aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Paul Broun: No boobs on base

That headline is shamelessly lifted from the brilliant Radley Balko:

Rep. Paul Broun, R-Ga., (profiled by Dave Weigel here) wants to ban the sale of Playboy on military bases.

What’s maddening about it is the legal reasoning.

Broun said he wants to bring the Defense Department into compliance with the intent of the 1997 law “so that taxpayers will not be footing the costs of distributing pornography.” [...]

Exchange officials noted that tax dollars are not used to procure magazines in the system’s largely self-funded operations. [...]

But Broun’s spokesman John Kennedy contended that taxpayer dollars are involved - “used to pay military salaries, so taxpayer money is, in effect, being used to buy these materials,” he said.

Balko notes that line of argument would open up all sorts of other possibilities. It is absolutely amazing that conservatives can find legal rationale for nanny state intrusiveness whenever they’re in the mood.