Mandrake I can no longer allow pornographic infiltration, pornographic subversion, pornographic indoctrination, and the international pornography conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
Posted on 04/17/2002 8:45:48 AM PDT by KMC1
Be afraid, be very very afraid. Last night on Fox News Channel on Brit Hume's Special Report, Brian Wilson reported on the comparison between the new TV show that mimics the Supreme Court and the actual Supreme Court as they both ruled on cases dealing with "virtual child pornography". The TV version voted 7 to 2 in the same direction that the actual Supreme Court voted (6 to 3). It would have been 7 to 2 in the actual had Sandra Day O'Connor taken a little more of her medication that morning.
In Ashcroft vs. Free Speech Coalition (a pornography trade, lobbying, and activist group), the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that images can show children having sex, children can be shown in nude or erotic poses, children can perform sexual acts, children can be shown having sex with adults, children can be shown having sex with their own or opposite gender. The only catch - as long as they are not actual children being shown. Sound Confusing? Well it is.
Yesterday's ruling basically opens the way up to allowing pedophilia, child porn, and child molestation to be a major theme of everything from movies to printed materials - as long as they can prove that, the children depicted aren't actually children.
Getting the Court to rule this way obviously thrilled the ACLU and other pro-porn groups across our nation. It obviously deeply cut the groups that are trying to stop one of our nation's most cruel vices from spreading. So what should we expect? More of the same from as best I can see it.
With the publication of the University of Minnesota Press book released three weeks ago promoting the idea that sex between children and adults is just neato keen, and now being followed up with the ruling from this court that children can be made legitimate sexual objects on screen, parents - be afraid, be very very afraid.
Load the shotguns, carry your concealed weapons and suspect every creep that talks to your kids in the grocery store. At the rate the U.S. is going you might just have to shoot someone to literally save the innocence of your own child.
Harsh rhetoric - hardly. Why is the pope this week bringing all the bishops from around the world to meet to discuss the issue of homosexual pedophilia (and a few isolated cases of heterosexual too) amongst the servants of the church? Why is the North American Man Boy Love Association still in business and doing better than ever before? What is the great defense as to why we should not allow children to be sexualized on film - even if adults are playing them or a computer generated them?
(Too be read with a whiny little voice while holding one's nose) "Because we might not get to see films like Traffic or American Beauty." I didn't see Traffic though I am aware that it was nominated for Best Picture the year it came out. But I did see American Beauty which was deemed 'Best Picture'. This little political perverted statement - made through the eyes of a Pretendlander as director - wished to paint the middle class conservative family in America as nothing more than twice adulterating, homophobic, pedophilic, drug addicted, twisted rot. The director's anger against the "right wing" was focused into an attempt to say, "this is how conservative middle class America REALLY lives". Pretendland loved it - that's way they rushed it to the Academy to be deemed "the best of the year". But church going America for the most part yawned as it came and went - it didn't represent most American families - and we knew it.
Pretendland has evidently wielded its logic to the halls of the Supreme Court. But what it has done in the meantime is make every child in America - more vulnerable to the stalking of men who wish to prey on little boys and girls.
I'm sorry Mr. & Ms. Justices of the Supreme Court - but you struck out on this one. Your reasoning was lame. Your decision was even worse.
Maybe you will wear it as a badge of honor that you made child porn the new "fetish du jour", but please take note, you weakened Americans today.
Thank goodness there is that 2nd Amendment! It's there just in case we need to protect ourselves day to day. You may be sitting there saying, "C'mon what's with all the 'protectionism'?" If that's you, well, never mind you won't ever get it anyway. For the rest of you, lock and load, and be very afraid, be very very afraid!
Except the founders saw that bluff and raised it one. That is why they gave guns their very own special 2nd ammendment. To forstall such activity, and why your arguement is specious. Gun(ownership) is specifically and specially protected, porn isn't. The arguements against one, don't apply to the other.
Guns and kiddie porn are both tools. Guns have many and varied uses from sports, sustenance and self defense. MISUSE of a gun may indeed harm a child, but it is not the intended purpose and use of a gun.
Child porn has only two purposes; one is the self validation of a mental illness obsessed with a criminal act (sex with children) and the second is the intentional harming of a child through solicitaion of a similar act. Neither are beneficial socially or to the individual child or adult user, but are demonstrably harmful.
