Pondering Child Porn
Bad Laws Harm All
Update 2: One other problem, by placing a price tag on child porn, will this not lead to more child porn?
Update: This essay has been updated and will probably be updated again as it is a composite of many side notes I have on this topic and my concerns. Please note this, I am not making a strident position here but trying to provoke people to rethink their position on this topic. My thoughts on this matter are likely to fluctuate.
I know in writing this, I stand to upset the vast majority of my readers and potentially lose many subscribers. However, there has been a level of fanaticism about supposed “sexual predators” to the point of denying humans are biological, sexual animals. Americans have reached the Shaker problem on multiple levels. The Shakers had such an aversion to sex, they were committed to lifelong celibacy, which is why they went extinct. Elon Musk is right to be concerned about a birth dearth, and our inability to address such a problem alarms me so I now question all our attitudes about sex. Saint Thomas Aquinas understood the problems within but has been forgotten.
Americans on a social level have become too wayward about abortion, pornography, and, to some degree, homosexuality as well as sex education. Like the Shakers, there was no attention for the need for fornication for posterity. Children are important. But sex education made child birth seem scary, dangerous and extremely painful without explaining benefits and long term outcomes.
Anyways, this court case in Omaha appears to be really messed up (https://omaha.com/news/local/crime-courts/article_4d4794e4-39f1-42bb-ae3f-5fc3ba2a2c9b.html). The basis of civilization and good government comes down to the defense of property against rape, robbery, murder, and fraud. Make the government do more, and liberty and prosperity suffer. Yet, Americans are quite wealthy by historical terms and have great tolerance for the expansion of government to the point of allowing it to determine if a tomato is a fruit or a vegetable (https://blogs.kentlaw.iit.edu/iscotus/supreme-court-great-tomato-debate/). Dare I mention this involved a tariff?
Anyways, this child porn case shows how excessive government can be. While I agree the perpetrator should pay the three identified victims, the amount of $3,000 is way too small, particularly compared to the over 10-year prison sentence, which is not justifiable at all. What a cheapskate judge. Give the victims $10,000 each and let the man go but require him to register as a sex offender for a year.
Many readers will be upset with me, but no evidence was presented showing Nathaniel A. Lazanis touched any child or had any intention of doing so. Putting him in jail is a waste of taxpayers money. Disturbing as his interests are, there is a broad difference between viewing vile content versus committing a crime.
Often, humans take appearances as the same as action when it is not. The rule of law is about action, not possession or perception. In much of the world, merely owning a gun is equated with a will to murder people. The same is of many horrible things. Just because someone is a pedophile does not mean they will molest children. Contrary to what many think, most pedophiles realize their sexual interest in children would disrupt their interaction with children they care about. But limited government should and must only address bad action.
At the same time, often, viewing debauchery fits largely into the category of rubber-necking to see who got totaled in a car accident. Law enforcement knows this because there are law enforcement members who will tell you this type of porn is mere nudity, decades old, or comes from foreign countries. To make matters worse, when a true child molester is found, connecting an image to the child molester and the time and place of the crime is super complicated.
But there are other problems. The laws against child pornography have expanded over the decades. A father can innocently video their 10-year-old son swimming and diving. The boy loses his swimsuit, but because he is in the family’s backyard and only Dad is watching, he continues to dive again and again, but he is sporting an erection. His video can be cut to a dozen images, and by law, it is child pornography. This is the danger of digital techonology. Fortunately, for most parents, most law enforcement is aware and cognitive of the problem and will display a level of mercy and say: “Can you just delete it ?” However, today, almost anything you do is connected to the internet and stored somewhere. Also, what do we all do when law enforcement wants to inspect all our devices for illegal porn?
The effort to ban AI created child porn is laughable to me and most idiotic. Are we now going to stop people from creating images? Dare I create an image with the words “Make Hitler Great Again”? Also, evidence suggests child porn actually discourages child molestation, but this might actually be a bad thing. Yes, it can be used to entice child molestation but in most instances, it calms a deviant interest but this may be a bit much.
Unfortunately, parents are so focused on preserving their child’s innocence, instead of confronting their children with facts. Parents need to make it abundantly clear to their children: you, as a parent, will die, and will not be available to them. This, they must come to terms with. Also, someone may have to grab the child by the private parts and tell them non-verbally “you need to get this up and operating and having children”. If a parent does this, we call it incest. If molester does it, well, it is just an unfortunate event. Yet, such action makes fornication an important part of fostering posterity.
Let me take the matter further. Autism and gender dysphoria are close to being a pandemic. Perhaps all our concerns and worries about sexual predators ignore the potential benefits of mild child molestation. Yes, a benefit. I am not talking about sexual intercourse. Indeed, such perversion may promote fertility and posterity. Confused? Sex education goes a long way to explain to minors about protecting their private parts, but in many ways, it does a disservice as to what “private parts” mean for posterity or the value people place upon them. In large part because education is merely a cerebral discussion instead of physical contact. Mild molestation, being physical, may clarify this.
