On Wednesday, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced he was proposing legislation to make it difficult for child pornographers to manufacture "virtual porn." Posted on 05/04/2002 3:35:13 AM PDT by billybudd
Jonah Goldberg (archive)
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May 3, 2002
Free speech: rotting from the inside out
On Wednesday, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced he was proposing legislation to make it difficult for child pornographers to manufacture "virtual porn."
This came as a response to last month's Supreme Court decision that overturned portions of the Child Pornography Prevention Act. The court held that the government couldn't ban "virtual child porn" - i.e. animated or computer-generated depictions of very young children in sexually explicit situations or scenes of older kids made-up to look like young children.
"The Supreme Court's legalization of computer-generated child pornography has created a dangerous window of opportunity for child abusers to escape prosecution," Ashcroft argued. "Prosecutors are now forced to prove that sexually explicit images involving children were, in fact, produced through the abuse of children, an extremely difficult task in today's worldwide Internet child pornography market."
In short, the attorney general is confined to proving that child pornographers have abused children or we can't ban their products. After all, we can't trample on the free speech of kiddie-smut-peddlers if they don't physically hurt any kids.
What a sick joke. Abuse of children is a secondary issue. Some things just deserve to be censored because they are evil. If we can't agree that child pornography is one of them, then we've got bigger problems. Whether the court was wrong in reading the Child Pornography Protection Act or Congress was wrong in writing it, no matter how you slice it, the law is an ass, to paraphrase Charles Dickens.
At the end of the day, the country's political leadership - the courts, Congress, the executive branch, as well as the journalists who police them - has simply failed to do what any bus driver, school teacher or store manager could manage to do in an afternoon. Banning child porn is one of those simple things that liberals and conservatives, libertarians and socialists can agree on.
Sure there are a tiny minority within a minority of people who want to make the issue complicated or clever, fraught with slippery slopes and "what if?" scenarios. But these people tend to be soaked-to-the-bone ideologues who see Big Brother around every corner.
Indeed, the irony of these radical civil libertarians and uncivil libertines is that if Big Brother ever arrives, it will be because of their misplaced energies. Here's what I mean. Most constitutional arguments about slippery slopes have a fairly straightforward logic. We protect those things at the extreme fringe of acceptable behavior and speech in order to ensure that our core liberties will be preserved. We allow neo-Nazis, black nationalists and Klansmen to spout their filth because, by allowing that speech, then all speech is allowed.
The problem is that the civil libertarians' obsession with protecting the extreme has caused them to turn their backs on the center. Political activities central to our democracy are becoming increasingly regulated. Every day, the "reformers" push for new regulations on political commercials, newspaper ads even the right to freely associate in public. If Tom Paine were alive today, he'd have to register "Common Sense" with the Federal Election Commission. The anonymously written Federalist Papers would be decried as "stealth ads."
In its April 16 decision, the Supreme Court replied to the charge that some images of pedophilia might entice or encourage would-be pedophiles or child pornographers, saying, "the prospect of a crime ... by itself does not justify laws suppressing protected speech."
I'm sympathetic to the court's reluctance to establish a new category of "thought crimes." But we're talking about child pornography for Pete's sake. The founders didn't have kiddie porn in mind when they wrote the First Amendment, and they certainly wouldn't have had any problem with local jurisdictions banning it.
More to the point, this is the same court that holds that the possible "appearance of corruption" is sufficient justification for all sorts of campaign finance laws and regulations. The "appearance of corruption"! In other words, we can lock up the political freedoms at the core of our republic because corruption lies in the eye of the beholder.
I can guarantee you that more people think "virtual child pornography" is more corrupting to our society than the ability to run issue-ads 30 days before an election. But the political class, in its laziness and its desire to protect incumbents, would much rather come up with clever reasons to keep child porn legal rather than call attention to the fact that much vital political activity is becoming increasingly illegal. Keep the fringe free, regulate the core. In other words, free speech is rotting from the inside out.
I wish Ashcroft luck in his attempt to ban what should be banned on the outposts of our society. When he's done, it would be even better if he could return to the heartland of our democracy and free things up a bit.
Jonah Goldberg is editor of National Review Online, a TownHall.com member group.
Contact Jonah Goldberg | Read his biography
©2002 Tribune Media Services
Which section of the Constitution defines "evil"?
He must be talking about me. I was booted from Lucianne.com because of political incorrectness. Just being a bad boy. They couldn't take it and I was sent packing! HA HA HA!
Who are ROTTING from the inside out
I see that all of the slippery slope nuts have gathered on this virtual street corner. Lacking the intellectual capability of distinguishing between kiddy porn and political speech, you are also unable to walk and chew gum at the same time.
Thanks for posting and identifying yourselves.
Love and peace.
With an attorney general that's embarassed by a pair of stone boobs, I want firm Constitutional ground for any public-policy decisions he's involved with.
Goldberg has it right except for one sentence: "Banning child porn is one of those simple things that liberals and conservatives, libertarians and socialists can agree on."
We have too many in this nation who are so "open-minded" that their brains are falling out. It will (has?) become impossible at some point for them to distinguish criminal activity from free speech - except when the perp shoves a gun in their face, threatens them, and then claims it a right to express their "thoughts" about killing them.
Please explain to me why the lack of a dictionary in the Constitution is an impediment to the outlawing of kiddy porn.
The statue in the lobby canard is not even used by the liars who created it. I suggest that you drop it also.
Love and peace.
Whose definition of evil? Goldberg's? The Taliban's? Cardinal Law'? George and Jacob Donner? Wovoka? Captain Ahab?
(Since we're not going to have real discussion here...)
Lets correct a few self serving statements.
1. Neither one (Kiddie Porn or Political speech) can be understood with out a moral foundation. Obviously this one attribute you chose to ignore. Not un-common amongst the pornies.
2. Attacking the intellectual properties of those that do share a moral foundation, is doing so with the brain at the lower end of the trunk.
Look, Goldberg explains it:
”Abuse of children is a secondary issue. Some things just deserve to be censored because they are evil. If we can't agree that child pornography is one of them, then we've got bigger problems. Whether the court was wrong in reading the Child Pornography Protection Act or Congress was wrong in writing it, no matter how you slice it, the law is an ass, to paraphrase Charles Dickens.”
and I have explained it:
” The purpose of pornography laws in general was more than the protection of the people being photographed from exploitation. The purpose was primarily to protect the general population from degradation. The support of what I call “public morality.” Just as anti pollution laws are primarily designed to protect the physical environment so that people will not be exposed to noxious waste products, pornography laws were intended to protect the mental (spiritual?) environment from the noxious effects it would have on both children and adults.”
What part of the explanation don’t you understand?
I could not care less about your evil thoughts. I do care about the health of the intellectual environment.
Love and peace.
If you don't understand that, give back that doctorate.
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