Sex industry is incredibly important to civil rights in the USA, regardless of how it reflects widely held values systems where we might better recognize neighbors as a cause of regressive social values, moreso than businesses servicing their interests. 

Playboy, Hustler, and Extreme video have all assumed legal risks and funded major free speech litigation, which has far broader civil rights impact than any of those businesses' direct commercial interests.  The main difference between groups like http://www.ncsfreedom.org/ or Naturist Action Committee, and http://www.freespeechcoalition.com/ , is that the latter is a porn and strip bar supported organization with far better funding to advocate for lifestyle and speech rights than nonprofit user community based organizations.  Like it or not, money largely equals ability to litigate important issues in our perverse system of government, and so sex industry often ends up being more active protecting us against Rabid Religious Right predators and their organized conspiracies to enact thousands of illegally discriminatory censorship laws, than most other activist groups combined. 

As to social harm, it's not inherently present in porn as some claim.  Porn can be seen as often humorous or pathetic, or creative or stimulating, and can be a healthy or unhealthy influence based on how people use it, not inherent speech content.  The all ages widely distributed TV role models found in Springer chair bashing and dysfunctional relationships as if a national goal, or soap opera counterparts, fill a far more pathological societal function than the porn industry.  So does TV news to the extent it normalizes illegal wars and sanitizes them for people who can support them so long as the death and destruction is safely edited for TV.  Even TV sports serves a destructive role, to the extent any mass opiate allows people to bury their heads from serious issues, and evade being responsible democratic citizens. 

The related legal and social issues are ones which often don't make sense to people who've yet to do serious activist work in the trenches, trying to counter RRR highly funded and well organized tactical efforts to abridge core speech rights, and in the process demean related lifestyles rooted in religious values for many minorities.  There are deeply rooted prejudices and bigotry prolific in our culture over sexuality, and that's not limited to RRR groups and their funding sources.  Sadly, it's a problem among pagans who otherwise claim to consider sexuality a natural part of life's wheel, and it's a problem among people who claim to be socially liberal (as in tolerant) over personal belief issues of neighbors. 

As a long term naturist and pagan, who has tracked and worked to counter RRR efforts to subvert this into a more theocratic nation, it's clear to me that we need legal protections for sex speech on open TV,  and for sex acts as natural and normal on beaches and town greens, before 1st and 14th Amendment protections will come close to seeing serious enforcement.  For that to happen, commercial sexual speech will also require full and open protections. 

Does that mean advertising will use sex in ways demeaning to our humanity?  No doubt.  Does it mean such speech will be harmful, to minors or adults?  By comparison to how marketing of cloths and cosmetics already pressure teen suicides, particularly for girls trained that they'll never be adequate humans absent a budget for products that never quite make them into air brushed fantasies, the opposite is likely more true.  Even if subject to commercial distortions, open depiction of natural functions of human animals helps to break down unrealistic perceptions and prejudices, and demand that more people face up to the realities of life. 

Since enforced censorship of speech content ultimately is a form of violence against underlying values or beliefs of the audience and speaker censored, those promoting that RRR efforts to censor sexual speech be made more prolific are in effect advocating violence.  That's true even if social, economic, or legal pressures are used to undercut free and open forums, or implement or enforce discriminatory laws. 

It's therefore inconsistent with both respect for civil rights and each other's existence in a free and open diverse society, and ideals of reducing mechanisms of violence backed oppression, to restrict speech or action based on religious values such as those with which most of our perspectives on open or suppressed expressions of sexuality are intertwined. 

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Many investment advisers suggest large tobacco companies as having very desirable financial outlooks.  That's balanced by high risks of being held liable for fraudulent marketing and a product that has no common uses which aren't medically unsafe for humans.  It's complicated by diversification into foods, office supplies, and many other product categories unrelated to dangerous addictive drugs promoted for use in harmful ways. 

One of the major issues for that industry is teaching stock brokers a lesson.  Many people, especially institutional investors, make decisions based on numbers and best guesses about risk factors.  Some have trouble "getting it" when someone tells them that they absolutely refuse to fund an industry or company where an ideal goal would be bankruptcy and ceasing to exist, not financial growth and larger markets. 

Sometimes, this is from investors feigning social politeness, and just declining a suggestion.  If social policy awareness if to be made more of an important issue in financial industries, brokers and fund advisers need feedback.  They sometimes need rather blunt reminders, like, "No fvcking way will I invest in any company of that nature, because they cause (x, y, z, specific forms of) serious harm." 

Getting that feedback to brokerage and fund managers, in ways that make it an issue at staff and management meetings, can do far more than just personal boycotts for no apparent reason.  Such in your face direct and blunt negative feedback is rare enough, that the times some of us do it carry more weight than just our own voices.  Companies, like politicians, often value one such comment as representing 300 to 3000 others they never hear. 

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Strip bars would tend to go bankrupt if they relied on people like me as their prime customers.  At the same time, efforts by RRR groups to enact ordinances banning them are an obnoxious cancer on society, part of the treatment for which requires that target businesses of their Sexually Oriented Business model ordinances exist and fund litigation and lobbying efforts.  Many people are in reality denial over how politics makes strange bedfellows, as the old saying goes.  In the realities of our system, as a minority religionist, I'm functionally "in bed with" political and economic factions which rely on rights overlapping those important to me, even when their direct focus is very facially different. 

