This week, two senators introduced legislation to create a xxx domain for porn sites (i.e., smut.xxx instead of smut.com). The idea isn’t to promote porn, but to ghetto-ize it or label it and make it easier to filter out. It might be a good idea, except that (as I understand it) pornographers won’t be required to surrender their .com domains. Also, legislation in the U. S. applies only to U. S. companies, not overseas pornographers, which is a substantial weakness since the Internet is international.

It isn’t the issue itself I’m interested in as much as the acrimonious debate about it between two parties that are on the same side. John C. Dvorak (a PC Magazine Columnist and one of my favorite tech gurus) and Concerned Women for America (an evangelical Christian activist group) both want to make it harder for kids to see porn, yet they have made themselves enemies of one another with lots of name-calling and mud-slinging in their respective columns. Dvorak likes the idea of a xxx domain (in fact, he may have been the first to suggest it, way back in the ’90s). CWA hates it, and doesn’t think much of Dvorak for liking it.

Too bad. As an evangelical myself, I wish I could call CWA to a higher standard of discourse. The bickering keeps US ghetto-ized.