When Children Are Hurt For The Pleasure Of Adults

Utah is in a legal battle over censorship of pornography via the internet. Citing First Amendment infringements the ACLU is representing 14 different entities who feel that the law introduced there would stifle their ability to do business in the world of pornography.

Under the law, the state Attorney General's Office must establish and maintain a database of Internet sites containing material harmful to minors. It requires Internet service providers to prevent access to Internet materials harmful to minors and sites on the adult content registry, if requested by consumers, with filters to be checked at least annually by the state Division of Consumer Protection.

The division will also be required to make public service announcements. Web content providers in Utah also will have to rate the data on their sites.

Service providers won't have to offer filters until that section of the law goes into effect Jan. 1, 2006. But after that, if they don't offer filters, they're in trouble. Every violation will cost $2,500, up to $10,000 per day. An intentional violation is a class A misdemeanor.

The law also extends the state's harmful-to-minors law to Internet content publishers and service providers, a move the complaint says bans some constitutionally protected speech for adults. A violation of that section of the law is a second- or third-degree felony.

In July of 1982 the Supreme Court handed down a decision in New York stating that:

a) The States are entitled to greater leeway in the regulation of pornographic depictions of children for the following reasons: (1) the legislative judgment that the use of children as subjects of pornographic materials is harmful to the physiological, emotional, and mental health of the child easily passes muster under the First Amendment; (2) the standard of Miller v. California, 413 U.S. 15, for determining what is legally obscene is not a satisfactory solution to the child pornography problem; (3) the advertising and selling of child pornography provide an economic motive for, and are thus an integral part of, the production of such materials, an activity illegal throughout the Nation; (4) the value of permitting live performances and photographic reproductions of children engaged in lewd exhibitions is exceedingly modest, if not de minimis; and (5) recognizing and classifying child pornography as a category of material outside the First Amendment's protection is not incompatible with this Court's decisions dealing with what speech is unprotected. When a definable class of material, such as that covered by the New [p748] York statute, bears so heavily and pervasively on the welfare of children engaged in its production, the balance of competing interests is clearly struck, and it is permissible to consider these materials as without the First Amendment's protection. Pp. 756-764

The ACLU has this to say about child pornography:

The sexual exploitation of children is a crime. Criminal, sexually abusive acts committed against children -- _not books or films that depict such criminal acts -- should be vigorously prosecuted. As for young people's access to pornography, the ACLU has found that efforts to render material inaccessible to minors generally end up restricting the freedom of adults as well. Parents, not the government, should monitor their children's reading and viewing habits.

The ACLU admits that the ACT of sexual exploitation of children is a crime, but feels that under the First Amendment "not books or films that depict such criminal acts" should be included. My question to the brilliant nit-pickers of the First Amendment is how a FILM that DEPICTS can be made with a CHILD to portray the ACT? Are they saying that it is OK as long as adults dressed in diapers are the ones they are filming or are they saying for the sake of ART and CREATIVE EXPRESSION it is OK to victimize children by having them PRETEND TO GET UNDRESSED, PRETEND TO ACT OUT LEWD BEHAVIOR, and PRETEND TO PERFORM SEX ACTS ON OTHER CHILDREN AND ADULTS? At what point does PRETENDING stop and VICTIMIZATION begin, if this is the case?

Of course, the Utah case is one that is not a question of "child pornography", but rather that children can inadvertently be subjected to pornography and Utah would impose through their legislation buffers to prevent this. The ACLU and their plaintiffs are saying, "but what about us adults? We don't want to go through buffers to get to pornography? It is an infringement of our First Amendment rights." Why would any decent person who gives a flip about childrens welfare mind a buffering system? It is because they aren't decent, they are sick individuals who don't care about children and protecting them from a twisted adult form of recreation. They only care about the act of perversion itself and if it makes a buck for them in the process even better.

This is an early Thursday Stop the ACLU blogburst. Get involved in the battle to protect your children from those who would hurt them just for their own personal pleasure.