IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES :

The ugly American, Supreme Court-style (Maggie Gallagher, April 24, 2002, TownHall.com)

This latest court decision is part of the increasingly hard-to-digest fiction that pornographic images are speech. It is also a direct affirmation of the increasingly naked proposition driving our society: that the sexual interests of adults are more important than children and their needs. Such an utter reversal of moral priorities ought to (and in most places does) provoke disgust on the part of decent adults.

But it is also the logical result of a set of particularly destructive abstractions adopted by the court (and elite opinion) over the last generation. Pornography is not intended to express any idea. It is intended to short-circuit thought by provoking sexual desire. How do people move from lust to action? In the case of pedophiles, it helps to have a community of affirmation available, which pornographers are happy to supply in exchange for money. According to the FBI, a third of consumers of child pornography recently arrested in its Candyman sweep admitted to molesting children.

The obligatory fig leaf of art, used to cover up the ugliness of our single-minded obsession with adult sexual expression under any and all circumstances, is getting thinner and thinner. But still the Supreme Court trotted out the tired old convention that only the Supremes stand between Great Art and the philistine yahoos intent on chilling speech: "The statute proscribes the visual depiction of an idea, that of teenagers engaging in sexual activity, that is a fact of modern society and has been a theme in art and literature throughout the ages. Both themes--teenage sexual activity and the sexual abuse of children--have inspired countless literary works. William Shakespeare created the most famous pair of teenage lovers, one of whom is just 13 years of age."

My question is : how can those who form this community of affirmation then turn around and feign indignation when people act on these ideas? Don't those who think it is vital to the future of the Republic to allow access to child pornography have to bear some share of the moral responsibility for giving a cultural imprimatur to such a pathology? Posted by Orrin Judd at April 24, 2002 8:40 AM