The American Civil Liberties Union of Oregon has joined booksellers and librarians in the state to challenge a state law restricting the sale or provision of sexually explicit material to children, saying it could affect constitutionally protected material.
The ACLU says the law approved by the 2007 Legislature is vague and could result in parents being charged for providing educational books to their children – or even an older child who gives material to a younger sibling.
As an example, the ACLU cited the 1975 novel “Forever” by Judy Blume, a frequent target of censors because it deals with teenage sexuality. “A 17-year-old girl who lends her 13-year-old sister a copy of the book and tells her to ‘read the good parts’ could be arrested and prosecuted,” said Dave Fidanque, ACLU executive director for Oregon.
“For booksellers, the new law is vague and difficult to apply,” Michael Powell, owner of Powell’s Books, said in a news release. “It says a 13-year-old can legally buy these books, but it’s a crime to sell them to a 12-year-old. How do I ‘card’ a 12-year old?”
The law was passed by the 2007 Legislature and signed by Gov. Ted Kulongoski. Story from kcby CBS as well as oregonlive.
Protect the Children
The idea of the law is to protect children from explicit content. Coming from someone that was exposed at age 7 to pornography, and incidentally, will struggle all my life with an addiction to porn, I say do everything possible to keep porn out of kid’s hands. Even if that means they can’t read a Judy Blume book. Parents will have to decide how to educate their children. If their child is mature enough to hear “the talk,” accompanied by educational literature, their child is probably mature enough to not call the police on their parent. The crime of pornography in this country is disgusting, it leads to violent crimes. It has absolutely nothing to do with the freedom of speech. No one is ever going to be arrested for sharing, even the raciest captions, in a Judy Blume book. I hope the ACLU can find a better cause than defending the distribution of filth to children.
Such laws are not about protection
The idea of the law is to protect children from explicit content.
The use to which such laws will be put, however, will not be for the protection of children, but to control what materials will be allowed access to the free marketplace of ideas, so as to effect control over the minds of the populace.
If a group of people wish to effect control over a substance or material, it is necessary before anything else to define as accurately as humanly possible what that substance is. This is fairly easy with physical materials such as cocaine or heroin. Physical substances, after all, can be measured. The concept of pornography is an abstraction. It cannot be weighed, measured, or hooked up to oscilliscope or put through a mass spectrometer. As a result, there is no objective method by which pornography can be identified. Essentially: anything is pornography that some one person somewhere finds to be pornographic. Even a U.S. Supreme Court judge had to admit that point:
I put sixteen years into that damn obscenity thing. I tried and I tried, and I waffled back and forth, and I finally gave up. If you can’t define it, you can’t prosecute people for it. And that’s why, in the Paris Adult Theatre decision, I finally abandoned the whole effort. I reached the conclusion that every criminal-obscenity statute-and most obscenity laws are criminal-was necessarily unconstitutional, because it was impossible, from the statute, to define obscenity. Accordingly, anybody charged with violating the statute would not have known that his conduct was a violation of the law. He wouldn’t know whether the material was obscene until the court told him.
–William J. Brennan, Jr., quoted in Nat Hentoff, “Profiles: The Constitutionalist,” New Yorker, 12 Mar 1990
Aside from the above, when most people apply the term pornography they do so in a misrepresentative fashion. Sexual materials can be slotted into three hierarchic categories: indecent, pornographic, and proscribably obscene. Exemptions are made for indecency and pornography, but not for the proscribably obscene. And in the U.S., the indecent and pornographic are protected speech and expressions.
For more viewpoints on various aspects of this general issue, see my commentaries:
To Smut Or Not To Smut
The Disrespect in Prior Restraint
“Harmful” like hell!
We Must Respect The Children
Cracking Down On Sex
A Hierarchy of Offensiveness
There is nothing that cannot be found offensive by someone, somewhere.