Court Decision Favors Advocates of Adult Film Condom Use

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A federal judge has allowed representatives from the AIDS Healthcare Foundation to remain as parties in the legal challenge to a countywide measure requiring condom usage in adult film productions.

U.S. District Judge Dean Pregerson rejected arguments that the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision on interveners in same sex marriages in California would also apply to interveners in the Los Angeles County Measure B condom law as well.

Michael Weinstein, president of the Hollywood health care agency, and four others will be allowed to remain as parties in the case because as interveners they “are needed to sharpen the issues this court will be required to answer,” wrote Pregerson in his five-page decision released Aug. 2.

In April, Pregerson gave the AHF representatives standing in the case because Los Angeles County officials would not actively defend Measure B in court. AHF collected the signatures that got the measure on the ballot and funded the Campaign Committee Yes on B for its passage in the November 2012 election.

“We absolutely should be allowed as interveners in this case and applaud the court’s ruling allowing us to remain so,” said Weinstein, in a prepared statement.

The lawsuit against Measure B was filed in January in Los Angeles federal court by Vivid Entertainment LLC, a San Fernando Valley production company, and performers Kayden Kross and Logan Pierce.

Vivid and the other plaintiffs had argued that the Supreme Court decision in Hollingsworth v. Perry on Prop. 8, the ballot initiative banning same sex marriages in California applied in the Measure B case. In that case, the court ruled that proponents of Prop. 8 did not have standing to appeal a 2010 district court ruling that the law, approved by voters in 2008, was unconstitutional.