The morality police

Cloaking themselves in concern for the welfare of children, censors have managed to successfully paint the people who oppose them as willing corruptors of children. And in the midst of outbreaks of mass hysteria, such as the '80s vogue for stories of Satanic ritual abuse, or the not-yet-abated horror stories about the Internet, speaking out against measures like the Child Pornography Protection Act (which got one man prosecuted for renting a video of Oscar-winning German film "The Tin Drum"), the Communications Decency Act (which would have meant that the article you're reading could have cost me a quarter of a million dollars and landed me in prison for two years) or the Child Online Protection Act, essentially the same legislation (whose constitutionality the Supreme Court has decided to review), is often enough to get you labeled as some sort of pervert willing to countenance the sexual exploitation of children. What kind of person, after all, would oppose a bill called the Child Pornography Protection Act?

Well, anyone who wanted to teach "Romeo and Juliet" for one. The CPPA outlawed the portrayal of sex between minors. Under that definition, child porn could be defined as the wedding night scene in "Romeo and Juliet"; the hugely popular family comedy "Big," in which Tom Hanks plays a 12-year-old who, in one scene, goes to bed with Elizabeth Perkins; the episode of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" where Buffy sleeps with Angel on her 17th birthday. (Bob Dole, however, leering at Britney Spears over his Pepsi, would have been safe.) Unlike obscenity laws, the CPPA, since overturned, provided no exception for "redeeming social value"; if something fit the description, it was child porn. And lest those examples sound like exaggeration or worst-case scenarios, let me reiterate that the statute was used to prosecute a video store owner and the customer who rented "The Tin Drum."

Heins must have realized she was striding into a minefield. Shrewdly -- but also, I think, honestly -- she focuses on the harm done to children by censorship laws. She questions how children who have been so stringently shielded can be well prepared for life (especially when at age 18 -- poof! -- they magically become "adults"); how, under the Constitution, some citizens can be judged to have fewer free-speech rights than others; and how you can claim to be protecting children if, in the case of birth control or sexual information, you are depriving them of something that, especially with the public health crisis of AIDS, could save their lives. Some parents love to wag their fingers condescendingly at those of us without children who oppose free-speech restrictions. They say, "You'll change your tune when you have kids of your own." But why would anyone wish for a world in which their children would have fewer rights?

The notion that words and images and ideas can cause harm to young minds has become such an article of faith that it's hard not to feel a sense of futility when you point out that there is not a shred, not an iota, not an atom of proof that exposure to images or descriptions of sex and violence does children any harm. In the face of people who are certain about the evil Pied Piper effect of the media, insisting on the facts becomes pointless, even though every expert who tries to claim otherwise gives himself or herself away. On May 6, the Associated Press reported news of an American Psychiatric Association panel on online voyeurism in which a University of Michigan psychiatry professor named Norman Alessi testified that "the potential of seeing hundreds of thousands of such images during adolescence -- I have no idea what that could do. But I can imagine it must be profound" (emphasis added). God knows psychiatry isn't science, but you'd expect a doctor to be a little more circumspect when he has only his imagination to go on.

Yet this is exactly the kind of "data" that Congress swallows whole before coming up with some new way to put the screws to Hollywood. And witnesses who do try to testify to the facts are often treated with contempt. MIT professor Henry Jenkins appeared before the Senate in the hearings that convened in the panicked aftermath of the Columbine killings and found himself to be the only scholar present who didn't take it on faith (because there's no other way to take it) that media violence promotes real violence. Jenkins described a Senate chamber festooned with "hyperbolic and self-parodying" posters and ads for the most violent video games on the market. "Senators," he said, "read them all deadly seriously and with absolute literalness."

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