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Originally Posted by ..
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It's a really tough call, isn't it? And I don't think there is a good answer when you attempt to call one thing "moral" and another not. Who's gonna make that call and how?
If you let "the majority" decide you wouldn't have
Lolita or
Sabbath's Theater in a lot of places.
If you try to put a scientific basis to it and say that you won't allow anything that could "inspire" or "tempt" a potential pedophile then you might as well take a match to
The Guitar Lesson or the Thérèse series or any of the numerous other Balthus works that dwell on pedophilia.
There are some on this board who were born into a world were selling a copy of
Tropic of Cancer was a criminal offense in the US. Censorship of great works isn't such a far off memory.
So where do you draw the line? I think you have to go with Orwell and draw it on action versus thought. To me, once you start punishing ideas for the sake of the idea you're into dangerous territory.
What this guy wrote was horrible and disgusting. But so what? How did his
words or
ideas hurt anyone? What makes it wrong to
write down a bunch of horrible and disgusting stuff? What was it about reducing his thoughts to written word that suddenly made those thoughts a crime?
And what if this guy hadn't published it? What if he just wrote it down and kept it in his basement and the cops found it there? Was it his
sharing of an idea that made it worthy of criminal punishment?
And if writing it down or sharing is so bad, then isn't just
thinking such thoughts equally as horrible and disgusting? Should we make that a crime too?
I react with just as much deep-seated nausea to this stuff as anyone, but I just don't see how you can fashion a remedy here based on what somebody thinks or believes versus what they do. And what good would it be to allow people freedom of thought if you're not going to allow them to share and express those thoughts - no matter how vile others consider those thoughts to be?
On this topic I take the literary equivalent of the NRA's position: "Books don't rape children, people rape children"
I just don't see how you can start punishing people for an idea or a belief without ending up with a real
1984. Manifest an idea into action and harm someone else - child or not - and you should be punished to full extent of the law. But until those ideas come off the printed page and turn into deeds I say we just have to live with them. If we don't we'll lose so much more.
There's also a lot of hypocrisy that I don't like on this subject.
The Turner Diaries is still on the shelf. That book's inspired a lot of pain and mayhem too. Where are all the picketers screaming for Pierce's head? And why stop at just at harming children with sex? Isn't the murder or mutilation of a child just as horrible? Should we ban all works in which a child is killed or maimed and throw the authors in the clink? If so then you better throw out your John Irving before the cops kick in your door.
As much as I hate the fact that such people exist, I have to defend this guy to the extent that his "crimes" were restricted to the printed page. Whether he actually laid hands on a child is a different story all together. Arrested for publishing a book, though, is over the line for Mazo no matter what kind of filth is in the ink.
Cheers,
Mazo.
Free Speech
