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'Virtual' Child Porn Act Ruled Unconstitutional
wiredog writes "The United States Supreme Court, in a 6-3 ruling, has found the Child Pornography Prevention Act to be unconstitutionally vague and far-reaching." You might read the Act. There were a number of cases challenging the constitutionality of the Act; I believe three Appeals courts eventually upheld it, and one ruled it unconstitutional, guaranteeing that the Supreme Court would take one of the challenges for review. A summary of the decision is available, and see that pages for links to the majority opinion and dissenting opinions.
Off the top of my head:
-The Tin Drum - was and probably still is banned in OKC
-Kids
-American Pie I & II
-Porkys I, II, and Revenge
-In fact, pretty much all teen sex comedies
-Lolita (old and new)
Do these films appeal to purient interests? Would we be better off without them because they portray characters that are under the age of 18?
Kind of odd though... nothing illegal about people under 18 having sex in most states, but to depict such is illegal... and before this ruling it was illegal to portray persons "acting" under the age of 18.
"Defenestration" is to throw out of a window; what's a word for throwing 'Windows' out of something?
right, because the day they turn 18, something magical happens and suddenly they understand all the possible repercussions that getting naked on camera could have.
that one day's difference is enough to teach them a whole lifetime of moral and social implications, and they can suddenly make that choice that they could not have made 24 hours previously.
what a bunch of bunk. i'm all for the protection of innocence, but the meme that 18 is a special age is complete nonsense. teenagers have sex across the country, and to pretend that people under 18 lack sexuality is ignorant and harmful. the fact that an 18 year old male can be placed in prison and permanently branded "sex offender" for having sex with his 17 year old girlfriend offends me. i know that when i was 16 years old, i was damn well smart enough to know what pornography meant, and that if i got naked on camera it would last forever.
this is a bit of a touchy subject for me. the current laws on child pornography and statutory rape are closeminded and plain wrong, and need reform.
The best way to protect children is to give an outlet to the perverts who want child pornography or who create it, a legal outlet which harms no one, virtual child porn may be the answer.
Theres no way you can ever rid the world of these people, they will always exsist, and taking away their virtual porn would make them create more child porn or worse, rape and abuse children.
So in the best interest of the children, Virtual Porn should be legal.
Virtual porn directly takes money away from the REAL child porn industry, and that is key to stopping child porn.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
In the Middle Ages people were considered adults at age 13 or so. It wasn't uncommon for people in their teens to be married, having sex and blessed with children. And there are many paintings from the time of nude women who were most likely under 18 when they posed for the painting. So would all this centuries old art have to be destroyed if the law would have been upheld.
There will always be the few extrordinary circumstances <snip inflammatory example> which is why the judicial system exists. Not to interpret.
What do you think "judge" means? It is to exercise judgement. Opinions like yours are why:
The courts are the last check against the enforcement of bad laws. (This should be the place of a jury, but appeals courts have taken the activity on for themselves.)
Nope, no sig
And that's exactly the problem with our legal system. An adversarial system, presided over by an allegedly impartial judge, that demands a binary verdict, is neither social, nor natural nor just.
All legal systems are just formalizations of mob rule. No? Then why do we have juries? The trouble is that we allowed lawyers into the system, then we allowed lawyers to decide what the law would be. 50% of both Congress and the Senate are members of the American Bar Association. If that doesn't scare you, then it should. We will never see meaningful legal reform, or a streamlining of our bloated system, as long as our laws are written by lawyers, for lawyers.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
worth restricting people's rights.
It's like the DMCA... It ASSUMES that people are guilty because they look at non-real images. It ASSUMES that these people will later go and commit a crime.
Would SOME people commit a crime based on this virtual desire? Probably.
Should the government assume ALL people are criminals and strip our rights to expression because a few people MAY commit a crime?
BTW - Romeo and Juliet - underage sex. Titanic - underage sex. Traffic - Underage sex. Lolita - underage sex. I think you get the picture. There are a LOT of films and artwork that depict "virtual" mature scenes (not necessarily nudity, but the law outlawed any notion that kids may be having sex, even if it wasn't explicitly shown), because it is a part of the film and the characters are supposed to be under 18.
These films were technically outlawed before.
This decision is a win for people's right to expression, especially when there is no real victim. Even if the idea is putrid to most, we can't force value judgements on everyone based on concepts that do not harm others (although we do all the time: see homosexuality, etc.)
Ciao!
This is the problem with modern law:
Law cannot be 'up for interpretation'. This is why the drinking age is 21, why the pr0n age is 18. Once you make things open for interpretation, cops are suddenly 'biased' and governments are suddenly tyrannical.
First this is not a "modern" problem. The debate about absolute laws versus interpretation has been around for at least a thousand years.
Law has to be open to a certain amount of interpretation. This is a fundamental principle of government and one of the reasons the American constitution is framed to separate the judicial and legislative branches. The framers recognized that there has to be interpretation in the system and put an explicit procedure in place to allow the judicial branch to interpret the laws written by the legislative branch.
If you didn't allow interpretation lawmakers would have to anticipate every possibility both present and future. This is at best an absurdly optimistic requirement. In the real world it is impossible to write a law that will never require interpretation. The system needs to be able to adapt to changes in society. Look how much the interpretation of the first amendment has changed since the second world war.
The system must retain some flexibility or it will become obsolete, inappropriate and eventually so out of touch it will be overthrown. The only questions are how much interpretation should be allowed and where and who should be responsible for interpreting. These are good and important questions and are widely debated in the legal profession and elsewhere.
When things are clear cut there is no argument. You either broke the law or you didn't. There will always be the few extrordinary circumstances (is abortion murder or self mutilation? one is illegal, one is not.) which is why the judicial system exists. Not to interpret.