With physical contact, the dimension and importance of private parts becomes far more tangible. As upsetting as this writing may be to parents and to a children, the discovery of relevance, and not mere excitement, of their so-called private parts provides a broader complexity in their role to have children. But note, I am not anywhere suggesting parents hire a registered sex offender to be a babysitter! However, for those who have been molested, they should not be viewed as damaged goods.
Please note, I am not writing this with any great stridency but with great nuance. I reserve the right to reform and change my thoughts on this matter. I merely ask, what if we got human sexuality all wrong? What of the birth dearth and how to address it?
Still pondering.
It's also pretty awful and ugly when all it takes for a child predator to get footage or images is for them to find a way to hide a camera in a bathroom or to hack someone's smart phone or TV.
Mommas get really mad when they find these things going on. Dads get even angrier. You want the justice system to take these incidents seriously, to deal with them with reasonable firmness because... the other option is parents turning into rage monsters and taking justice into their own hands.
When my kids were little, you can be sure that my first thought would not have been the police if I'd encountered something like that. It might have been after my friends sat on me and calmed me down. Maybe. HOURS LATER. And before you say, "But your friends would never lose their cool like that, they're smarter 'n you," Um... no. If it had happened to them, I would've had to sit on them too.
It's how parenting and feelings and reactions when you're a parent just really work.
Also, those child predator lists are utterly laughable as a deterrent. Most of the addresses are incorrect. No one in their right mind who's a registered sex offender is going to give out their correct address on a public list that makes them a target for vigilante justice, and quite frankly, their parole officers and the court have better things to do than to actually verify those addresses--as my parenting group discovered with the child predator lists in Colorado (and as has been mentioned more than once here in the news).
Hugh Heffner - you may be aware of who he was (the founder of Playboy, had the mansion with the Playboy "bunnies") - was a user of his own product. He became so jaded by porn that in his later years of life, he could watch the most disgusting of displays of inappropriate behavior in person and still not be able to get any physical excitement out of them.
This is what regular porn addiction does. It desensitizes people to sex, and in order to spur their sexual interest, they have to up the ante to view ever greater and more appalling depths of prurient sexual misbehavior. And, in the process, the mystery, the beauty, the holiness and joy in the procreation of life and the renewal of intimacy and affection are utterly lost.
If you want to have a healthy sex life, if you want to enjoy having a very long-term, healthy sex life (and have kids, a reasonable home life, and a happy wife--or husband!), your best choice is to get married, bend over backwards and do whatever it takes to stay married, and go out of your way to avoid porn at all costs. I know it isn't easy in our hyper-sexualized culture. It may mean getting rid of your TV, putting child safety settings on your computer, and being really diligent and advertent in working with an accountability partner, but--not screwing up your marriage and your life is worth whatever it takes to NOT DO THAT.
And yeah--I'm aware that a very high percentage of young men in Christian circles are now addicted to porn. It's become a serious problem in the dorms at Christian colleges. Something like 80% are caught up in that and so addicted, they couldn't walk away from it if they wanted to (which many of them apparently don't).
Viewing child porn takes this addiction to a whole new level. Viewing child porn really isn't enough for sex predators. They get excited by it, they want more of it, the endorphin boost fades, and... then they need to find ways to get their high back. And next thing you know, they're off in Thailand getting in trouble with the local authorities. The Thai have REALLY lost their patience with the sex tourists buying kids (it has really hurt their tourist industry), and Asian prisons and Asian ideas of how to treat people who get sent to prison for vile and disgusting acts are the stuff of nightmares, and really not something a reasonable thinking person wants to experience for themselves. But--that's the problem with an addiction--the addicted really aren't thinking.
And, if they lack the finances to take their criminal behavior overseas to some country where they think they can get away with it (like Thailand), they prey on the kids nearby.
Andrew, all that to say that there are some very good reasons why our laws are written the way that they are, why they're being enforced the way that they are. Porn is a very destructive thing. Child porn is even more destructive.
Worse, we've now got millions of illegals in this country from parts of the world where child marriage is a common thing and child rape is religiously approved and encouraged by the community if they're molesting the children of people who don't share their religious beliefs. This is what has led to the Muslim rape gangs in the U.K. that their country's ruling elite have been refusing to stop now for decades upon decades.
Don't think it can't happen here. Don't think that it isn't happening here. As a parent, I feel pretty strongly about this, and while I'm all for reasonable sentencing guidelines, I've gotta say that I don't want people getting away with a slap on the wrist for preying on kids, EVER.