If restricting access to forbidden works is justifiable in order to protect children, then we must also restrict access to the Bible, Koran, and Torah ... as it is clear that devout adherents to any of them have - beyond a reasonable doubt - committed heinous crimes against children. Already there are calls bringing charges against the Catholic Church under the RICO act as a criminal conspiracy in the current scandal about buggery. If it is justifiable to forbid images of sex and/or violence, then it follows logically that children must be shielded from images of the cross, certainly of the cruxifiction. Freedom of Religion is guaranteed, in the US, by the same document as Freedom of Expression ... and can be as easily breached. A Good intent excuses not an evil act.

Hmmn. I spent a fun morning early this morning reading a whole bunch of Supreme Court opinions on FindLaw - they very kindly reference with a pointer previous decisions referred to. I read most of the CPPA decision, which kindly referenced the 1982 SC decision on child porn, which referenced the 1972 decision that attempted to define 'obscenity.' I also discovered, much to my 'delight' that the 1972 case originated here in good ol' Orange County, CA, the John Birch capital of the US. The cusp of the 1982 decision was that (at least to that point) the creation of those pictures required the abuse of a minor, frequently a child. Since the creation of those photos at that time required a crime, and a particularly henious one by most standards, leading to the kinds of lifelong problems in the victim cited in earlier parts of this thread, the SC (which was still pretty 'liberal' at that point) upheld existing laws forbidding the possession and sale of those images. They were also careful to exclude things like, say, a med school anatomy textbook that showed pictures of a child's genitals. The whole opinion is much more detailed, of course, but that was the gist of it as my spinning brain remembers it. I've never read a whole supreme court decision before, much less three. Interesting the subtle jabs the justices take at one another in them.

Attached Link: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vol=000&invol=00-795

It will be interesting where this goes from here. The CPPA opinion contained some interesting precedents that will affect any attempt to resurrect this law in another form.

Huolong said: Freedom of Religion is guaranteed, in the US, by the same document as Freedom of Expression ... and can be as easily breached. The trouble is, that the "enemy of freedom" and "enemy of the people" is merely People, Each Other, Overcrowding, too many of one's own kind. In the same way, shepherds say that "the worst enemy of a sheep is another sheep". For example, freedon of religion should not stop the law from imprisoning Muslim imams who preach inflammatory sermons against nonbelievers. But that is getting off topic and too near the topic of another long acrimonious thread that recently had to be deleted.