In that sense, your proposed boycott advocates undercutting real world protections for my civil rights (plus probably your own), and indirectly, promotes violent crime (de facto result of cop guns backed oppression) via RRR abuse of law and judicial process against me personally.  You certainly have a right to take such a position, while you cannot do so free of me pointing out how that kind of position is misguided and abusive within the context of what admittedly is a seriously pathological society. 

I see little similar social benefit from the existence of tobacco companies.  There are many reasons to subject them to such high liabilities that they for practical purposes largely cease to exist in the USA.  Still, they too involve tricky balances, due to the nature of corporate conglomerates, and legal process that is often used in ways that technically function or fail, while not operating to respect legal rights theory in actual legal process. 

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University of Queensland Business School lecturer Darren Lee has found no evidence that investing in a portfolio of socially responsible firms means lower returns for investors.

“Perhaps the most unexpected finding is that leading CSP firms are bigger in relation to the firms that haven't embraced strong corporate sustainability principles.

“Leading CSP firms seem able to attract equity capital more easily than other firms, thereby resulting in a lower cost of capital.”

Mr Lee said his research helped to overcome the common criticisms directed at existing work in this area.

“What this research means is that investors can hold a portfolio consisting of socially responsible firms without incurring a financial cost,” he said.

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OtherMother (OM) Foundation - see me for details .......

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LAST MONTH, three business plans were named winners in a nationwide competition for social and environmental ventures organized by the University of California Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. EasyDiabetes took the first prize of $10,000 for its Internet-based diabetes management system; RippleEffects — interactive media games and simulations to help young people troubled with behavior problems — and Xtracycle with a sport-utility bike with tremendous cargo capacity were runners-up, each receiving $2,000.

The plans impressed the panel of 19 judges, leaders in socially responsible organizations such as: Dan Geiger of OpNet, Shelly Herman of Shorebank Advisory Services, Trinita Logue of Illinois Facilities Fund, Stephen Moody of Private Equity Portfolio Calvert Group, and William Rosenzweig of Hambrecht Vineyards and Wineries. “The impressive quality and number of business plans submitted for the competition reflect the increasing commitment of business people pursuing a double bottom line of financial and social objectives,” said competition judge Jed Emerson, who is the president of Roberts Enterprise Development Fund and a Bloomberg Senior Research Fellow at Harvard Business School. John May, the managing partner of New Vantage Partners of Vienna, Virginia noted, “The winners met or exceeded the quality of professional plans I see at regional venture fairs and at past Investors Circle conferences.”

TOP BUSINESS SCHOOLS COMPETE

The Haas Social Venture Business Plan Competition invited teams from the country’s top business schools to submit business plans that would yield a positive financial performance as well as a positive social and/or environmental outcome. Some 66 teams from schools including UC Berkeley, Stanford University, Harvard, the Wharton School, the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, and the Andersen School at UCLA participated.

As one of the nation’s most entrepreneurial business schools, Haas also has a long-standing tradition of promoting social responsibility among its students and community. To qualify, plans had to be mission-driven, self-sustaining and profitable, while showing quantifiable social or environmental return on investment. Almost half of the plans entered involved the Internet. As competition winners, EasyDiabetes, RippleEffects and Xtracycle will have their plans circulated among 150 “angel” investors from the Investor’s Circle, a group of individuals who make private equity investments based on social dividends and economic returns.

Haas MBA organizers secured more than $55,000 in cash and in-kind support for this competition. Contributors included the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, Greenmountain.com, Peninsula Community Founds, Irwin Home Equity, The Men’s Warehouse, Calvert Social Investment Fund, and South Shore Bank. Also supporting the competition were Investors’ Circle, Stonyfield Farm, Honest Tea, Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Hambrecht Vineyards and Wineries, IDG Books, Prophet Brand Strategy, and Net Impact.

VENTURES AND PLANS

The people behind EasyDiabetes — Jenna Beart and Michael Douek, both MD/MBA candidates at UCLA’s Anderson School — built an Internet-assisted support system that will, among other tasks, allow patients to hook up their blood sugar monitor to the computer and have results sent to a physician in easily readable form. “We wanted to express our excitement for having the opportunity to participate in such an important event,” said Douek. The RippleEffects team is from the University of Washington, while Xtracycle’s goal of more bikes and fewer cars comes from students at UC Davis.

Other finalists in the competition included the following:

Boost Technology, which produces devices allowing people with severe disabilities to interface with computers; Cafe Dalat, a gourmet coffee bean enterprise aimed at improving the livelihoods of subsistence farmers in Vietnam’s central highlands; Enviro-Search.org, offering a comprehensive website with information about, and solutions for, the environmental community; Mind, Body & Soul, with plans to develop a nationally branded relaxation service; and Virginia Winegrowers Association, with a program that enables tobacco farmers to switch their crops to grapes.
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