There’s almost no way of constructing a legal argument with holes in it obvious enough to dissuade the Bush regime from signing it into law. Their latest effort (.pdf link) makes the use of ‘misleading words or images’ on a website a crime carrying up to 20 years in prison.
(Fundi)mental(ist) Christians, who cannot seem to separate sexual pleasure and child abuse, believe that pornographers are so ‘evil’ any ‘razorblades in apples at Halloween’ type urban myth seems plausible. For them it’s easy to believe porn companies want to attract children to view sexually explicit material, despite there being no reason why businesses, which incur costs every time they receive a visitor, would choose to be overrun by minors incapable of becoming paying customers.
Consistent implementation of the new law is impossible. The logistics of determining when it’s fair to use a word, or deciding which words are the sole preserve of children, would be a job for one of Kafka’s bureaucracies - had the intellects behind the law read Kafka. In a country which can’t define pornography, how can any court declare a website is pornographic and subject to a charge of misleading minors?
Unfortunately logic won’t save us. To people who believe Pollack’s not art, Hip-Hop’s not music, Henry Miller’s not literature and abstinence-only sex education works, using the fear of pedophiles to justify sweeping, ill-thought-out legislation with a ‘better safe than sorry’ mindset is entirely reasonable. In the world they’re building we are to be ‘allowed’ to publish anything as long as it can’t be be exploited, abused or misunderstood by anyone sensitive, stupid or of school-age.
The new law is blind to fact. The sexual exploitation of children is not enjoying a new internet-based surge of popularity, the internet’s made commercial pedophilia easier to detect and prosecute, and the vast majority of child abuse of takes place at home among relatives. Kids need protection from their parents more than anyone, and the easiest way to protect a child using the web is via attentive parenting. Anything less pits kids trust against child abusers depravity in a battle they can’t win.
It’s now clear that the long feared government war on sex has begun with a phalanx of legal attacks on an industry with limited resources and little public sympathy. An assault on every front, legal via obscenity, administrative via 2257, and moral via child abuse. The only way to fight back is in court via new precedents, won in victories over bad laws, which will freshly delineate the legality of pornography. Sex for pleasure, public or private, should not be a crime.
If the Republicans succeed in driving honest pornographers into the sea, the criminals who step in to fill the gap will publish horrors even the most fanatical anti-porn campaigners have difficulty imagining. The vast majority of pornographers today work within every law affecting the industry and take additional steps to safeguard against inadvertent exploitation. The criminals will not and, unless industry opponents think the demand for porn will evaporate for the first time in history, conservatives need us to win this fight too.
When I read the headline I thought Buckaroo.
“Bush Approves Word Crime League”.
Damn, do the Blue Blazer Irregulars know?
Very level headed post. This latest bout of anti-porn action led me to donate money to the Free Speech Coalition. The fundies throw obnoxious amounts of money to enforce their religion on the rest of us . Looks like we need to do the same to fight them.