But just a bit:
WASHINGTON (AP) - The Supreme Court upheld criminal penalties Monday for promoting child pornography.
The court, in a 7-2 decision, brushed aside concerns that the law could apply to mainstream movies that depict adolescent sex, classic literature or innocent e-mails that describe pictures of grandchildren.
The ruling upheld part of a 2003 law that also prohibits possession of child porn. It replaced an earlier law against child pornography that the court struck down as unconstitutional…
…Justice David Souter, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, dissented. Souter said promotion of images that are not real children engaging in pornography still could be the basis for prosecution under the law. Possession of those images, on the other hand, may not be prosecuted, Souter said.
“I believe that maintaining the First Amendment protection of expression we have previously held to cover fake child pornography requires a limit to the law’s criminalization of pandering proposals,” Souter said.
The bit of common sense was the ruling that child porn is not covered under the rubric of free speech - the reason it was only “a bit” of common sense is that the SC didn’t rule that laws could be made to restrict all pornography…’cause, boys and girls, there wasn’t a man at Bunker Hill, the Alamo, Gettysburg, Argonne, Iwo Jima or anywhere else Americans have fought for liberty who was thinking as he died, “at least my descendents will get to look at dirty pictures”. Pornography ain’t speech - its a prurient way to make a buck off the ruthless exploitation and objectification of human beings, but it isn’t speech…and only a liberal entirely detached from common sense could ever say otherwise. The fact that we, as a society, have said otherwise is a badge of deep shame upon us…because scummy purveyors of smut wanted to make a buck, we’ve enshrined their filth as being fit company with the great literature of the past, and the great political documents of our history.
And there were Souter and Ginsburg, following the idiot tradition of American jurisprudence on free speech - if you needed a reason to vote McCain, there it is. He’s pledged to appoint more Scalias - Obama will appoint more Ginsburgs. Who do you want ruling from the bench?
Tags: Barack Obama, First Amendment Issues, John McCain, pornography, Supreme Court
May 20th, 2008
What an amazingly topsy-turvy view:
Lindsay, Mar 19, 2008 (CNA).- The firing of a county library employee who disobeyed her supervisor in reporting to police a patron who was viewing child pornography has focused attention on permissive library “free speech” policies.
Brenda Biesterfeld, a librarian assistant in Lindsay, California, was ordered by her supervisor not to report a man who was looking at pictures of naked boys on the library’s public computer. She called police anyway. On the 39-year-old man’s next visit, police caught him allegedly viewing child pornography.
The man, Donny Lynn Chrisler, was arrested on March 4 on suspicion of violating child pornography and obscenity laws. Police say they found “kiddie porn” in Chrisler’s trailer home.
Biesterfeld said she had a hostile conversation with her supervisor, Judi Hill, after she ignored the supervisor’s orders and notified police. “She kind of threatened me,” Biesterfeld said. “She said I worked for the county, and when the county tells you to do something, you do what the county tells you. She said I had no loyalty to the county. I told her I was a mother and a citizen also, and not just a county employee.”
Biesterfeld was fired on March 6. A letter from Tulare County Librarian Brian Lewis said that probationary employees such as Biesterfeld can be terminated at any time if they don’t perform at a level “necessary for fully satisfactory performance in the employee’s position.”
However, a Lindsay city councilwoman said that six weeks before the firing, she was told that Biesterfeld was doing a great job.
On March 14, the Linsdsay City Council sent a letter to Tulare county supervisors complaining about Judi Hill’s “abrupt, demanding and demeaning” phone call to a police captain telling him to call off his pornography investigation because the city had “no business interfering” with library matters.
Do you want to know an indisputable and very obvious truth? The Minutemen who stood fast at Lexington and Concord; the boys in blue who won Gettysburg; the Doughboys who charged into the Argonne; the Marines who raised Old Glory on Iwo Jima…not a one of them fought for the right of creeps to view pornography. This is free speech:
Guy A: I think that taxes should be raised.
Guy B: I think tha taxes should be lowered.
Guy A: I say you’re a bloody fool for believing that.
Guy B: Well, so’s your old man.
