Banning Pornography

Oh, the dreary calls of Weakmen for "government" to ban the things with which they do not agree.

I just engaged in an exchange with some online acquaintances, people who claim to be pro-liberty.  How ironic that in the face of their self-proclaimed love of liberty, they were calling for pornography to be banned, citing very valid concerns such as moral decay, the exposure of children to such materials, and so on.  What they appear to have missed is the fact that those concerns are only peripherally related to pornography itself, and are more symptoms of a deeper malady.

One of my buddies stated in a very authoritative tone that pornography must be addressed, thereafter citing all the moral decay and the attendant woes that have followed, all very well taken as such.  But nowhere did he state the specifics of how it is to be addressed, to which I responded as follows.

"What, precisely, do you mean by "addressed"?  The operating definition of the term in this case is central in predicating your argument.

I am not standing with anyone promoting the degeneracy of children.  Your inference, presumably drawn from my objection to banning pornography, due to an utter absence of innate criminality of the act, per sé, is drawn incorrectly.  

I have no problem with keeping such things from children, just as I have none with disallowing them from possessing, consuming, or dealing illicit drugs.

I've considered pornography carefully.  Most of it is just stupid.  Some is disgusting, and some is indeed perfectly healthy.  For example, I find choking and slapping of women in their faces very objectionable, as I do any portrayal of violence in sex.  My disgust, however, in no way justifies a ban so long as all the participants in a given example are engaging consensually.  

Do recall what I have been saying for at least 40 years: freedom is at least as much scary and sucky, as it is exhilarating.  Freedom is not easy.  It is mostly difficult and at times terribly so.  One is called upon to tolerate things he wishes he could remove from reality.  But he tolerates it because it is the right thing to do.  The other side of that coin, of course, is that others are not free to impose their preferences upon their fellows.  If someone whips out their dick and his boyfriend starts slurping away on it over on fifth avenue just above 34th street and they parade it all before your young children, were I on your jury I would not convict you for having beaten the snot out of them both with an iron bar.

All that said, a free people must perforce be a moral people, for the one cannot be had without the other.  The availability of pornography is not objectively immoral.  PUSHING it actively and with great force upon the children whose parents object to it being imposed in that way, however, is.  Not only is it, it is demonstrably criminal, as it violates valid parental authority with respect to their offspring, as well as those who have been placed in their care, whether temporary or otherwise.

Banning is not the answer.  Holding accountable those who unlawfully engage in an otherwise lawful activity, is.  Sex is not a crime, but rape is.  One presumably doesn't charge me with a crime for poinking my girlfriend.  But if I go into the street and rape a woman in a dark alley at 2AM...  My point is made.

I am the first to acknowledge the problems that have been raised here.  Solving them is not accomplished with bans of non-criminal acts, which is the tyrant's way of approaching the deeper problems.  Every megalomaniacal twerp of the twentieth century approached their cultural/societal problems that way, and look what it brought us.  We Americans have done the same on the one hand, and have done absolutely nothing, on the other.  It seems that each extreme yields the same result, more or less.

Do notice how the calls for banning represents abdication and disavowal of all individual responsibility.  Rather than being accountable for one's own actions, including the ways in which he deals with his children, the mean individual looks to someone else to clean the mess that HE helped come to bloom, whether through active support or by his shameful and morally corrupt indolence.

I see people crying for freedom from the one side of their mouths, while simultaneously shrieking their demands for bans of this, that, or the other by "government", from the other.  One cannot have it both ways.

We either act like Freemen, or we act like Weakmen.  Thus far, only a pathetic few of us are as the former, all big talk to the contrary notwithstanding.

Time is here.  Shit or get off the pot.  Be a Freeman, or choose Weakman status.  You cannot be both.  You cannot have a degree of freedom, but only of servitude - "pretty slavery" as I like to call it.  Choice is yours, every minute of every day, regardless of circumstance."

Thus had gone the exchange.

Tolerating the rightful prerogatives of one's fellows, regardless of whether those choices chafe, is part and parcel of living as free people.  If you cannot accept this, you are not in fact a lover of freedom, but an advocate for Pretty Slavery - the gilt cage, wherein you get what you think you want without having to bear the burdens of liberty, which are many and often rather heavy.

So before professing a love of freedom, you may serve yourself well by gaining a more complete and circumspect understanding of what it is.

Until next time, please accept my best wishes.