OK To END CENSORSHIP TO END RAPE ?

OK.
I thought my answer was evident,
but I 'll be more explicit, if u like:
" OmSig, would you be willing to be punched repeatedly in the face
and be "well-compensated" in order to prevent someone else from being stabbed? "
My answer is NO, as to both myself and my hypothetical kid.
1 ) I am sufficiently well off that I do not need financial compensation.
2 ) I am and have always been a very selfish person; this is my chosen philosophy.
In my mind, in my values,
I exalt my own well being and comfort over that of my fellow beings.

To my mind,
getting hit to prevent someone else from getting stabbed,
is antithetical, except for my loved ones,
or anyone else whom I choose to elevate to that position.

( I 'd rather put a gun into the stabbing victim 's hand.)


David

Yeah, I'msickDavid wants now to claim that he has not suggested that providing kiddie porn would end rape, and that he is just offering a subject for discussion--but his poll gives the lie to his dissembling. Past experience of this joker also suggests to me that once he gets a hold of an idea, he thinks he knows exactly how things are, and invites you to agree of be damned.

I'msickDavid believes in the first amendment protection of free speech only to the extent that you are free to agree with him or keep your mouth shut.

BFGPP continues to resort to name calling and nitwitspeak instead of attempting to address the points.

I don't like this thread either, but neither do I like BFGPP.

Yes, the poll.... a wee bit biased, I agree. That's why I didn't bother to vote in it.

But I do think it is interesting to think about how far I would personally go if I had the power to end something horrendous. I could sacrifice myself but I could never sacrifice my child.

What I found out about OmSigDAVID
My first impression of OmSigDAVID was that he was a sick voyeur and pedophile. That may not be the case. I was curious and wanted to see what I could learn about him.

The following is what I found about OmSigDAVID from the public record on Google and from public forum sites where he posts. I started here:

Edit (Moderator): Link removed by moderator

Just out of curiousity, Alison,
r U aware of studies that U
deem competent, which claim
that children cannot distinguish
between fiction, fantasy, n
ordinary daily reality?

Edit (Moderator): Name removed by moderator

Edit (Moderator): Name removed by moderator <omsigdavid@...>
omsigdavid@...

OmSigDAVID A2K profile:
Member Description:

Opulent Mensan Special Interest GroupDAVID:
A retired trial attorney
and constitutional lawyer

A supporter of the US Constitution,
particularly its first 1O amendments,
in its genuine, Original Intendment.

A supporter of all the amendments
(with some doubts about the 16th & 18th)

A lover of PERSONAL FREEDOM,
which is the heart of Americanism
(knowing that freedom consists of limits
on the power of government)

A supporter of rugged INDIVIDUALISM
and of citizens' freedom of self defense
from the violence of criminals or animals

A supporter of the logic & efficiency of
fonetic spelling

A supporter of inquiry into whether
conscious life is finite or perpetual

A supporter of the advance of science;
fascinated by Vertebrate Paleontology, Astrophysics,
Cosmology and the reconciliation of Quantum Mechanics
with Einstein 's Relativity found in Membrane Theory
in 11 dimensions

LOVE the Space Program; the Earth was Man 's cradle.
It shud not be his grave.

A collector of guns and gold

Founder of my local Mensa Fine Dining SIG,
the Opulent Mensan Special Interest Group,
whose goal is to have as much FUN as possible

" Reality is merely an illusion,
albeit a very persistent one." Albert Einstein

One of OmSigDAVID sites:
Edit (Moderator): Link removed by moderator

He posts on several forums.

Found these on his Yahoo mail site:

Edit (Moderator): Link removed by moderator

Legal information: Edit (Moderator): Name removed by moderator

Edit (Moderator): Link removed by moderator

BBB
Now he's started another site, same topic, but cleaned up poll:

http://www.able2know.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=119532

Hey, Tinkerbell, you great braying jackass--if you had actually read the thread, you'd know that i have specifically addressed what pass for "points" on the part of I'msickDavid.

Read your own posts above Peter (eater) Pan.

Setanta


Who is this addressed to?

BBB

As i said, Tinkerbell, i addressed the "points" I'msickDavid claimed to be making. I'm not surprised, though, that you missed that. All the evidence i've seen at this site suggests that you're not very goddamned bright.

All the evidence I see leads me to intentionally avoid reading your gibberish.

You must be a liar then, because you have been commenting on what i have posted, so you must have been reading my posts. Liar.

Fat boy.

cj


You better be careful about assigning "Fat Boy" to Setanta. Fat Boy was the name of an atomic bomb.

BOOM!

BBB

I think, in this case, it is more like "atomic butt".

Oh good grief!

Perhaps this is an appropriate end to a qestionable, troubling thread.

