Censorship Essay - Dont Censor Child Pornography -- Argumentative Per

Don't Censor Child Pornography      Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   In November of 1997 a Williamson County, Tenn. grand jury indicted Barnes & Noble booksellers for violating state obscenity laws prohibiting the display of "material harmful to minors". The materials in question were two books that featured photographs of nude children: Jock Sturges' Radiant Identities and David Hamilton's The Age of Innocence. Since then, Radical Right activist Randall Terry has launched a crusade aimed at forcing bookstores to remove the "criminal garbage" of Sturges, Hamilton and (recently added to his list of demons) Sally Mann from their bookshelves (bookweb). To implement his program Terry issued a call to Right sympathizers, urging them to march into bookstores and tear offensive pages from the targeted books. Several bookstores around the country fell prey to Terry's vandals. In response to these incidents and the threat of future public vandalism, Barnes & Noble recently issued a memo to each of its 1000+ stores directing them to place t he contested materials under lock and key, and to allow customers to view them only in the presence of a store manager (apocalypse 9709).    This response is upsetting. It is upsetting because it means that, in several significant ways, Terry has won. True, no one (as of yet) has put Sturges or the others in jail (as Terry has called for), but the public's right to view the supposed "pornographic" content of their work has been significantly diminished by Barnes & Noble's action. By acknowledging the threat of Terry and his small group of supporters, B&N has reified their claim that the work of the named photographers needs to be segregated from the "decent" public's reach. It installs a technology of surveillance that in... ...ms to me that it would be rather unlikely for a young child to stumble onto the work of a contemporary professional photographer. S/he would have to know something about that photographer, know what his or her work is about, and know how to get to it. This means that, in the case of these photographers, the child would have to know something about nudity, art and photography to want to seek them out. If s/he already knows something about these subjects, then what harm is viewing nude bodies going to have?      Works Cited:    Foucault, Michel, History of Sexuality, Vol I: An Introduction, New York: Pantheon, 1978.      www.bookweb.org/news/btw/905.html    http://apocalypse.berkshire.net/~ifas/fw/9709/terry.html    http://apocalypse.berkshire.net/~ifas/fw/9509/terry.html    www.villagevoice.com/pride/10goldstein.shtml