NRC asks for reviewers for forthcoming Internet porn report

[Sampo Syreeni]

On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Jim Choate wrote:

>> Maybe, maybe not. I'm the first to agree that porn *should* be treated as
>> equal to other speech,
>
>But 'porn' is no more speech than 'murder' is. What makes porn so
>offensive isn't the pictures, but the ACTS that had to be commited to
>create the speech.

So legislate the ACTS, not the speech.

>No where in the 1st does it say that you can say and do anything you want
>as long as it contains 'speech'.

But one *is* guaranteed a whole bunch of privacy rights and
self-determination. If one *wants*, for one reason or another, to engage in
the production of porn, who are you to say it cannot be done? The stuff that
results is then just speech.

>While the 'speech' part is really irrelevant (and a wrong-headed way to
>resolve the issues relating to the acts)

Of course it's wrongheaded -- you're confusing the act, and the act of
distributing a record of an act.

>there is still the component of the acts against minors that needs to be
>dealt with. Those acts are in no way 'speech'.

Not speech, but not relevant either. What results from recording the acts
*is* speech, and should be treated as such. In fact, even if the original
acts constitute a felony, I think it is a separate issue whether
dissemination of the resulting speech can be controlled. Punish the
pornographer for any provable violation of other people's rights, but do not
touch porn that was produced.

Then there's the nagging question of whether all of the so called child
pornography actually calls for a violation of a minor's rights. I won't go
there here.

Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy at iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front