Re: BBB

This posted thread is about ENDING RAPE
(or reducing the incidence thereof anyway), by ending censorship
of sexual materials so that, in some cases, destructive sexual energies
will be directed into non-living photographic objects INSTEAD OF INTO LIVING HUMAN BEINGS.

Therefore,
in answer to your question to me,
I think u shoud feel that it woud have been better
if those two rapists had gotten their rocks off (as u so poeticly put it)
by devoting their attention into paper pornography INSTEAD OF INTO YOU
and just left u alone.

Call me unreasonable.


David

Re: OmSigDAVID

My posted thread is about ending (or reducing the frequency) of rape,
by adjusting the laws on censorship
to deflect some of the negative sexual energies
away from living human beings and into non-living paper images.

The way u wrote your post,
it sounds as if I had said that rape is OK; I said no such thing,
nor did I imply it, nor have I ever believed it.


The question presented for consideration in this thread
is whether the censorship of sexual materials has caused MORE RAPES,
by preventing the harmless catharsis
of dangerous sexual urges to be absorbed into ART instead of into HUMAN BEINGS.

In other words:
have censors promoted and proliferated RAPE ?


(Incidentally, someone raised the concept of nude photographic models being abused on the job;
I did not suggest that any model actually engage in REAL sexual activity.)

The Supreme Court's Recent Child Pornography Decision
The Supreme Court's Recent Child Pornography Decision, and the Problem with Narrowly Construing Statutes with First Amendment Implications:
Part One in a Two-Part Series
By JULIE HILDEN
Find Law
Monday, Jun. 9, 2008

Last month, in United States v. Williams, the Supreme Court decided, 7-2, to uphold a federal statute criminalizing the offering or seeking (or, in the statute's language, the "pandering" or "solicitation") of child pornography.

In this column, Part One in a two-part series on the Williams decision, I will take issue with the majority's and concurrence's approach here: resolving the constitutional problems with the statute by simply interpreting the statute as if it did not raise them.

I'll explain the generally valid reasoning behind the Court's use of this interpretive approach, yet also contend that it is an approach that should rarely, if ever, be used in First Amendment and criminal cases like this one.

Why Construing a Statute Narrowly to Avoid Constitutional Issues Often May Make Sense

To begin, it is well-established that the Supreme Court may - and indeed, according to Court precedent, should whenever possible -- construe a federal statute narrowly, in order to avoid constitutional issues. The theory behind this precept is that, for separation-of-powers reasons, the Court should not reach out to strike down a statute that Congress has passed and the President has signed, unless doing so is absolutely necessary.

Thus, if there are two plausible interpretations of a statute - one constitutional, the other not - the Court may choose the constitutional one. It may do so in order to avoid an unnecessary clash with Congress and the President, and, relatedly, in order to honor the assumption that Congresspersons and the President intend to honor, not betray, the oath they take to uphold the Constitution.

Choosing what it believed to be the constitutional interpretation of a statute is precisely what the Court majority did in Williams. Having already struck down a prior, related law in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, the Court now decided to narrowly interpret the current law, rather than striking this one down, too - perhaps feeling that it was time for its back-and-forth with Congress on the child pornography issue to come to an end.

Such a decision has the advantage of showing that the Court is trying to work with a coordinate branch of government, rather than clash with it. But it also has the disadvantage, in First Amendment cases like this one, of allowing Congress to be sloppy where free speech is concerned, and leave the Court to clean up the mess it has made.

In this Case, the Court Essentially Drafted the Statute's State-of-Mind Requirement -- a Job Congress Should Have Done

In this case, the sloppiness had to do with the statute's state-of-mind requirement. The statute stated that a perpetrator had to act "knowingly," but was unclear as to exactly what the person offering or seeking the images at issue had to know, in order for his or her conduct to be criminal. Indeed, the statute was so unclear that both the majority and the concurrence felt the need to offer substantial clarification regarding the statute's state-of-mind requirement.

First, writing for the majority, Justice Scalia construed the statute to mean that "[a] crime is committed only when the speaker believes or intends the listener to believe that the subject of the proposed transaction depicts real children." (Emphasis added).

Justice Scalia's interpretation, by looking to beliefs and not reality, renders it beside the point whether real children really are depicted in the images at issue - or whether the images are computer-generated (making the pornography "virtual").

Moreover, Justice Scalia's interpretation - by using the word "or" -- ensures that the statute sweeps in even those who knowingly purvey virtual child pornography as real -- just as, ironically, law enforcement personnel might do to capture child-pornography seekers.

Thus, while this interpretation clarified the statute by making its prohibition more specific, it hardly narrowed it or placed it upon more solid constitutional ground. No wonder, then, that Justice Scalia's aggressive interpretation of the statute triggered a dissent from Justices Souter and Ginsburg (which I will discuss in detail in Part Two of this series of columns).

