Waaaagh!

Kodomo no Jikan and SCOTUS

Man - i never thought it would get this bad. I mean - even under this idiot administration the courts had come in saying 'you cant hold something as child pornography if it doesnt actually depict a child' (Ashcroft v Free Speech Coalition (2002)) and thus overly broad and unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

"First Amendment freedoms are most in danger when the government seeks to control thought or to justify its laws for that impermissible end. The right to think is the beginning of freedom, and speech must be protected from the government because speech is the beginning of thought." - Justice Anthony Kennedy

So the boys on the hill went back to the drawing board and came up with the PROTECT act... "The law, known as the Protect Act, applies regardless of whether the material turns out to consist solely of computer-generated images, or digitally altered photographs of adults, or even if the offer is fraudulent and the material does not exist at all." - basically they're going around the first amendment by saying you're 'pandering' child porn if you 'think' it might be child porn - and SCOTUS just gave the law a 7 on 2 gangbang.

So - before I go any further I want to make something clear: I've never considered any character in any game, movie, or cartoon to be a human child for the purposes of any sexual or pseudosexual situation. They're all either adults or micronized zentradi - i have no way of knowing differently since i dont speak japanese and no one can tell me i THOUGHT ANY DIFFERENT AT THE TIME - meaning they might well be hundreds of years old. Thank you. If I'm playing GTA4 I'm of the opinion that all the hookers i'm fucking are OVER THE AGE OF CONSENT IN LIBERTY CITY... I swear I never thought they were young looking - they all looked like grandmothers to me.

WHEN THE HELL DID WE HIRE PRECOGS

In the dissent - Souter wrote "However, he added, possession of pornographic images that do not depict real children is constitutionally protected, and offering them should not be a crime. “If the act can effectively eliminate the real-child requirement when a proposal relates to extant material, a class of protected speech will disappear.”

There is no question in my mind that Ada depicts the sexual acts of a 14 yr old girl... if i offer it for sale by claiming it has child pornography between the covers then, as i understand it, i am guilty of pandering. If I claim a video of the presidents state of the union address is chock full of bukakke shots of Dick Cheney blasting away at 4 yr old boys and encourage you to download a copy then I'm pandering.

7-2... it'll be years before, even in a best case scenario of the court slowly edging back from this sort of idiocy. What will they do next? Even as the court gets better and moves in a slightly less crazy direction - what thoughts will they determine to be illegal tomorrow? WTF.

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EDIT:

From Scalia's majority opinion itself:

A crime is committed only when the speaker believes or intends the listener to believe that the subject of the proposed transaction depicts real children. It is simply not true that this means "a protected category of expression [will] inevitably be suppressed," post, at 13. Simulated child pornography will be as available as ever, so long as it is offered and sought as such, and not as real child pornography. The dissent would require an exception from the statute's prohibition when, unbeknownst to one or both of the parties to the proposal, the completed transaction would not have been unlawful because it is (we have said) protected by the First Amendment.

So what I read as an affirmation of an attack on conduct in games and cartoons isnt. This is a good thing - if they start prosecuting the lambdamoo guys for REAL rape then we're all in trouble.