crm@duke.UUCP (Charlie Martin) (01/18/85)
Well, I can't seem to get the quoting stuff to work, so I'll just have to quote from memory... if I msiquote substantially, I apologize in advance. First off, I'm going to try not to respond to any further stuff about pornography, because I am tired of the subject, and at least as importantly, because the people who have responded in favor of a restriction have pretty well demonstrated that their TOTAL THESIS is simply that they (or "government" which is just a bigger subset to call "they") have the right to regulate what I read. You may have the power -- you don't have the right. That is something I consider unarguable. I will resort to drastic action, even violence or civil disobedience, to defend this right. You may feel assured that anyone who attempts directly to wrest from me something I wish to read will have great difficulty doing so; anyone who suggests a political ban on me reading what I want to read will see me in the drive to defeat them; and any law which tells me what I may read or write will be one which I will ignore. However, there are several arguments which have been presented which I want to rebut: 1) "We should supress Nazi propaganda, so there should not be an absolute restriction of the power to supress certain publications." As far as constitutional law is concerned, this is already made pretty clear. Especially if you read the history of the Alien and Sedition Act, which was finally stricken down as unconstitutional during John Adams's administration. It related to *exactly* the sort of question to which you allude -- the power of the government to restrict the publication of political opinion which opposes their own. If we have the power to supress Nazi propaganda, then we may also be able to supress Democratic propoganda. I *will not accept* anyone restricting my right to read what I will, whether Paul Dubuc, NAACP, Communist Party, or Jesse Helms. Furthermore, I feel that anyone who attempts to do so is committing a moral and ethical "sin" of such great proportion as to make me almost speechless (but only almost, you won't get off that easily.) 2) "Pornography should be supressed because a great number of mass murderers and/or rapists have large collections of pornography." The counter-example offered was that many rapists have drunk milk in childhood; Paul Dubuc and others have claimed this is not a good analogy. If you examine the FORM of the statement, it is clear that this IS a good analogy: rapists have X implies X makes rapists. Whether you replace X with "milk in childhood" or "large collections of pornography", the argument is the same. It's also called the *post hoc ergo propter hoc* fallacy -- also stated as "correlation does not imply causation". The Greeks knew about this, and knew it was not a good argument; so do the few people who bother to learn about such things today. It is too bad that otherwise educated people use it believing the argument reveals something other than ignorance. A counter-example: I have some collection of what some people would call "pornography" -- specifically a collection of magazines in which women are naked, and in which some of the women expose their external sexual organs (not "genitalia" women can't expose their genitalia except surgically). Some of these magazines are magazines like Playboy, Oui, and Penthouse, some of them are more "hard-code" ... and some are classy slick-paper European magazines which are devoted to photography in general, and which include nudes because people make good and attractive pictures with nudes. Some of these magazines also have pictures with naked men, which I don't like as much. I can't help it, I don't find those pictures as compelling, but my repression doesn't change the fact that others may. However, I am *not* a rapist. A number of others I know who have such things are not rapists. The only rapist I have ever known was violently opposed to such things. Further, there are *millions* of these magazines sold every year! That is not an exaggeration, MILLIONS! How many rapes are committed in a year? How many rapists are there? Not enough to make your claims for causation stand up. (heh, heh.) Finally, in Germany there are hundreds of porno stores, along with legal prostitution, peep shows, and who knows what else. The closest equivalent of Family Weekly is probably the Neue Revue, which publishes a picture of a naked girl every week (called the "girl next door") right in there along with the recipes. Sexual material is much more available in Germany that here -- if your supposition has any predictive value, then this should imply that rape and sexual violence are more prevalent in Germany than here. They are not. Your hypothesis fails. 3) "No-one would come out in favor of child pornography, would they?" OK, get ready. I am coming out if favor of the right of people to print and sell child pornography. Also snuff films, mathematics textbooks, and books in which the overthrow of the USA, God and the Republican Party are recommended. I am *not* *not* *not* in favor of a) sexual abuse of children, b) being an accessory to the sexual abuse of children, c) killing people, d) the way most math textbooks are written, or e) the overthrow of the USA. (God I'm not sure can be trusted, and I certainly don't trust the GOP right now!) Sexual abuse of a child is a hideous thing -- not because of some mystical concept, but because it can screw up the child's life so thoroughly for so long. Killing people is also a hideous thing, although it is sometimes necessary. (-- it can also be a merciful thing, but that is *not* an opposite to hideous.) If someone sexually abuses a child, then publishes pictures of it, we should simply be glad that they took the trouble to keep the evidence we need to put them away where we can be sure they will not abuse any more children -- but the publication SHOULD BE PROTECTED even if we jail or shoot both the offender and the publisher (as an accomplice after the fact, or before the fact.) If I were to draw a conclusion from this whole argument, it would be simply that it is a good thing the Constitution tries to protect us from people like these -- and that the Founding Fathers really knew what they were doing much more than we have a right to expect. -- Opinions stated here are my own and are unrelated. Charlie Martin (...mcnc!duke!crm)