I've been writing less serious posts lately, but today is different. I know myself pretty well, and I know that when I get worked up, I can get to be a pretty unpleasant person. Well, when I checked the news online today, I started to get heated up. Here is what I saw:
It was not the first story or anything like that. It was the sixth headline in the list next to the main big story about John Edwards running for President even though his wife has incurable cancer. I found that minorly ironic, that he is running for President of a country with an incurable cancer as well.
I was not surprised that this court decision happened. I had read about the possibility a few months back on Wired.com - another bastion of "freedom" and "enlightenment." Basically, this judge ruled that it is unconstitutional - under that mysterious "right to privacy" that is not listed in the Bill of Rights, and the nebulous Freedom of Speech - for the government to consider it illegal for websites to expose children to material deemed "harmful to minors" by "community standards." The long and short of it: the government can no longer force websites to have age-verification when they have explicit material on it. The people who started all of this was a collection of "Sexual health" sites, salon.com, and "other web sites" - backed by our friends at the ACLU. (I wonder who those "other sites" were.)
The line that made me so angry I wanted to go up to Pennsylvania and punch the judge was this beauty: "Perhaps we do the minors of this country harm if (free speech) protections, which they will with age inherit fully, are chipped away in the name of their protection." Hang on a second....yeah....I can see where he's coming from. It is definitely more harmful to the minors of this country to violate their mythical freedom of privacy and "free speech" that to keep them from having to see sexually explicit sites. You are absolutely right, Senior U. S. District Judge Lowell Reed Jr. It is waaaay more important that my three and five year old do not have their right to free speech threatened than to keep them from accidentally finding a website with obscene pictures on it that is masquerading as a kids' site.
I mean after all, violating a minor's free speech would probably destroy them and make them a quivering shell of a person. It would make them less than human. That wrong would burn into their brain forever, so that it would pop up for decades. It would give them the wrong understanding about what a woman is supposed to be. It would make them compromise their high standards, and settle for digitally enhanced frauds. It would damage their intimacy with others and with God. It would keep them from being able to connect to their spouses. It would give them oppressive guilt and shame. It would stunt them emotionally. It would enter them into addictive behaviors that would take intense counseling to escape. It would put their marriages at risk. It would probably escalate into getting into fascination with illegal and immoral activities. It would make them come face to face with urges and desires that they have not grown up enough to understand.
I mean, pornography seems mild compared to the damage that hampering a minor's freedom of speech would cause. Porn doesn't do all of that. It's just harmless fun. Just something everyone does. No big deal. I'm glad we have the ACLU and Senior U. S. District Judge Lowell Reed, Jr. to set us straight. I mean, after all, "parents can protect their children through software filters and other less restrictive means that do not limit the rights of others to free speech." We can't have that - people's free speech being limited. Especially when it comes to free speech that looks an awful lot like a naked woman. Why, that would be criminal.
[If this post seemed a wee bit sardonic, just remember - it's just my freedom of speech.]
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