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Oregon's New Censorship Law Challenged In Court
MachineShedFred writes "A lawsuit has been filed against all the county District Attorneys as well as the Attorney General of Oregon to block enforcement of a new law that restricts the sale of 'sexually explicit' material to people under the age of 18. Powell's Books (who claims to be the largest independent new and used bookstore in the world) as well as Dark Horse Comics (publisher of Frank Miller graphic novels) as well as many other bookstores claim that the new law would be impossible for these businesses to comply with. 'Powell's has in stock over 2 million volumes constituting over 1 million titles,' Michael Powell said in his affidavit. 'We receive on an average over 5,000 new titles per week. Obviously we cannot read each new title to determine whether there are any sexual explicit portions and if so whether such portions "serve some purpose other than titillation" (even if I knew what that meant).'"
First movies, then video games, now books will need to have a big ugly "E" stamped on their cover before they can be sold to minors. And on the back cover there will be spoilers like "Warning! Graphic content: main character murdered at the end"
Hasn't written material traditionally been exempt from obscenity laws?
Not really. Wikiepedia has a whole section on "non image based obscenity" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obscenity
The comedian Lenny Bruce was prosecuted in the 50s and 60s for merely speaking about "forbidden" topics at nightclubs. Just recently there's an internet site that published text stored "red rose stories" that was raided by the freaking FBI. There's a ton more. The Red Rose Stories prosecution case is scheduled to start soon.
So no, if you think this is about image based porn "obscenity", you're very wrong.
AccountKiller
I don't understand the problem here. Powell's simply needs to ban children from their store. Why should children be reading books their parents haven't approved, anyway? In fact, I think no child should be allowed to read a book that their parents haven't or can't read. That way, illiteracy will become an inheritable disease, and we'll need a government program to treat it. Your health care dollars at work.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Years ago before you could see anything you could imagine googling for, young kids got their porn pictures from National Geographic where tribal womam had breasts exposed or more.
The problem with "titillation" is that, more than subjective, it ignores context. I wrote a "porn filter" for an internet search site 10 years ago, and while I was looking at all sorts of porn, I was not "titillated." I was studying the language, canonical terms, and word usage to create a proper filter.
I posted Tom Lehrer's "smut" earlier, but I think my point was missed. Specifically, the paragraph where it goes: "For filth is in the mind of the beholder, when correctly viewed, everything is lewd, I can tell you things about Peter Pan, and the wizard of Oz is a dirty old man."
"Titillation" can be anything from pictures of women in police uniforms, hell, some people get their rocks off by looking at pictures of women's feet. I don't understand it, but it is true.
Censorship, throughout history, has never had much success in suppressing that which had been targeted. It has, however, been quite successful in suppressing those that disseminate information. and creating an environment of fear.
Censorship is terrorism.