Could the Court’s child porn ruling affect legitimate (and mainstream) art?
Let’s start this topic by stating the obvious right at the outset: Nobody is in favor of child pornography. OK? Repeat after me: Nobody thinks child pornographers should get any legal protection.
Here’s another comment that I hope is obvious: All art cannot be about puppy dogs and cotton candy. Some art — legitimate and mainstream art — will and should be about difficult topics, hard topics. Even painful topics.
So, from there, here’s my question:
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a child porn case, upholding a law that “sets a five-year mandatory prison term for promoting, or pandering, child pornography. It does not require that someone actually possesses child pornography.”
Opponents of this law, according to the Associated Press story:
Opponents have said the law could apply to movies like “Traffic” or “Titanic” that depict adolescent sex or the marketing of other material that may not be pornography.
(Justice Antonin) Scalia, in his opinion for the court, said the law takes a reasonable approach to the issue by applying it to situations where the purveyor of the material believes or wants a listener to believe that he has actual child pornography.
So, do you think Scalia is right? Suppose a movie included a plot line in which a villain was a purveyor of child pornography? Suppose a movie included scenes (or suggested scenes) of under-aged sex (or rape)? These are difficult topics, but they are timely and topical and may be worthy subjects for legitimate, mainstream art. Would they be verboten under the law?
Kurt is the director of social media for the Post-Dispatch, where he has worked since August 2002. He's been a journalist since 1982, covering municipal government, courts, education and two hurricanes as a reporter before becoming an editor. 
If we allow situations of ‘child porn’ as art, then every child porn distributor just calls himself a movie producer or an ‘artist’ and gets away with this. To me, the real question is the definition of ‘child pornography’. The common definition of ‘any sexually explicit depiction of a minor’ certainly seems open for subjectivity.
The courts seem to have struggled with issues such as animated child nudity, child partial nudity, sexual behaviour by minors without nudity, non-minors acting as minors, minors lieing about their age to act sexually, sexual entrapment by minors or those posing as minors. It sure seems difficult to make something illegal when our country allows parents to scantily clothe their children and even allow them to attend nude beaches where cameras must abound. Our society does not even have a clear definition and enforcement of our current obscenity laws related to adults, much less pertaining to children.
To me, this is one of those times (like at the airport now) that we give up some of our past freedoms for the better good of our society. Are we really going to miss out because we didn’t get to see a bunch of artistic expression involving the innocence of our children? Let all the wacko’s that want to find this stuff go to other countries that really don’t care about the well-being of their society already. It sounds selfish, but at least we will protect some of this world’s children and keep some of these vermen out of our neighborhoods.
The post by Al is the most intelligent comment I have ever read on any PD forum.
Just a question. Would that famous Coppertone ad (showing a kid’s bottom when the dog pulls down the kid’s swimsuit) now be subject to this law? As Al says, the real issue is what exactly constitutes pornography. I mean, we all would agree that certain photos or films of an underage child engaging in some sex act would be porn. But child nudity gets into a really grey area. Some folks could look at a picture of a naked kid and see an expression of freedom and innocence. Somebody else could see the same photo and think it’s sexually charged. I don’t really know what to think of this ruling until I would see how it is applied to actual cases.
I think it’s a good law.
As to whether or not the Coppertone ad, or similar photos of kids/babies are deemed to be pornographic is not my concern. While I don’t think that Coppertone ad is pornographic, I think since we now live in an age where an overabundance of pornography and ’sex sells’ has produced these deranged pedophiles, and it’s a price we must be willing to pay in order to try and protect kids.
I don’t think companies that deal in child-oriented products should have any problems producing quality ads for their products that don’t include nudity or partial nudity. Of course the ACLU will probably try to fight this law and claim that it hurts business and the arts, while totally overlooking how kids are being abused for the sake of some sick people’s cheap thrills.
God help us.
I am grateful for everyone’s participation here…but I want to make sure we don’t lose site of the topic. We’re not debating whether child porn is good or bad. It’s bad. Period. The question is about, for example, whether a movie about the pursuit of a child pornographer could (or should) fall victim to this law.
