Why is Child Porn Legal?
In a series of five articles, I show why Child Porn is legal in the US and why publishers can print books with images and explicit text with child porn and put them in schools and libraries.
Child Porn Law Series vol. 1
Image: US Supreme Court, Made by Perchance AI on 1/14/24
What do you get when nine judges illegally make up laws from the bench? You get legal Child Porn masquerading as free speech.
The Miller Decision and Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1988
At What Cost Do You Enjoy Your Porn?
Capitalism, when married to bad laws, has given us free Porn today. Congratu-freakin-lations. You can sit at home, watch porn on your TV, your computer, your phone, or your game console. Gone are those pesky days when you had to skip past the paper articles to get to the paper photos. Now, you can be illiterate to watch porn. In our Brave New World, porn is our Soma. How did we get here—where porn is so ubiquitous?
Beyond the Supreme Court is the actions of Christian leaders. One of my arguments is that because Christians are just as guilty about watching and enjoying porn, we are helping fund child porn and sex trafficking. One of the largest websites, PornHub, owned by MindGeeks in Canada has been accused of participating in trafficking and child abuse.1 So has XHamster and OnlyFans.2 If you are a Christian, secretly enjoying porn, or you think it is a victimless crime, you’re grossly mistaken. Even adult porn leads to the of many of the actors through suicide. Watch Michael Knowles speak with a former porn actor who was saved and is now a pastor.
Let’s provide a simple definition of porn. It is images of men and/or women having sex, often for a small transactional fee, to be viewed by others through various forms of media. It’s pornographic if it is cartoon images, drawn images, or actual images. It doesn’t matter if it’s created by artificial intelligence or by humans. The only caveat is, if the images are of drawn, cartoon, or simulated children engaged in sexual acts, then it’s protected free speech. Like Matt Walsh, I define porn as digital prostitution.
These series of articles are going to be a crash course in the law. Future articles will deal with the porn industry, education, psychology, libraries, and the church. In this article, I will cover Miller v. California and the Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1988. Next Monday, I will cover the Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition and federal legal statutes (18 U.S.C. § 2252, 18 U.S.C. § 1466A, 18 U.S.C. § 1470, 18 U.S.C. § 2252A, and 18 U.S.C. § 2252C). In the third article, I will highlight Missouri Statutes. In the fourth article, I will demonstrate that the law has been rigged by the porn industry and the rise in our nation of moral relativism is directly related to the rise of porn in our communities, churches, and homes. In my fifth article, I will demonstrate how porn is being promoted by psychology, education, and the church.
Miller v. California
In 1973, the Supreme Court heard a case brought by California against Marvin Miller. Miller was a distributor of pornographic books and films. One of his graphic advertisement brochures landed in the hands of a woman in California who reported him to the police. He was arrested and when he was convicted by a jury of his peers, he appealed the decision because the judge poorly instructed the jurors to use a “community standard” rather than the previous standard set up by two other court cases, Memoirs v. Massachusetts and Roth v. United States. Those two cases created the standard that obscenity was determined to be “utterly without redeeming social value”.
After the Supreme Court of 1973 reached its decision, they created three rules which gave local communities more rights to prosecute. However, this was a two-edged sword. If a community’s leaders decided porn was in the interest of the community, then it was allowed. The three rules are as follows:
Whether "the average person, applying contemporary community standards", would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
Whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions[4] specifically defined by applicable state law,
Whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.[note 1]3
The work is considered obscene only if all three conditions are satisfied
Let’s deal with each one individually so we understand it. In the first step, the standards are set not by a higher moral authority. It never questions whether the porn is abusive to the people participating in it. The standard is set by an average morality from an average person. Do we define murder this way? Theft? Should we have community standard for rape? In England, a judge ruled that a man’s community standard were sufficient to determine he didn’t deserve to go to jail for raping a 13-year old because he didn’t know rape was illegal. The judge used the community standards of the perpetrator to determine if a crime had been committed. He did not consider the community standards of the rape victim.4 This law, like in the Miller case, was used to protect the distributor of sex crimes. Remember, porn is prostitution and prostitution is illegal.
