Censorship Essay - Dont Censor Child Pornography -- Argumentative Per

Dont Censor Child Pornography In November of 1997 a Williamson County, Tenn. grand jury indicted Barnes & Noble booksellers for violating state obscenity laws prohibiting the display of material noxious to minors. The materials in question were two books that featured photographs of nude children Jock Sturges Radiant Identities and David Hamiltons The Age of Innocence. Since then, Radical Right activist Randall Terry has launched a rouse aimed at forcing bookstores to remove the criminal garbage of Sturges, Hamilton and (recently added to his list of demons) Sally Mann from their bookshelves (bookweb). To implement his program Terry issued a call to Right sympathizers, urging them to march into bookstores and pull in offensive pages from the targeted books. Several bookstores around the country fell prey to Terrys vandals. In response to these incidents and the threat of future public vandalism, Barnes & Noble recently issued a memoranda to each of its 1000+ stores directing the m to place the contested materials under lock and key, and to allow customers to view them only in the presence of a store film director (apocalypse 9709). This response is upsetting. It is upsetting because it means that, in several significant ways, Terry has won. True, no one (as of yet) has put Sturges or the others in jail (as Terry has called for), and the publics right to view the supposed pornographic content of their work has been significantly diminished by Barnes & Nobles action. By ac go to bedledging the threat of Terry and his small group of supporters, B&N has reified their claim that the work of the named photographers needs to be segregated from the decent publics reach. It installs a technology of surveillance that in... ...ms to me that it would be rather unlikely for a unsalted child to stumble onto the work of a contemporary professional photographer. S/he would have to know something about that photographer, know what his or her work is about, and know how to get to it. This means that, in the case of these photographers, the child would have to know something about nudity, art and photography to want to seek them out. If s/he already knows something about these subjects, then what harm is viewing nude bodies going to have? Works Cited Foucault, Michel, History of Sexuality, Vol I An Introduction, New York Pantheon, 1978. www.bookweb.org/news/btw/905.html http//apocalypse.berkshire.net/ifas/fw/9709/terry.html http//apocalypse.berkshire.net/ifas/fw/9509/terry.html www.villagevoice.com/pride/10goldstein.shtml