“To what extent is faith the basis for public policy?” asks Frederick Lane, the author of The Decency Wars: The Campaign to Cleanse American Culture, which aptly surmises his headlining third book and earned him guest spots at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and NBC Weekend Today. The separation of Church and State has been a never-ending issue ever since Henry the VIII booted the Puritans off the island, Lane writes, and came to America and found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. On the same thread, years later, politicians—both Republicans and Democrats—are promising to moralize and “cleanse” American culture by extending the FCC to apply to cable and satellite radio when in reality that’s not constitutional, Lane reminds the readers.

A former attorney of five years, with a J.D. from Boston College, a popular university lecturer on First Amendment issues, and expert witness, Frederick Lane shares his expertise and insights on issues and matters from his latest book, as well as thoughts not in his bestseller but just as important in the pursuit of constitutional rights.

SexHerald: Where are you in Vermont?

Frederick Lane: Burlington , actually.

SH: Isn’t that the largest city in Vermont?

Lane: Which isn’t very much; it’s got 35,000 people. [laughs]

SH: What made you choose Vermont of all places to live?

Lane: I did a clerkship for a couple of years from ’88 to 1990 out of western Massachusetts and when I finished that, I was basically looking for a college town to live in, because I just like the energy of a college town. As it happens, my grandmother lived in Burlington all of my life. So, I knew the city pretty well and came up here and applied for a job.

SH: What do you do besides write provocative books?

Lane: That’s actually been my main focus for the last 12-13 years now. Also, sort of tied into that is lecturing. Periodically, I’d go after some college university and talk about either privacy issues or decency issues. And then, because my first book [Obscene Profits] dealt with the online adult industry, I periodically get calls to do expert witness work for criminal trials.

SH: Did you ever expect that your most recent book, The Decency Wars, would manage to bring you on to everything from Good Morning America to The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to NBC Weekend Today?

Lane: Well, it’s interesting. I think that’s probably every writer’s pipedream [laughs]—something that you write will end up doing that. Look, honestly I felt this book had some potential to attract some attention because obviously the incident with Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake was such a big deal. It seemed like timeliness—certainly my book dealt with issues that were really relevant to people today. Frankly, there was no way that I realistically thought that was going to happen. But there was obviously hope that it would attract that kind of attention. And I’m pleased it has so far.

SH: Let’s talk a little bit about your personal life. Tell me a little bit about your family situation: married, children, attached, unattached, et cetera?

Lane: Generally speaking, [I’m] divorced. I’ve got two boys. I’m very much attached with a professor at St. Michael’s College up here in Vermont. We’re actually in the process of looking at writing a book together about Anthony Comstock, the 19 th century moralist. The two boys are middle-school aged, so kind of going through the whole preadolescent thing.

But, pretty routine in a lot of ways. I think that it’s just an interesting process to try to write about these kinds of provocative issues in what is a relatively small town. I’m not sometimes challenging… I serve on the school board up here. So, it’s a little bit unusual to have this particular combination. But I really come at it from a First Amendment sort of defensive modern culture point of view. Yeah, this is work that needs to be done.

SH: What does your partner teach?

Lane: Art history.

SH: You brought up Anthony Comstock, which is rather interesting, because SexHerald is going to be giving its first Comstock award this summer. We chose the name Comstock for someone who will be receiving the award on the basis that Comstock did whatever he could to destroy, or at least limit, sexual expression in the individual. Then of course, there was the opposing force to Comstock, Margaret Sanger. We’re going to be giving out a Sanger award as well for someone whose goal is to free things up a little bit—to allow people to think a little more freely. What do you think of how things have progressed since the days of Comstock and Sanger in terms of how the public, and especially how the politicos, view privacy in the bedroom among other things?

Lane: I think that’s a really saturated question. My sense of it is that frankly if Comstock were to be around today—he died in 1915; so, we’re talking almost 100 years since he died—I think he would be horrified at the kinds of materials that are routinely available, even on broadcast television, let alone cable or the movies. I think that when you look at the kinds of things that he was trying to suppress, we have moved so far beyond the things that outraged him. He would have viewed this as a complete disaster. The flip side of that, though, is he managed to memorialize in a federal statute his values.

The Comstock Act, which was passed in 1873, really codified the whole debate over obscenity and indecency and we’re still fighting those battles today. If you look at the FCC for instance, that is a federal bureaucratic organization that is empowered to punish broadcast outlets for indecency. This despite the fact that various federal courts have ruled that indecency is not a legitimate legal standard for evaluating whether something violates the First Amendment. In order to violate the First Amendment, you have to be deemed to be obscene, which is a much more difficult standard. BUT because in large part of what Anthony Comstock was able to do in the 1870s, there’s still a legitimate threat for broadcasting; by merely broadcasting something indecent, they can be fined and punished.

So in a sense, his legacy has really lingered long after his death. I think there are things that he would definitely consider to be a real travesty. But I think he would be pleased that we’re still debating these issues. In my mind, it’s really remarkable that we are so long after his life.

SH: Here, basically 130 years later, we ARE still debating these issues. We’re putting people in power on the basis of these issues. In fact, we’re watching some of those folks in power fall, like Mark Foley for instance. And, Anthony Comstock had his own personal quirks.

Lane: Not like Mark Foley, to be fair. [laughs] I think that there’s absolutely no question about the huge amount of hypocrisy that underlies these kinds of debates. We’ve seen that time and time and time again. That I think really weakens the ability of people to make these arguments, but they still do so. One of the reasons that they do so is that these kinds of issues have an enormous distractive capability. One of the things that’s most tragic about this is that we have REAL issues to debate in this country. We’ve got the federal deficit, which is staggering; we’ve got healthcare issues we have to wrestle with; we’ve got foreign policy issues, which are ruining this country’s reputation around the world. These are things we should really be wrestling with, and when we spend time debating Janet Jackson’s breasts, we are WAY off track from what is really important in this country.

SH: The Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction: We’ve had folks throughout history, like Bettie Page, come under fire. And Janet Jackson obviously springboarded an entire—one can say—a presidency. What do you think has to happen in society before people leave other people alone; before gays are allowed to do what they want in their private world; before what happens in a person’s bedroom is inviolable provided that they are not violating the free rights of others. How do you think we can accomplish this task?

Lane: That’s a great question. There’s no easy answer to that particular question. Based on my experience of living in Vermont, I would say that it is only going to happen with a combination of time and familiarity. The best example I can give you is back in 2000, 2001 when we were having the battle of civil unions up here. It was vicious and nasty and bitter. The whole idea of this tiny state would in any way acknowledge the union of two people of the same sex… there were people putting up these horrifically anti-gay signs around the state. And 6-7 years later, it’s just not a big deal. I think people have sort of realized that the state has not collapsed, that if anything we get some pretty impressive tourist dollars from people coming up here to be civil unioned, that the couples that have been civil unioned, by and large, are regular folks who buy houses, who pay taxes. They’re not having kids for obvious reasons but some gay couples adopt or have a surrogate father or what have you. By and large, you begin to realize it’s not the end of the world.

Frederick Lane is an expert witness in cases involving freedom of expression. Click here for more information.