At 1:55 PM -0700 7/4/01, Eric Cordian wrote:
Here's some more screwing around with the First Amendment from our friends in the great state of Ohio.
Ohio, as you may recall, brought us the Supreme Court decision permitting state laws to call anything they like "child porn," including mere nudity and mere text. It also brought us the Mapplethorpe Trial, the "Salo" gay bookstore arrest, the Larry Flynt trial, and served as the birthplace of the National Coalition Against Pornography.
Now Ohio is again at the forefront of blue-nosed preoccupation with private conduct in the home.
In a case the prosecutor calls a "breakthrough" in the war against child pornography, a Columbus man pleaded guilty to a single charge of pandering child pornography and got a 10 year prison sentence. His only crime was writing words in a personal journal, which he never showed to anyone, and which was discovered during a routine search of his home.
"During a routine search of his home." This is becoming more and more common. King George is no doubt laughing at how the foolish colonists have created a system worse than anything ever imagined during colonial days.
I believe this to be the first successful US child porn prosecution for purely textual material created for private use.
Civil Libertarians are, of course, unamused. I wonder how many of them have the balls to say so publicly, and risk getting labeled as supporting the sexual abuse of children.
I say so. What a person _writes_ cannot be a crime, no matter how repugnant the thoughts may be to others. That we are sending people off to prison for 10 years for fantasies written in their journals shows what kind of society we now live in. That there is not an uproar over searching a man's journals "during a routine search of his home" shows the situation is probably hopeless.
My guess is that the ACLU will keep silent on this one, and stick with defending the right of Jewish children not to be frightened by Santa.
Lot of Jews in the ACLU, and Jews are well-known to be censorious and hateful of liberty (Feinstein, Lieberman, Schumer, the whole qabal).
"What you're saying is somebody can't, in essence, confess their fantasy into a personal journal for fear they have socially unacceptable fantasies, then ultimately they end up getting prosecuted,'' said Wolman, former director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Ohio.
Already the case with shrinks, at least in many state. Confess a fantasy, even an absurd and non-credible fantasy, and "Tarasoff" requires the shrink to narc out his or her patient. Here in California, psychiatrists, counsellors, and family therapists are Agents of the State.
"This is one of the first felony cases in Franklin County that involves the written word -- a writing somebody created on their own,'' he said.
"Even without passing it on to anyone else, he committed a felony.''
Thoughtcrime.
At yesterday's sentencing, Dalton told Judge Nodine Miller: "I know what I wrote was disturbing.
"Over the past few months, I looked back at it and realized it was not something I could do. I don't know how I imagined to write anything like that.''
"He came to realize that he _loved_ Big Brother." --Winston Smith