Censorship is an anathema to a democracy and an evil in and of itself, albeit a necessary evil in a few rare instances.
In saying this, I am not debating what Constitutional rights to information Americans may have, this is strictly a matter of morality and the logical necessities of a democracy. I would argue that free flow of information about all subjects is necessary to a democracy, whether or not it’s in the Constitution is a moot point.
I’ll start by defining censorship as one group of adults deciding what information another group of adults may have access to, by governmental fiat.
Note that I am specifying adults. I am sympathetic to parents who don’t want their kids seeing “Cum Guzzling Butt Girls” on broadcast TV, so long as protecting the kiddies from smut doesn’t also prevent adults from enjoying it if they are so inclined (which was historically the case for many years).
Note also that I am specifying “by government fiat.” An individual or corporation may be in possession of personal and/or proprietary information (like the formula for Coca-Cola) and keep it secret, but they don’t have the power to compel all others to keep their similar information secret. That’s a government thing.
The reason censorship is so dangerous to democracy has little to do with sex, it’s that it runs counter to the democratic process by nature. After all, in a democracy it is the citizens who ultimately rule, if only by electing the ones who make the rules, based on their understanding of their rulers’ performance.
In order to understand their ruler’s performance on the issues, they have to have acess to the most accurate, unbiased information they can get, or at the very least, information that reflects a variety of biases. it’s the duty of every citizen to bring the most skeptical intelligence they can to the acts and pronoucements of our rulers (a duty that many have clearly shirked in recent years). For that reason, we have to have the best information possible.
Censorship attempts to abridge that process. And wherever the potential for censorship exists, those in power will almost instinctively seek to use it for their own political gain. We need look no farther than the present Administration. They refuse to allow the press to photograph the coffins of servicemen killed in Iraq arriving in the US. They say it is to protect the privacy of the servicemen who died and their families but of course this is arrant nonsense. An external shot of a coffin violates no one’s privacy. They use this bit of censorship because they remember well the role that the coverage of all the flag-draped coffins returning from Vietnam had on the American public in that conflict.
The Bush administration seeks to censor these images for political reasons, pure and simple. They don’t want Americans to fully understand the cost of the war in terms of human life. They fear that such understanding on the part of the American public would run counter to their interests, so they censor the information that would help lead to it.
What would-be censors of all stripes understand is that if you can control what information people have, you can control what they think, and if they can control what they think, you control them much more profoundly than you could in any other way. Elections are a mere formality when you control what people know, because on what basis can they cast a vote, other than on what they know?
Censors are therefore profoundly undemocratic, in fact, their very nature is antithetical to democracy. They are the fascists and would-be dictators on the home front who have always sought to undermine freedom of speech even as American soldiers spilled their blood to preserve it on countless battlefields. They are traitors to the core principles of democracy. Insofar as anything can be innately evil, censorship is innately evil with regard to democracy.
Censorship often crops up in relation to sexual matters because sexual matters are the opening that lets the camel get its nose in the tent. Americans typically are more willing to see sexual issues censored than any other kind of issue, largely because the American religious establishment has long advocated and supported this kind of censorship. As a result, a government that wishes to censor generally will often start out by censoring sexual matters specifically, then either expand the scope of censorship, or expand “obscenity” to include materials that non-censors would have trouble understanding as censorship.
Thus, in the early part of the 20th Century, the US government censored, not just images of naked women, but birth control information – in fact, one early feminist who deliberately violated the ban on birth control information killed herself, rather than go to jail for her “crime.” (The censor who persecuted her, one Anthony Comstock, was a certifiably evil man, who gleefully noted that he had driven 15 other people to suicide.) And thus, the Soviet Union condemned Solzhenitsyn’s work on grounds that it was obscene. And the Hayes Code of self-censorship of US films (instituted only to fend off growing calls for Congressional censorship from an “aroused” public led primarily by the Legion of Decency because of the “shocking” sexual content in films) not only censored nudity, but also scenes where bad triumphs over good and where authority figures are mocked.
More recent attempts at censorship like the Communications Decency Act failed to pass muster because they were found to be unconstitutional.
Now we face new challenges, like Section 2257 which was passed under pretext that it was needed to defeat a nonexistent child porn web presence in the US; and an FBI unit dedicated to attacking, not child porn, but consensual adult materials aimed adults (no kids or animals involved). In order to establish this program, FBI agents have been pulled from more pressing programs like protecting the US against terrorists, causing much anguish from law enforcement types who would like to pursue actual criminals.
It is an old and familiar paradigm. They hope that by starting off with attacks on sexual imagery that most people don’t care for, they can eventually attack sexual imagery generally, and finally spread to other things … all the wrong thoughts and ideas that were once covered by the Hayes Code, for instance.
In the United States, the mainstream has an unfortunate tendency to assume that censors and their supporters are acting from moral impulses, and that those who oppose censorship champion morality. I would argue that exactly the opposite is the case. Most often, censors are acting on what they think are good impulses, but are invariably evil impulses. After all, on what basis does one citizen of a democracy seek to control what other citizens can know, other than to aggrandize their power within that democracy? Whether the topic is sexual, moral, behavioral, political or philosophical, if democracy means anything, all citizens should be able to express themselves on that topic, so long as such expression doesn’t actively harm another.
So don’t ask who the target of this censorship is. It is, ultimately, you. Don’t ask what areas the censors propose to control – they propose to control everything. Most especially, they wish to establish the idea that it is all right to jail Americans for publishing the wrong sorts of thoughts, ideas and images, even when those images are created in a completely consensual way and violate no laws other than censorship laws in their creation.
Let your senators and representatives know they are treading on dangerous ground, now. Because if you don’t, eventuallyYOU will be treading on dangerous ground when you object to things they propose to censor. After all, they will ask, what business is it of yours to know these very evil things, citizen?
