective, it’s already done.