We need to tread lightly here. Lawmakers are setting themselves up to deal with questions and issues that will barrage our legal dockets with arbitrary and nebulous causes that cannot be argued. I work with both molesters and their victims, and honestly I feel that the relationship between “pornography”, “fantasy” and “offending” is unclear. But some studies would indicate that on an average 60% of individuals who VIEWED child pornography and 75% of those ARRESTED on charges relating to child pornography had actually molested a child. This is a stumper, and it will be interesting to see how it develops.
The wording of the law does seem overly broad, and open to interpretation – which means that the law could be twisted to apply to many things. But the Supreme Court has decided that most of the scenario’s you can think of are “fanciful” - they claim that no prosecutor is going to go after you for having a picture of the Coppertone kid (to use Pat C’s example). I do worry a bit about literature; what about the book “Lolita”? How about the book “The Godfather”? Both depict what some would consider child porn. In truth, I (like the Supreme Court) can’t see a prosecutor going after you for having these books. But I can see a prosecutor who wants to go after you (for whatever reason) using this as an excuse to charge you and hold you. Kind of like going after Al Capone for racketeering, but all they could pin on him was tax evasion. Overly broad and open to interpretation are blank check for a creative prosecutor.
I also believe this law could be used by a prosecutor from an ultra conservative district to ban movies they found objectionable. Two recent movies come to mind, “Hound Dog” and “Towel Head”. Since this is a Federal law, once it goes to court, it’s off limits for everyone. The country’s threshold of tolerance will be set by the least tolerant among us.
Still, the law has been upheld, so it’s the law of the land. Of course, this won’t be used against anyone unless you have done some really evil things – or have made an enemy in the government, or offended the most easily offended.
The law opens up more questions than answers. It seem that the movie industry would be out of business tomorrow if they only made movies about real life. People are always going to go see movies that exploit sex, murder, war. I can’t stand any of it. When I was young, I left a drive in movie that was showing Billy Jack, because a woman was raped in the movie. Hollywood drives this machine of vulgar useless crap. People go watch it. It would seem to me that again the Supreme Court has proposed a law that will only ensure their jobs for many future years. When it comes to children, there should be no questions. It should be against the law to expose children to the public and the penalty should be extreme. That would be too simple to do it that way. As long as there are people on this earth, there are going to be sick one’s. We need as much protection from them as we can get. There should be no fuel for a perverts fire. If the movie industry can’t make a movie that will be successful without using children in any other way than they were used on Little House On The Prairie, don’t make it at all.
The problem with this situation is intent. The suggestion of a movie based around a child pornographer or child rape probably has the artistic intent of dealing with a real situation and highlighting the issue on film. Its intent probably wouldn’t be to titilate perverts. However, a pornographic movie using an 18 year old to portray a 15 year old would be classified as intent to cause arrousal from the depiction of under age sex. We need laws that prevent the over sexualization of our youth. In that case I’d have no problem prosecutin the latter. But we can’t forgo the real ability to deal with situations that actually exist. So, no, I wouldn’t include the former as child porn. But again, the tricky nature is intent.
Your last question posed is hard to answer since our laws are arbitrary in this country and not enforced equally. Porn is in the eyes of the beholder, as we know. As long as priests are loose whom we know molested children, we know children are not safe, and laws not truly enforced. This smacks of playing to the crowd and solving easier problems than our sad economy and increasingly lower world respect factor due to jackboot foreign policy. Most folks dangerous to children are in their own homes, have fathered them, or are already in contact with them in some “legit” way. Feminists have been fighting porn that has harmful intent for decades, but got shouted down and physically put in their place in one way or other.
Is there a law that could answer why the pornsters rake in millions? Banning child porn isn’t the problem, the problem is folks who breed are breeding emotionally sick people and raising them to need this crap. We have millions of men in their twenties who already feel they need viagra to get it up enough. Question that. How much casual humping is enough?
The child pornsters live next door to you. There are not thousands of porn sites raking in millions each year because of the “other guys”…it’s YOUR guys(and fewer gals) who feel their lives are bare without someone else submitting to their fantasies. Behaviors go deeper than any law can reach. Do we have enough jail cells for those caught in this web of silliness? Would you rather have a violent person set free to make room for a picture looker? Where do we put them when they are caught? And do we have reciprocal agreements to bring them to trial? Most biggie producers are in foreign countries. Countries that feed america’s captivation with child porn. It’s our upstanding citizens who buy it. Not some sand covered boogeymen that George favors blaming for all problems we have. Good luck with that law thing!