"For the Childrenz!" Porn Law Strikes Out

SCOTUS declines to revisit favorite porn law of the culture vultures, the Child Online Protection Act, which then-President Bill Clinton signed into law in 1998 but never took effect due to ongoing legal challenges.

[T]he law would have made it illegal for the operator of a commercial Web site to make sexually explicit material deemed harmful to minors available to those under 17. Violators would have faced fines of up to $50,000 per offense and six months in jail. A site that carried such material but gated it off from children through credit cards or other age-verifying measures would have had a defense under the statute.

Backers of the law contended that it was aimed primarily at "teaser" ads, or free samples offered by Web pornography sites. But opponents of the law complained that it was too broad and could have covered non-pornographic sexual material, like those dealing with gynecological issues.

There's no "could have" about it, really. Censorship of "pornographic" images has been a recurring problem for me, as many of the images I need hosted to talk about feminist issues (like disembodied women's parts as novelty items) are censored on the basis of being "pornographic."

Years ago, there was legitimate concern that even marginally sexualized imagery of same-sex couples would be censored, too, limiting the freedoms of same-sex dating sites who wanted, like their hetero counterparts, to be able to show images of couples canoodling.

Just a total coincidence, of course, that a law designed to "protect the children" from pornographers necessarily impinged on the freedom of expression of feminists/queers engaged merely in the promotion of their radical ideas about equality. What are the odds?!

I quite genuinely sympathize with parents' struggles to shelter their children from online pornography, which is infuriatingly ubiquitous even in spaces one wouldn't necessarily expect, but this law was never the right way to do it.