Photo by sally henny penny.

A couple of years ago, I made some friends on one of our friendly neighborhood listservs — and people were always asking for favors. After all, that’s what neighbors do for each other. In any case, I got roped into babysitting occasionally. No big deal right? A free pizza, playing some Xbox 360, and some quality time spent engaging my inner seven-year-old — to be honest, it wasn’t that much different that my usual evening activities. (You know, just without the booze.) Really, the only downside to the whole shebang was when the two or three kids decided to break into a full-throated argument about which toys were whose, and who, at that very moment, had the right to monopolize the box they all laid in. Invariably, someone got hit, I’d have to step in; it was a considerable mess that accomplished nothing. Ten minutes later, they’d be back fighting again over the same things.

That said, the more press this whole University of Maryland-porn-uptight state legislator kerfuffle gets, the more it feels exactly like that. Reading this morning’s latest installment of the story is like attempting to decipher the angry wails of two kids who both want to play with all the toys at once: there’s very little logic and plenty of nonsense being spouted. To wit:

• Just so we’re clear here: the film’s title is Pirates II: Stagnetti’s Revenge (hey, 8.2 on IMDB, not bad!). The film stars such luminaries as Tommy Gunn, Jesse Jane, and Belladonna, and it’s an epic two-and-a-half hours long. I don’t really think I need to make any additional comments here.
• Sen. Andrew P. Harris (R-Baltimore County), who quickly crafted the bill to withhold state funding from any public university showing porn which derailed the planned screening, has apparently said that “X-rated belly dancers and pirates have no place in a public university.” Geez, most of my collegiate Halloween parties would have been pretty boring if that was the case, Sen. Harris.
• Again from Sen. Harris: “[The university] should stop any showing of it right now until a clear policy is developed by the university regarding the conditions under which a triple-X-rated, hard-core pornography movie will be shown on campus.” The esteemed Senator realizes that there are freshman dorms down the road, right? For every “Pirates II” shown at a lecture hall and coupled with a discussion on free speech, there’s twenty barely coherent kids in a cramped 150 square foot room around a old HP monitor witnessing something much, much worse. (Perhaps that was just when I visited Maryland as a high school senior, but it’s probably a safe assumption in general.)
• Also, there’s the little thing about how the movie has already been “shown at several across the country without major controversy,” including an overflow crowd at the University of California Davis. Yup, this is totally something worth arguing about!

There’s more — especially the quote from one of the event’s political supporters claiming that “he has never watched a porn film” — but the point here is made.

So, what’s the end result here? Well, Marylanders look like a bunch of prudes, and the porno’s production company now has a world-notorious movie about pirates getting nailed to the plank. It’s just like when the kids argue all night — they get sent to bed and scolded by the parents, and the babysitter usually ends up with a nice tip. Congratulations, Maryland, you’ve just made a whole bunch of pornographers filthy rich.