“Extreme”ly Unjust
In the United States, when the words “pornography” and jail are used in the same sentence, most people assume that the imprisoned individual was trafficking in child pornography. This assumption of course is flawed, as our draconian anti-Obscenity laws have landed many people in legal hot water of late, most notably Paul Little (aka Max Hardcore) and Loren Jay Adams. They represent the tiny class of pornography producers and distributors who have received prison sentences for producing material featuring consenting adults engaging in atypical but not illegal sexual activity. That there are any such individuals languishing in our prisons should inspire immense outrage from any liberty-loving individual. But it seems that even our hard line against legitimate erotic material is surpassed by the United Kingdom. Though historically they have created a number of broad and oppressive censorship laws like the Obscene Publications Act and the Video Recording Act, the multi-faceted 2008 Criminal Justice Act that went into effect on January 26 represents a more significant blow against free speech and pornography than any previous effort.
Sections 62 through 67 of the 2008 Criminal Justice Act makes it a punishable offense, for which one may receive three years in prison, to possess pornography that meets the outlined definition of extreme. Legally, pornography is regard as extreme if any action depicted therein “[can] threaten a person’s life, results, or is likely to result, in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals, involves sexual interference with a human corpse, or sex with an animal (dead or alive).” As such niche fetish material constitutes only a small percentage of all available pornography, many people are unconcerned, suggesting that most individuals will be unimpacted by this change in law. It turns out however that as many as 9.5 million UK residents could be guilty of violating this law, or so claims Backlash (the chief opponent of this law). Consider for a moment what that means. 9.5 million adults could be jailed for three years for owning a single image or video clip of material that is legal to perform but is regarded as excessively kinky by the sexually repressed members of government and law enforcement who wrote and will subsequently enforce this policy. Even if you have zero regard for the critical value in protecting freedom of speech and freedom of choice, and even if you see nothing wrong with conducting a witch hunt against people with different sexual preferences, one need look no further than the cost that this might have on British society to see why this law is so flawed. As of 2004, the cost of incarceration was £38,000 (54,344 USD) per prisoner per year. So, even if no new facilities were built to house them (impossible as that would be given the huge influx of new inmates), ignoring the lost tax revenue and the consequences of depleting the working population, this law has the potential to cost £1,083,000,000,000 (1,548,711,367,474 USD) if all those eligible are convicted and sentenced. Suffice to say the prospect of spending more than a trillion GBP to imprison otherwise law abiding citizens for their choice in pornography (created by and with consenting adults) is absurd.
Given the lunacy of this law, many people wonder why it is that it was passed in the first place. Simply put, certain sex hating Members of Parliament want to stop the flow of pornography, and as here in the US, realize that this is best done by attacking the fringe before going after mainstream material. With strict censorship laws on the books, such material was already illegal to produce in the UK. But in the age of the internet, there exists an ample online supply of such material courtesy of Brazil, Japan, the United States, and a great multitude of European nations. Nationally mandated ISP filtering would of course be ineffective, both because any filter list is always incomplete, and because of technological loopholes such as dark nets or FTPS transfer. Nor would it punish those who already had the material on their computer or other physical media. So instead they opted to pass a broad and oppressive law that potentially endangers the liberty of millions, hoping that because the average person is not directly impacted by this policy, they will remain silent. Doing so though would constitute a great mistake, for as Niemöller famously remarked “…they came for me . . . And by that time there was no one left to speak up.” That is to say, if we do not stand up for others when their rights are being trampled upon without due cause, we cede ground to those who will later seek to deprive us of the liberties which we personally care about. So, regardless of what one may think of the sexual preferences of those under attack by this law, we must all be vocal in our objection to it, and more importantly, to the multitude of less extreme but still alarming anti-pornography and anti-sex positions taken by our own national, state, and local governments.
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