You are not allowed to read or possess obscene material in the U.S.
You might want to let Allen Ginsburg and others in on that ‘pure text is never obscene’ idea.
I think most of the responses about child pornography are incorrect. The crux of the issue is still not whether the material concerns actual persons.
There is a three part test to determine if material is obscene and therefore malum prohibitum (bad because it is against the law):
Whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
Whether the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions;
Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
That’s why my Grove Press edition of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom is not obscene, even though it undoubtably contains child pornography.
There is no prohibition on possessing obscene material in the United States. Under Stanley v. Georgia, 394 U.S. 557 (1969) all state laws criminalizing possession of obscene material were struck as in violation of the First Amendment via the 14th Amendment.
Child pornography’s illegality (for possession) is not dependent on whether or not it is determined to be obscene. I was wrong on the pure text never being ruled obscene - while it rarely is, it can be. But you need to stop confusing child pornography and obscenity.
Your de Sade is not considered obscene because of the test you quoted. It is not considered prohibited child pornography because it is text rather than pictures. I believe, though I am not certain as I don’t have the law in front of me, to be considered prohibited child pornography there must be an actual photographic portrayal of an actual underage person.
Well yes - if you had permission to visit Cuba, you could bring a limited amount in. You couldn’t bring them in from other countries. It’s a very small loophole that was closed.
Nonsense. It is not illegal for a U.S. citizen to smoke a cuban cigar except where smoking in and of itself is outlawed (for example in a restaurant in a state where smoking in restaurants in banned). The language in your citations is very clear: it’s the importation of the cuban cigar that is illegal, and not possession nor the cigar itself. And if you are in a foriegn country where it is legal to import/possess Cuban cigars, any U.S. law regarding those cigars is not applicable in any way, shape or form as long as you are not on U.S. property like a military base or diplomatic mission.
Further technicalities abound … if you buy a Cuban product in Mexico and bring it into the U.S., technically you are not bringing in a product from Cuba, you are bringing in a product from Mexico.
Please don’t try this. Cuban goods don’t become Mexican goods any more than my paying US sales tax for Chinese goods in the US makes them American. At best you’ll get a laugh out of Customs as they confiscate your stuff.
Yeah; my point was that information could be considered to be a stolen object, so even if the actual piece of paper you’re looking at wasn’t stolen, if a copy of stolen document is printed on that paper, you could (possibly) be in possession of stolen property.
I was also just thinking about material that might not be stolen property but was illegally gotten – say a peeping tom photograph from a hidden camera in a dressing room or something (let’s assume the victim is an adult). Now, whoever took the picture is surely civilly liabile to the victim, and I imagine a decent DA could find a statue to charge the creep with criminally. I don’t know what the legal status of the picture would be – it’s hard too see it as stolen property, but it wasn’t legally obtained. So a more knowledgable legal mind would have to weigh in on the possible crimes of knowingly possessing such pictures.
There’s an awful lot of self-congratulation here from Americans who seem to think every other country in the world is oppressed by censorship.
For the purposes of comparison, here’s a complete list of every book I haven’t been able to read and every film I haven’t been able to see because I live outside the USA:
I didn’t say there was no censorship outside the US, obviously there is plenty. My point is that there are also plenty of places where there there is also little or no censorship. It’s not like the US is the only place in the world that has effective freedom of speech.
Outside of dictatorships of various sorts, everywhere has effectively the same level of freedom of speech as the US. Note: I’m saying “effectively” - which means that there might be censorship laws still on the books in some places, but that they are not enforced in practice.
When I was in Denmark about four decades ago, they lived at a level of freedom that was at least as high as where we are now. They didn’t seem to be as hung up on things like nude beaches or nudity in general. But they also weren’t as obsessed with it.
They weren’t so free to drive while intoxicated without much penalty though.
Wasn’t it “Here In Wisconsin” that a progressive magazine published plans to build a Hydrogen Bomb? And the feds fought and threatened them for six months because it contained classified information? And they finally published it, based on the 1st Amendment?
“The H-bomb Secret: How we got it and why we’re telling it”…
“In 1978, Morland had decided that discovering and exposing this “last remaining secret” would focus attention onto the arms race and allow citizens to feel empowered to question official statements on the importance of nuclear weapons and nuclear secrecy.”
Nobody else is claiming this, so I don’t know why you are.
This is simply wrong in the case of, for example, works that deny the Holocaust in Germany and other European nations: You cannot claim Germany is a dictatorship, and you cannot claim they are not banned.
Is this a sincere or rhetorical question? Could be either.
Mr. Excellent said:
Definitely reads as “USA best, nobody else this free.”
FNAWright said:
It’s a description that has made it into the popular lexicon. I’m pretty sure the idea is that virgins’ thighs are expected to be smooth, and they’re much sexier to think about than rolling on, for example, babies’ butts (also known for being smooth).