From the Associated Press:

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration said Wednesday it would seek to reinstate an indictment against a California pornography company that was charged with violating federal obscenity laws. It was Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' first public decision on a legal matter.

Billed as the government's first big obscenity case in a decade, the 10-count indictment against Extreme Associates Inc. and its owners, Robert Zicari, and his wife, Janet Romano, both of Northridge, Calif., was dismissed last month by U.S. District Judge Gary Lancaster of Pittsburgh.

Lancaster ruled prosecutors overstepped their bounds while trying to block the company's hard-core movies from children and from adults who did not want to see such material.

Oh, I can just hear the vocal left now, "Free Speech!!" "Bush is legislating morality, separation of church and state!" "George Bush is a Fascist!"

What most on the vocal left don't know, however, is the law - - there is no such thing as First Amendment protection for obscene material. If that were the only issue in this case, the only question would be whether or not this film is obscene.

Do this company's movies qualify as "obscene?" You be the judge:

One film, called "Forced Entry", includes shots of women getting raped and murdered. It also includes suffocation, strangulation, beatings and urination. Black calls "Forced Entry" a slasher film with sex, loosely based on the Hillside Strangler case.

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Extreme Associates is perhaps best known for the porn movie Forced Entry, which simulates a rape so violently that a camera crew for the PBS documentary series Frontline became disgusted and fled while filming the production.

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Extreme Associates bills itself as the hardest hard-core porn on the Web. "Forced Entry" features three graphic scenes of simulated rapes and killings. The women are also spat upon. "Extreme Teen 24" has adult women dressed up and acting like little girls in various hard-core scenes.

Paul Fishbein, president of Adult Video News, the trade journal of the pornographic film industry, said Zicari produced "horrible, unwatchable, disgusting, aberrant movies."

I haven't seen the films, and I don't care to, but based on the these descriptions, I have a hard time finding that they anything short of being obscene. In fact, the Judge Lancaster may agree with that assessment - in his opinion, he assumed that the films were indeed obscene and instead cited to Lawrence v. Texas to find that individuals have a right to "receive information and ideas regardless of their social worth [in the privacy of their own homes]."

The problem with that reasoning, though, is that the laws of the United States do not cease to exist at an individual's front door - if obscene material is illegal, it is contraband - and contraband is illegal wherever it exists.

Just as one cannot claim that he has a constitutional right to possess and use illegal drugs in the confines of his own home for "privacy" reasons, one should not be permitted to argue that he has that same right with respect to other illegal materials, obscene materials included.