Free speech is not and cannot ever be someone fondling himself while looking at dirty pictures - to say that it is a matter of free speech is to betray either an amazing ignorance of what freedom is, or an amazing cowardice afraid to stand up for what is right. But here we are - not only is this library (and many others around the nation; I’ve heard of this issue plenty of times - just not quite so starkly as this) allowing people to view pornography on public-owned computer (your tax dollars at work, boys and girls), but illegal pornography…and then getting mad when someone has the nerve to report a crime to the police.
We live in one utterly screwed up world, my friends - and the screwing up was uniformly and quite deliberately done by liberals…oh, sure; they didn’t mean it to come out this way, but any one with the sense God gave little, white mice could see where it would wind up…when you ease up on depravity all you get is more of it. Why? Because human beings are fallible - they will screw up, and the more you allow them to do so, the more they’ll do it. Life has rules not because someone arbitrarily is trying to stop fun from happening (though liberals are making a stab at that, too, with their asinine anti-smoking and anti-alchohol campaigns), but because people need rules to live in a civil society.
We’d better stop this pretty quick - the rot has gone far enough. A time when there is a dispute about whether a kiddie-porn consumer should be turned in to the police is a time when the final line has already been crossed, and if we don’t back up then things really will go to pieces.
Tags: morality, pornography, public libraries, public morality
March 20th, 2008
In re: the “lady” who wore a trampy outfit on the plane and now is doing a Playboy spread:
It never ceases to amaze me how some ‘modern’ women choose to ‘celebrate’ their femininity - by posing nude in the pages of Playboy magazine in desperate attempts to extend their 15 minutes of fame. The latest dingbat to bare all is Kyla Ebbert, the gal who was asked back in July by a Southwest Airlines flight attendant to ‘adjust’ her revealing attire - or leave the plane. What’s the title of the pictorial spread? “Legs in the Air.”
Oh my. How original (eye roll)…
…Seriously, what is wrong with people today? And why the hell would her boyfriend support her decision to do this? Wouldn’t a boyfriend who truly loved his significant other put his foot down over something like this? And before any uber-fems start screaming, yes, I know ultimately it’s the woman’s choice but I can tell you right now if I had a b/f, and he came over to the house and announced, “Honey, I’m going to pose in Playgirl. What do you think?” he’d get an earful, and if, in the end, he decided he was still going to go through with it, it’d be time to say adios.
There are some things that you just don’t do, and sharing your body with the world - whether it’s through pictures or sleeping around - is one of those things. This has nothing to do with prudishness and everything to do with possessing a strong sense of propriety, not to mention self-respect. Your body is your temple, and should be reserved only for the person you intend to marry or are married to.
Does all this mean ST would support a ban on smut mags? Of course not. We, thankfully, live in a free society, the Constitutional rights of which I fully support. Not only that, just because I don’t like something doesn’t mean I want to see it done away with. I’m just expressing my opposition to women who, in my view, take their freedom to express themselves to extremes. Who was it that said with freedom comes responsibility?
Now, for anyone who wants to take a stab at the good Sister: keep in mind that she’s exceptionally smart and drop-dead gorgeous. As Winston Churchill once observed, you can’t snub a beautiful woman - the snub recoils, and the woman remains beautiful.
Anyways, Sister is right - one of the things I find exceptionally tiresome is the old-fashioned, worn out notion that we need sexual liberation in order to get things right in our world. That if we would just be more free and open about our sexuality, we’d all be happier..I can’t imagine how we can get more open about it than we are now, but I can say that nothing has become more boring over the past half century than sex. Clue: when you do a thing a lot and talk about it a lot, you’ll swiftly run up against the dregs of it…such as some nitwit of a gal parlaying her horrid fashion sense into a nude spread for a magazine catering to foolish boys and dirty old men (and anyone who isn’t creeped out by Hefner these days is just plain weird, in my view).
What would have been avant garde here is if the woman had learned how to dress and started a campaign to de-ho the fashion sense of young women (and before you get started; yes, we need a campaign to de-gangsta the fashion sense of young men). That would have taken some intellect and some moral courage - dropping her drawers is something a trained monkey could do.
Tags: pornography, public morality
November 19th, 2007
