SCOTUS Kiddie Porn Decision

[ndkid]

New York Times ArticleA 7-2 split, which is pretty rare for the modern court. (Note to self: you really do need to do the research for that graph of Supreme court decision majorities over time

Comments

[rebelsheart]

That's going to make a few hundred thousand fans of HP slash happy.

Uh.

[trystanknight]

I'll admit I'm walking in here blind to the "issue" of child pornography or what the hell triggered this latest Supreme Court Fart-o-Matic.

I think , knowing you and I's past discussions at $FormerOffice, you are probably referring to 16 year old "consentual" type pornography, whereas I believe what the Supreme Court wants to stop is the truly scary stuff that involves, say, 12 year olds (or worse).

This means that your primary gripe is precisely what it's always been - you want to lower the age of voting and consent in the U.S. to something more reasonable, or somehow assign certain rights to the underage, and I can see your point. But I just think that your reaction to this article is a symptom of a larger disease, and nothing that happens as a result of this case is going to do a damn thing to the disease, it's just going to band-aid one of the open sores (or rip it off).

[chainkill]

1) Sexual assault is a separate crime from assault because of the nature in which our minds handle sex, which makes the assault worse. That is why rape of a minor is a worse crime than spanking a minor.

2) There is no way to make a law which will protect minors who are actually too young to make a decision without also protecting some minors who are not. I agree that the age should be dropped by one or two years on principle, but that isn't what this law is about. This law is about protecting five year olds from making daddy rich by starring in a movie with him.

3) In selling drugs, the issue is the drugs. Therefore, giving drugs away for free would be a bad thing. In prostitution, if the problem was the sex, then it would also be bad to have sex for free. Scalia may actually believe that, for any non-married couple. What I think is the problem with prostitution, however, is that prostitutes are selling their procreative rights as a human, and that is something which should only be shared, never sold nor given.

[ndkid]

You argued in 1) that kiddie porn debases children *worse* than spanking, not that the latter does not harm and debase. My point is that, if the laws should be structured to protect our children from harm and debasement, but we consider assault a fair form of discipline, we've got a bit of a contradiction