robbdn

There's no way he was going to find a legal loophole. Taking out the cartoon counts, he still would have been charged with 54 counts of child pornography.
Ah! You're joking. I hope. I understand your anger, though I don't necessarily condone the way you express it.
Which society? These sorts of laws vary so wildly, why should we assume any society is "smart enough?" Shouldn't they always need to get smarter? Are we always right, and others always wrong? Take a look at this:

So, who is right? Should somebody go to jail here for a drawn picture of a fourteen year-old having sex from a serious Hungarian graphic novel that is trying to make a point about how 14 is too young?

Furthermore, who in that society should be empowered to make these decisions? I mean, when the Muslim world got fired up about the Danish cartoons, most of them didn't even know what the cartoons looked like, because they were against their religion. If society demanded to see these pictures, to see if they are what in fact what Ustwo says they are (in which case, fair dues) would we be allowed to see them? Or would we be thrown in jail for asking? For merely suggesting that the people making these decisions may not know what's best, would we be labeled pedophiles and left to rot alone?

Honestly, I'm a bit bothered about playing the devil's advocate on this one. I don't like the fact that Ustwo is trying to descredit my opinion and arguments by labelling me as a NAMBLA supporter, which I'm not. I'm not trying to say that our age of consent is wrong. I think 18 is just fine and dandy, and before this post, I wasn't aware that the US federal age was 16. I'm not trying to defend a convicted sex offender from prison... he's in jail where he belongs. I'm not trying to defend sexual perversion, when that is indeed what it is.

All I hope to accomplish with the statements I've made here is to complicate this issue. This is a cultural issue as much as it is an issue of domestic law. Art and mass media are frequently the best arenas to play out matters of cultural difference, and strangeness, and as long as we are censoring things from other cultures that are considered "normal" or at the very least "acceptable" we are preventing ourselves from understanding our neighbors in the global village.

Furthermore, I do also see this as a slippery slope, and I don't think that's as far-fetched as others have tried to make it out to be. Any time there is censorship, period, we have started down the "slippery slope." If it is a crime to make a media-object, because crimes were committed in its creation, then it should be handled accordingly... but it should never be a crime to engage a media-object, no matter what.

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I'm swimming in the digital residue of a media-drenched world. It's too cold.