I recently weighed in on Al Jazeera America re CHASE bank terminating porn performers’ bank accounts. The mass closure of all accounts considered porn-affiliated is set to occur on May 11, 2014.
This is discrimination at its most obvious. It’s also been happening for years, it’s not just CHASE bank, and up ’til now the issue has been widely ignored. “Why widely ignored?” you ask. Because discrimination is wrong, but it’s still somehow OK if it’s happening to current or former members of the adult community… (that’s sarcasm – it’s not ok, and if this were any other community, we’d be rioting in the streets)
This is not just about current, active performers. It’s about former performers, content producers, and anyone even remotely thought to be associated with “pornography,” the vaguest catch-all qualifier for anything remotely sex-related. It’s about people who run brick-and-mortar clothing shops and those who work as costume/set designers. It’s about payroll services and caterers. In other words, it’s about all of us.
Here’s a snippet of what I had to say:
For Tibbals, the fraught battle for banking faced by porn professionals bespeaks a larger issue faced by all Americans.
“We are seeing that banks are able to make moral judgments on their clients. If [porn stars] can have their accounts canceled, everyone can,” Tibbals said. (here)
We as a collective society need to take notice! We need to pay attention, and we need to do it now. A bank’s ability to discriminate against one group shows that, in no uncertain terms, it can discriminate against ANY group.
That means me, and that means you too.
Read the entire article here. What do you think?