Lack of consistency may be constitutional (hell if I know), but again, even if “equal justice” is only a catch phrase, I always thought it was a nice catch phrase and a worthy goal (is my liberal side showing?). There’s something disturbing in the ideas that one town may make “possession of a Playboy” a criminal offense, while another town might allow “Real Freaky Hardcore Shit”. - Just to invent a title.
Now that is a cool job. I wonder how many bits of “evidence” were copied and taken home?
I don’t think it’s all that disturbing. Miller gave the power to determine prurient interest to the jurisdictions where such standards were to be upheld. I think that what would be truly disturbing is a uniform ruling on something that is as variably viewed as pornography. What goes in San Francisco, doesn’t go in Salt Lake City, and it should be up to the states and towns to determine that.
Yeah, but the people who favor censorship invariably do not think as you do. They want what goes in Fall Church, Virginia, to be what goes in San Francisco, Calif., and if those damn Californians won’t fall in line with the people in Falls Church, they should be jailed. That’s what censorship is all aboutl.
But Miller was determining what is and what is not “speech”, and therefore what is and what is not protected by the First Amendment. There is only one Constitution, and nothing in the Constitution says or implies that the protections afforded by the Bill of Rights may vary from place to place, according to the “community standards” of those different places.
Would you be willing to apply community standards to other Constitutional protections? If you were arrested in Seattle, would you have a problem if, under Seattle’s community standards for access to an attorney, you only got to see your attorney at the start of trial and not before? What if community standards allowed for just a bit of beating a suspect in Atlanta?
I’m not saying that the national standard for obscenity should be as lenient as it is in, say, Las Vegas (though I would have no problem with that). I am saying that, whatever the standard is, it should be the same.
Anyway, I would still disagree with the existence of this squad if all they did was track down **b-girl picture (Don’t ask!) but it appears that is not even close to what they are doing. Instead, they are hunting after p[pictures of girl tied up with ropes. The girls created the page, and they sure as heck know it is consensual.
When will people learn, this isn’t about showing ceremonial deism, this is about imposing Christianity. This isn’t about protecting people from simulated rape, it’s about imposing Victorianism, etc. :mad:
NO, the new docs are supposedly about child porn, require proof of age, but setting a really ridiculous standard for doing so that has already knocked out some web sites. If the things Sujicide Girls are worried about are ropes and handcuffs, that’s a whole different element.
Well, I have no problem with the FBI enforcing the law.
Some people above are suggesting that the FBI would target legal pornography. I haven’t seen any evidence of that. The pictures that Scott Plaid mentions, for example, were not removed at the behest of the FBI. They were removed by the site operators because of apparent concern that they violated the law.
If that were to happen, then I would have a problem.
I rest comfortably every night, however, secure in the belief that our legislature is not remotely close to passing a law requiring people to bayonet babies. Indeed, the farthest they’ve gone is a law permitting people to bayonet babies in certain limited circumstances, namely when the babies in question are not yet born.
I see your point, but disagree with your examples. Speech is a constitutional protection, but the standards of application are different based on locale, like it or not. If you stand on a street corner and scream hatred for Muslims in Denver, and you do the same in Dearborn, it will net you different results, even though the concept of so-called “free speech” is universally accepted.
Another nitpick with your example is that when someone is arrested and taken into custody, the criminal act that brought them to that state in the first place has already been committed. We’re talking about the creation of a new crime, essentially, rather than changing the community standards on the enfocement of an old one. Not to mention the fact that it’s more simple to define; a person arrested in Seattle is going to want access to an attorney, just like the person in Atlanta, and access would be what a ‘reasonable man’ would expect, but you can’t expect to apply the tenets of ‘reason’ to something that no two people can truly agree on.
I’m sorry sir, the abortion threads are two doors down and to the right.
My point is that a simple statement that you see nothing wrong with law enforcement really just means you see nothing wrong with the law as written. Not everyone shares your sunny outlook.
You would know porn if you saw it. OK, pic of naked woman tied up in rope. Porn?