In particular, the dissent took strong issue with the possibility that - under Justice Scalia's interpretation of the statute -- a person can be prosecuted even if he is, in fact, offering material that is virtual, not real, child pornography.

Second, in concurrence, Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer made clear that they would narrow Congress's statute even further - though not on the virtual child pornography point. Concerns had been raised that, for instance, hapless grandparents offering baby photos because they were cute, but using unfortunate language such as "hubba hubba" to describe the photos, would be caught in the statute's snare. In response, Stevens wrote that "t is abundantly clear from the provision's legislative history that Congress' aim was to target materials advertised, promoted, presented, distributed, or solicited with a lascivious purpose--that is, with the intention of inciting sexual arousal."

In other words, Stevens and Breyer effectively read into the statute a "lascivious purpose" requirement that was previously absent. Unlike Scalia's choice of "or" rather than "and," this was a reasonable, narrower, and clearly correct interpretation of the statute - one that was grounded in legislative history, and one with which the dissenters did not quarrel. Still, the number of glosses the Court had to make here raises the question of whether Congress should have done some of this drafting work itself, before the statute became law.

Why the Court's Narrowly Construing the Statute at Issue Here Is Troubling

By punting on the state-of-mind requirement with respect to the important "and"/"or" question, and punting on the question whether the pornography as issue needed to involve actual children, Congress was able to pass a vague statute and allow the Court to fill in the blanks necessary to make that statute constitutional. But the conservative Roberts Court also did more: It ensured that - courtesy of Justice Scalia - the statute would be construed to be as prosecutorially-aggressive and anti-free-speech as possible, without crossing what the Court's conservative majority saw as being the constitutional lines.

Suddenly, then, it seems that a doctrine requiring the Court to defer to Congress whenever it can, is being used to allow Congress to defer to the Court whenever it is convenient. Moreover, a doctrine that was meant to allow the Court to shrink statutes to fit them within constitutional bounds, is now being used to bloat the statutes until they reach constitutionally-suspect applications.

What might Congress have done had the Court not provided such copious drafting assistance here, but rather truly construed the statute narrowly - by using the "and" and not the "or", and by eliminating the statute's application to fraudsters who try to pawn off virtual child pornography as real?

Granted, Congress might well still have tried to reach the pandering and solicitation of virtual child pornography. However, by doing so overtly, in so many words, it might have raised a plainer and clearer First Amendment question - one the Court could not marginalize or evade. The conflict with the Court's earlier ruling that virtual child pornography is First Amendment-protected speech would also have been crystal-clear on the face of the statute.

And granted, Congress might still have gone after those who pass off virtual child pornography as real. However, it might (and, in my view, it should) also have done so with milder penalties than those reserved for persons who knowingly pass along genuine child pornography, and on a different and clarified theory.

After all, knowingly passing off virtual child pornography as real is a very strange crime. It is fraud, but the victim of the fraud, who is seeking real child pornography, is completely unsympathetic and, indeed, far worse than the fraudster. Moreover, the fraudster is arguably supplanting a transaction that really would have involved images of actual children, and diminishing the market for the completely reprehensible and profoundly harmful creation of actual child pornography.

Special Considerations Here Make the Court's Interpretation Especially Problematic

Granted, the legislating-from-the-bench point could be made with respect to any narrowing construction of any statute, but I believe it is especially trenchant here - for several reasons.

First, this is a criminal case, where prior notice of what a statute means is especially important -- as the Constitution reflects when it forbids crimes to be created retrospectively.

Second, this is a free speech case where, again, notice is key - as Supreme Court cases reflect when they take into account that laws can chill speech in the interim before their constitutionality is clarified. When a law affects speech and reads like the dog's dinner, there's an argument for the Court's punishing Congress by invalidating the law, not helping it cook a more palatable dish.

Third, whereas narrowing constructions tend to diminish a statute's scope in order to make it solidly constitutional, this interpretation of the state instead was the most aggressive the Court could have chosen.

Fourth, and finally, monkeying with state-of-mind requirements as the Court did -- so that as many states of mind as possible qualify for punishment -- comes perilously close to crafting the kind of "thought crimes" the First Amendment abhors, as increasingly less blameworthy states of mind (such as that of the fraudster, as compared to the true child porn purveyor) are seen as meriting the same harsh penalty.

In Part Two of this series, I will discuss the key question that divided the majority and the dissent in this case: Given that the Court has already held that virtual child pornography - that is, pornography containing computer-generated images, and not images of real children - is protected by the First Amendment, can it constitutionally be a crime to offer child pornography that is touted as real, but is actually virtual (including when the seller knows the truth)?