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More politician’s stupid crap in the name of protection
31st May 2009
Cory Doctorow posts an item over on Boing Boing about a manga collector that has plead guilty to possession of child porn because some of his manga collection includes depictions of “minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct”, and which lack “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” For this, he faces 15 years in prison and the remainder of his life tagged as a sex offender and pedophile. For collecting comic books. Read that again. Nobody involved with the case is claiming that Christopher Handley is a pedophile. Nobody is claiming he ever harmed any children. He was arrested and convicted on the basis of collecting comic books that are commercially available in Japan.
But that’s Japan, you say. Should we allow people to purchase film of little girls and boys being abused if it becomes commercially available in Thailand? Who’s there to protect the children? Here’s the thing. I’m all for protecting children from predators. In fact, in cases of clear sexual abuse of children…. where there can be no question of guilt, I’m totally in favor of the death penalty for them since, as near as I can tell, there’s no way to rehabilitate sexual predators. On the other hand, let’s say you’ve got a person who has a proclivity for such behavior and it’s taken care of by looking at some cartoon pictures of nastiness. Maybe it’s ok for him to satisfy his twists via cartoons, eh?
In the subset of manga known as hentai there is some pretty twisted shit. [Feel free to do a Google image search if you're feeling brave. DO NOT do it if you're at work]. Apparently, the stuff seized by customs involved beastiality of some sort but I have to worry when we have become so puritanical that we have to outlaw cartoon behavior. It seems to me like this is the 60s pornography debate all over again since it the government is claiming that there is no artistic value to the work. But maybe it’s just me.
Here is a lengthier article at Wired by David Kravets.
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