Food for Thought

[Jim Herrmann]

On Tuesday 05 November 2002 01:11 pm, Jason Clinton wrote:
> What would prevent kids from accessing alt.sex.* via NNTP for pics and
> stories or the likes of http://www.nifty.org via a publicly accessible
> telnet Lynx terminal? What's next? Are we to revert to chastity belts to
> which a child must ask for his parent's key to go the restroom? Will you
> hire public servants to listen for the sounds of masturbation in public
> bathrooms or follow your 12 - 18 year olds to and from the bathroom
> yourself? How 'bout morning 'sheet checks' and those X-10 cameras installed
> in their bedroom?
>
> For every wall there is an equally greater ladder. If a child is actively
> seeking pornography, it's time for them to see it. They're going to
> masterbate one way or another.

I think this is a really important point.  If the child is raised by moral 
parents, rather than expecting an education system to also instill morals, 
then the child will a) not look for nude pictures, b) be embarrased when they 
stumble across them, and/or c) be able to handle the pschological "damage" 
that might occur.  It's not the state's place to determine right and wrong.

The root of the problem is that we are trying to legislate morality, and that, 
my friends, is what is truly immoral!  That's the problem with this whole 
culture.  We make laws to keep people from doing what people do, based on 
some pseudo-puritan morality that has it's roots in some prudes a thousand 
years ago.  Our culture has this need to try to conquer nature through laws, 
guns, chemicals, and other artificial constructs.  In the end, nature will 
win.

So, IMHO, legislating filtering software will have the same assinine results 
as the existing drug laws.  Let's wage a war against something that we can 
never win, so that we can continue to build up the machine that fights this 
so called war.  War on Terrorisim sound familiar.  You can't have a war on a 
behavior!
</rant>

Jim