Step two attempts to define porn using a scientific definition. I assume executory functions refer to bodily fluids or eliminations which begs some questions about what Miller was sharing with people to bring this description into the decision–questions I don’t want answered. Patently offensive just means it is clearly offensive to people in the community. Any reasonable person who views it would recognize it as porn and not be confused about its nature. It then punts the idea of a national standard of obscenity back to the state governments. I’m usually for state rights, but a state that produces porn 1,000 miles away can be in my state as soon as it’s uploaded to the internet. Granted this decision was in 1973, but it allows for the production of obscene prostitution which means it can be carried over state lines like we saw with Marijuana when Colorado and Oregon made it legal. Once they created a market for it, the people in states without it, created a demand. One of the faults of capitalism is it doesn’t distinguish between a product which is good for a person and one that is bad for a person.
The last step is probably the most frustrating. It is used by book publishers to get pornographic material onto book shelves in schools and libraries because only a portion of the book has porn in it. The term value is also relative. What does it mean to have artistic value? Maybe I look at a Rembrandt and declare it has no value? Maybe another person says it does. Why are they right and I’m wrong? Who decides that depictions of a child having sex with a man, such as in Gender Queer, is right or wrong? It’s why you see so many parents at school and library board meetings fighting with progressive and marxist trustees and board members. It’s why a Georgia teacher can teach about sexual identity (a sexually obscene behavior) in her classroom library.5 Further, it’s why a racist, anti-semitic organization like the Southern Poverty Law Center thinks she needs to be defended. It comes down to a fight over values. Determining whose values are correct shouldn’t become a screaming match over who can be loudest–what is right or wrong cannot be relative. A society will collapse under that weight of disagreement and vitriol.
Overall, the Miller decision is just bad law. One of the justices, William J. Brenner, Jr., was eager to remove as many obscenity laws as he could. We can all give him thanks for his service to this nation. I need a sarcasm font. We were given a law which created a market for obscene materials across the nation. Its claim to return the issues to the states is a valueless claim. We are one bad petition initiative to change the Missouri Constitution to enshrine the right to porn in our libraries and our schools. This is what happens when you side with a Free Love worldview. Later in the series, I will show the connections between Free Love (from Marxism), psychology, and porn.
Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1988
This bill was created to limit child pornography distribution and create more severe penalties for child pornography. I’ll highlight the important parts below.
Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1988 - Title I: Child Pornography - Amends the Federal criminal code to make it illegal to use a computer to transport information in interstate or foreign commerce concerning the visual depiction of minors engaging in sexually explicit conduct (child pornography).
Establishes criminal penalties for buying, selling, or transferring the custody of a minor: (1) knowing that, as a consequence of the sale or transfer, the minor will be used in child pornography; or (2) with the intent to promote child pornography. States that such sale or transfer must involve: (1) the minor or other actor traveling in interstate or foreign commerce; (2) communications in interstate or foreign commerce; or (3) conduct in a territory or possession of the United States.
Includes the sexual exploitation of children as a predicate offense to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute.
Title II: Obscenity - Makes it a Federal criminal offense to receive or possess, with the intent to distribute, obscene matter which has been transported in interstate or foreign commerce.
Makes it a Federal criminal offense to knowingly use a facility or means of commerce to sell or distribute obscene matter in interstate or foreign commerce.
Establishes a rebuttable presumption, with respect to Federal criminal offenses involving obscene matter, that obscene matter produced in one State (or outside the United States) which is subsequently located in another State (or in the United States) was transported, shipped, or carried in interstate (or foreign) commerce.
Establishes criminal and civil forfeiture procedures with respect to Federal offenses involving obscene material and child pornography.
Includes communications by means of cable or subscription television within the prohibition against broadcasting obscene language.
Amends the Communications Act of 1934 to modify the penalty provisions of such Act with respect to obscene telephone communications.