This is clearly not true - go back to the constitution and the founding of the American judicial system. Take a look at the roles of the courts of appeal, especially the Supreme Court. The judicial system exists both to interpret and to rule based on law.
Sailing over the event horizon
Just check out Grand Theft Auto 3 or any of the other hundreds of other games.
I don't think any course of action that's been tried to date (castration, drugs to kill the libido, and negative re-inforcement) have had any significant effect on pedophiles.
As long as no one is hurt, live and let live.
When discussing computer generated child porn, many people ask - why _should_ there be computer generated child porn?
The main argument behind the banning of child porn is that the production of it constitutes the sexual abuse of a child. It has little to do with the effects it has on individuals viewing such material. The argument that viewing child porn would cause someone to become or indicate that they are a pedophile is as logically invalid as the claim that watching porn would indicate or induce some sort of sexual deviance.
There is even an argument for allowing computer generated child porn. (remember - no children are harmed in the digital creation process) What if these images satisfied the sexual urges of pedophiles? Suddenly we'd find that this material our society strongly condems prevents a much worse situation.
Ultimately, computer generated child porn skirts our current definition of child porn (an image in which a child is being sexually abused). When does a digital rendering become too close to that of a real child? Thats something that is VERY difficult to put into words which will be interpreted similarly by many people.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Unlike most people here, I actually know some pedophiles on a personal level. I met many online, while researching a pedophile character for a book I was writing.
After conversing with many of them, I had to come to the conclusion that pedophilia is no different from heterosexuality or homosexuality, except that heteros and homos can enjoy healthy sex lives and pedos can't. That's unfortunate, and sometimes, in the case of people with low self-control, leads to the horrible crime of child molestation. But we must always remember that heterosexual is to rapist as peophile is to child molester--not all pedophiles are child molesters any more than all heterosexuals are rapists.
We should attempt to help these people to control their sexual urges instead of stigmatizing them; that would *really* bring child sexual abuse statistics down. Virtual child porn is a nice start--no ral children involved, placed entirely in fantasy, to provide pedophiles with the same release valve for sexual tensions that heterosexuals and homosexuals have in regular porn. Get horny, watch virtual porn, jerk off, no more horniness. That's how it works in human males, unlike the moralizers' baseless claims that porn makes people want to act out more in real life. No, it releases sexual tensions. If every pedophile whacked off o some realistic-looking virtual childporn fuckfilms once or twice a day, they'd never have a strong urge to touch a child in real life, because the sexual urge would be sated.
I also wish pedophiles could get RealDolls which look like young girls, too. That would help to satisfy their sexual urges even further, resulting in fewer cases of really touching children. Anything which causes a real reduction of child molestation, without violating essential Constitutional rights, is a good thing in my book.
I found out in my research that pedophiles aren't automatically bad people or people who do bad things. They're just like you and I, except their sexual attractions are focused towards people whom it's unacceptable to engage sexually in this day and age. In prehistory pedophilia probably served a real purpose--finding a mate when she's young and bonding to her, so that her offspring when she becomes fertile will definitely be yours, and she'll likely be very devoted. Homosexuality is said to also serve an evolutionary purpose--homosexuals won't likely have childen of their own, and therefore will likely give some of their resources to their neices and nephews, resulting in a more rsource-rich childhood for the children of those families who have homosexual members. The difference is pedophilia is no longer viable and socially acceptable, while heterosexuality and homosexuality are.
Chasing Amy
(We all chase Amy...)
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws"-Tacitus
Here's another example of how schools enforce laws in a very broken manner:
I recently started administering a portion of my district computer system at a locked-down facility for children. In order to work there I had to read the 'must report' rules for suspected child abuse. I found that if a child came in with bruises on his or her arm over several months, then came to school with a cast on that same arm, it wasn't grounds for suspecting abuse. WTF?
However, if a child (and I'm talking child here, the example was a 5-year-old/kindergartner) told me that her uncle had picked her up in such a fashion as to put his hands on her 'breasts' then I *had* to report it as suspected sexual molestation.
Think about this for a moment: the guidelines specifically used the word 'breasts' for the imaginary 5-year-old. Yet as any sane adult knows *5-year-old girls don't have breasts*. They have a chest not at all different from that of *5-year-old boys*. But no breasts. Makes you wonder about the mental state of the person who wrote the guidelines.
I also realized that I had violated the guidelines on numerous occasions with my niece - in fact, every time I'd picked her up by grabbing her under the arms and swinging her through the air. Because my hands, being so large against her tiny 6-year-old body, always wrap around her chest - er, 'breasts', according to the whackos who wrote the manual. So according to these guidelines it would be reasonable to assume that I had *molested my niece on multiple occasions*.
Really, it's shit like this that puts the fear of the state into your heart. If I had picked up my niece and played 'airplane' with her when she came to visit me on the job, I could've gone to jail under the 'mandatory reporting' rules of the school district....
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
So by your reasoning, it is ok to yell fire in a crowded movie theater? Cause banning my yelling fire in a crowded movie theater would impenge on my rights. Never mind the people that may be trampled in the process.
Does that actually work? Can we get some random trouble maker to scream out "fire! the theater's on fire" and see if people actually panic and trample each other? Frankly, the example doesn't make much sense to me, and the supreme court decision it came from is questionable at best, as it was aimed at suppressing political speech (advocating objection to millitary service in WWI, if i remember right)
KKK members can't run around saying that all niggers should be tortured and killed
It is my understanding that they can, do, and get away with it. It has to pose a clear and present danger that someone will commit a specific crime, not just advocate criminal behavior in general (iirc)
--
Benjamin Coates