Guns and porn arguments are not even in the same intellectual ball park.
Mandrake I can no longer allow pornographic infiltration, pornographic subversion, pornographic indoctrination, and the international pornography conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
What about if I made an appeal to the morality of the "Purple Unicorn"? The Purple Unicorn is the begining and end of all morality! The Purple Unicorn is the REAL Supreme Court!
See . . . ?
I do not think that distinction is sustainable. A newspaper is a single-purpose product, insofar as its sole purpose is to convey information to its readers. By that sufficiently broad definition of purpose, pornography falls under the same rubric.
It should also be noted that newspapers are regulated in many ways (actual manufacture/processing, inks, copyrights, etc.) and they are taxed, as are the cigarette and alcohol manufactures, wholesalers, distributors etc.
True. At least, mostly true. Newspapers and magazines here in NY are not subject to sales taxes, but the corporate entities that produce them are taxed and regulated. I do not shop for porn, so I cannot say if pornographic products carry sales taxes, but the entities that produce pornography are also taxed and regulated, in the same manner as other publishers.
While the editorial, news and opinion content have 1st Ammendment protection, the advertising content does not, because it is commercial speech.
One may simply apply the same distinction to pornographic magazines and say that the content therein is protected by the First Amendment, while that advertisements they carry are subject to somewhat stricter regulation under the First Amendment.
Obscenity is exempted from 1st Ammendment protection, so I guess another avenue is to legally define virtual child porn as obscene and outlaw it that way, (with significant jail time).
Any prior restraint of expression is going to be evaluated most skeptically, under existing First Amendment doctrine. Additionally, government is not empowered to define obscenity, a priori - under the state of the law as it currently exists, the government must prove "that the work in question, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, is patently offensive in light of community standards, and lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value". Simply banning virtual child porn as obscene will fail yet again - indeed, that was the thrust of the law struck down yesterday - because it ignores context, of which Miller requires consideration.
No, commercial speech in fact, can be limited and regulated and does not enjoy full 1st ammendment protection. Just ask the Marlborough Man.
How could Georgia's Vote for the 13th Amendment be counted and it's vote against the fourteenth AFTERWARDS be discounted???
The 13th Amendment was ratified by 27 states of the then 36 states of the Union, including the Southern States of Virginia, Louisiana, Arkansas, South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina and Georgia. This is shown by the Proclamation of the Secretary of State December 18, 1865. Without the votes of these 7 Southern State Legislatures the 13th Amendment would have failed. There can be no doubt but that the ratification by these 7 Southern States of the 13th Amendment again established the fact that their Legislatures and State governments were duly and lawfully constituted and functioning as such under their State Constitutions.
on April 2, 1866, President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation that, "the insurrection which heretofore existed in the States of Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi and Florida is at an end, and is henceforth to be so regarded."
One would think that since sex with children/sex between children/child sex with animals/ is patently illegal in all fifty states and federally as well, that virtual depictions of such could be found patently offensive in light of community standards.
It's not such a stretch, is it?
The child pornography laws exist to protect children, not to punish pornography. As repugnant as even simulated child porn is, it must be protected under the first ammendment. I have seen some discussions about this being a "free speech" issue. It is not. It is a "free press" issue. We must allow the ill of simulated child porn to protect the real freedoms of the first ammendment.
You can't pick and choose your freedoms and disparage others.
Now, if we can just get the court to strike down CFR and the gun control laws.
Garde la Foi, mes amis! Jamais reculez á tyrannie un pouce!
(Keep the Faith, my friends! Never give an inch to tyranny!)
LoanPalm, le Républicain du verre cassé (The Broken Glass Republican)
States in the Union: 37
Needed to Ratify 28
States Voting Yes 22
States Voting No 12
States not voting 3
Mississippi's rejection resolution did not reach Washington and therefore it is numbered with the non-voting states. Even if all the non-voting states had voted for the amendment, it would still be short of the required number for ratification.
The Northern Congress realized that their attempt to secure passage of the amendment had failed. Thus the letter of constitutional law had survived the initial post-war assault. But the Northern Congress was determined to complete the radical change it had initiated. Frivolous Technicalities such as constitutional limitations, ethics and morality proved no obsticle.