Amends the Federal criminal code to establish criminal penalties for the possession or sale of obscene matter on Federal property.
Adds obscenity offenses to the list of crimes for which the Government may obtain wiretaps.6
This law made the trafficking of a child illegal. However, we all know that this is barely enforced anymore. Most of our laws are often overlooked though if 1 Million children are trafficked for sex each year.7
As we’ve learned through the criminal cases against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, they aren’t really applying the law equally. Jeffrey and Ghislaine may have trafficked and abused, but they were providing these children for dozens, if not far more, politicians and celebrities. Clinton, for example, seemed to have stopped his attorney general from prosecuting certain sexual crimes. Biden and Obama are on the list of people at the island. And after their regimes, we have more sex trafficking and human slavery than in human history.
Next Article
In my next article, I will address the Ascroft v. The Free Speech Coalition and the Federal Legal Statues. Join me next Monday as we review how the Porn Industry was able to undermine Child Porn laws and make drawn images of children engaged in sexual acts legal.
Copyright © 2024 by David Rice
Bibliography
Bentley, Paul. “Adil Rashid: Paedophile Claimed His Muslim Upbringing Meant ’he Didn’t Know It Was Illegal to Have...” Daily Mail, January 25, 2013. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2268395/Adil-Rashid-Paedophile-claimed-Muslim-upbringing-meant-didnt-know-illegal-sex-girl-13.html.
Contributors to Wikimedia projects. “Miller v. California.” Wikipedia, September 11, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_v._California.
French, David. “How to Fix America’s Child-Pornography Crisis.” The Atlantic, September 13, 2022. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/pornography-child-sex-abuse-exposure-crisis/671376/.
Hudson, Tiffany, and Brian Entin. “NewsNation.” NewsNation, June 17, 2021. https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/pornhub-faces-lawsuit-alleging-it-knowingly-participated-in-trafficking-and-child-pornography/.
Knowles, Michael. “‘She Hung Herself In A Park’ Michael & The Former Porn Star.” Video. YouTube, May 27, 2023.
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Southern Poverty Law Center. “Georgia Teacher Fired for Reading Children’s Book about Acceptance in Class.” Accessed January 12, 2024. https://www.splcenter.org/news/2023/06/22/georgia-teacher-fired-reading-childrens-book-about-acceptance-class.
Tiffany Hudson and Brian Entin, “NewsNation,” NewsNation, June 17, 2021, https://www.newsnationnow.com/business/pornhub-faces-lawsuit-alleging-it-knowingly-participated-in-trafficking-and-child-pornography/. Accessed on 1/14/24.
David French, “How to Fix America’s Child-Pornography Crisis,” The Atlantic, September 13, 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/pornography-child-sex-abuse-exposure-crisis/671376/ Accessed on 1/14/24.
Contributors to Wikimedia projects. “Miller v. California.” Wikipedia, September 11, 2023. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller_v._California. Accessed on 1/11/24.
Paul Bentley, “Adil Rashid: Paedophile Claimed His Muslim Upbringing Meant ’he Didn’t Know It Was Illegal to Have...,” Daily Mail, January 25, 2013, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2268395/Adil-Rashid-Paedophile-claimed-Muslim-upbringing-meant-didnt-know-illegal-sex-girl-13.html. Accessed on 1/11/24
“Georgia Teacher Fired for Reading Children’s Book about Acceptance in Class,” Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed January 12, 2024, https://www.splcenter.org/news/2023/06/22/georgia-teacher-fired-reading-childrens-book-about-acceptance-class. Accessed on 1/11/24.
H.R.3889 - 100th Congress (1987-1988): Child Protection and Obscenity Enforcement Act of 1988,” Library of Congress, November 18, 1988, https://www.congress.gov/bill/100th-congress/house-bill/3889. Accessed on 1/12/24.
“Human Trafficking Statistics & Facts,” Safe Horizon, June 30, 2016, https://www.safehorizon.org/get-informed/human-trafficking-statistics-facts/#definition/. Accessed on 1/14/24.