To Secure accomplishment of the 14th amendment the Northern Congress did the following.
1. Declared the Southern States to be outside the erswhile indivisible union.
2. Deny Majority Rule in the Southern States by the disfranchisement of large numbers of the population.
3. Require the Southern States to ratify the Amendment as the price of getting back in the Union from which they had been denied the right to secede.
The third point is a real brain-teaser. The North in 1866 removed the Southern States from the Union. This was the Same North that in 1861 refused to allow the States to secede from the Union. This same North now declared the Southern States non-states. To get back in the Union (that they originally didn't want to be part of anyway) it was required to preform the function of a state in the Union, while still officially no longer part of a Union, by ratifying an amendment previously as states in the Union, it had legally rejected!
Remember also that many of the states that voted against the 14th Amendment in 1866, Voted for the 13th in 1865, AND THEIR VOTE WAS COUNTED IN THE TOTAL in 1865, without their vote the 13th is invalid.
So either the 13th is valid and the 14th is not, or the 14th is valid and the 13th is not.
Take your pick pal.
Please if you disagree, Enlighten Us to why the above is not correct!
I have really got to hear this.
What are the potential negative consequences and implications if the court had ruled in the opposite direction?
There is absolutely no compelling reason why anyone ought to have access to child pornography, virtual or otherwise. It is a fairly simple thing to specifically prohibit such "speech" (and I use that term loosely) while having absolutely no impact on political, religous, or other speech which is, and forever ought to be, protected under the First Amendment. There is plenty of historical precedent for this, in the anti-pornography laws which were held to be Constitutional until the 1970s. Nobody is suggesting that we ban all pornography, but there is no reason to not ban any imagery which depicts unlawful sexual activity with minors.
Why do you believe that this narrowly defined class of speech ought to be protected?
I remember a case in Phoenix last year...police and detectives had sorted through some 10,000 photos to find a kid the porno perp claimed was "virtual." They nailed his stinking carcass only because the prosecutor knew he was lying, and decided to invest the time and manpower to prove his case.
The point being that in child pornography all will become virtual children.
Well, what you seemed to imply on your earlier post was that newspaper advertising (or commercial speech) does not enjoy First Amendment protections. In fact, it does.
That isn't to say advertising or commercial speech cannot be regulated, just like every other type of speech - including some political speech - is.
And nowadays, most restrictions on tobacco advertising aren't because the Government passed a law or laws but because the tobacco companies agreed to advertising restrictions as part of the settlement(s) in the lawsuit(s) againt them.
There are plenty of studies which demonstrate the impact of TV and video game violence to actual violence. There is a pretty clear causal link between "gangsta rap" and a whole class of inner city youths and suburban wanna-bes that engage in negative activities.
Therefore, if you give society's stamp of approval to this simulated activity, and popularize it in the media, more people will begin to see sexual abuse of children as acceptable. The likely consequence is an increase in such abuse.
On the other hand, if you do not allow this narrowly defined class of non-political, non-religous, purely pornographic "speech" you have only deprived a few perverts of an opportunity to indulge their baser instincts.
There is no harm to free speech, and no harm to society, by restricting virtual kiddy porn, and great potential damage if we allow it.
Murder is illegal in all 50 states, but if we banned all movies depicting murder, the shelves of Blockbuster would be pretty empty.
This is a specious argument. Guns have positive social purposes, and the right to own firearms is specifically articulated in the Constitution. There is no such right to kiddy porn, and no redeeming social value from allowing the depiction of child sexual abuse.
But here in America, we are not a theocracy. No amount of insisting or obfuscation on your part is going to change that. Murder (again, with your apples and oranges) is against the law because you've committed violence against another. You've violated their right to life. That's not permitted, nor will it ever be permitted. Any intelligent person can discern the diffence, but maybe my mistake is assuming you have any intelligence.
Go to a stump in your backyard and preach all you like. We don't have a Taliban here, we're not a theocracy. Some people don't buy into your theology and there's absolutely nothing you can do to force it on others. No, go pout and come back when you've got some respect for others.
Lest you believe I'm conceding the debate, let me say now, this is likely the last word I'm going to have with you on this topic. If someone argues with me that red is blue, I don't debate photo spectrometry with them. I simply leave them to their folly.
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