THE QUILL
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The Child Online Protection Act
By
On
COPA differs from
The porous nature of this law starts with the
concept of "harmful to minors" itself. It is supposed to mean,
"obscenity' in terms of a minor rather than an adult. That is,
On October 22, a coalition of plaintiffs,
including myself as a subplaintiff under Electronic
Frontier Foundation filed suit to have the law overturned as unconstitutional.
The papers may be found at http://www.aclu.org/
or http://www.eff.org/. My work is described
in Paragraph 132 of the complaint. My affidavit is available at my own site, http://www/doaskdotell.com/content/afidavit.htm
. A Temporary Restraining Order was granted by Judge Reed on Nov. 19. There
will be a hearing for a permanent injunction (as long as it takes for the
formal trial to proceed) on Jan 20. (The order expires on Feb. 1).
It's possible that the Court could allow the
law to stay if the Department of Justice concedes specific definitions of
"harmful to minors" and other related concepts such as "commercial
enterprise" (and its relation to free speech claims), "private"
vs. "pervasive" speech, and "community standards." Of
course, we know from a similar situation a few years ago with gays in the
military, official government recognition of a particular interpretation of a
law is not much protection from later "witch-hunts."
There will be some people who maintain that
adult materials should not be placed where children can find them. Period. We have R and X rated movies, don't we? But the
Supreme Court has already recognized that overbroad forms of content regulation
even in a new medium are unconstitutional if they cause prior restraint or
otherwise skew protected speech among adults. Some political arguments cannot
be credibly made without at least some adult references.
What will help in protecting minors from
obviously adult material will be some more innovation among software
developers. The HTML language should develop Metatags
for rating codes (similar to movies) and browsers should provide the hooks so
that parents can easily set their children's accounts to whatever level they
believe to be appropriate.
Also in the news
· Libertarian author Peter McWilliams jailed (and then
released) after growing medical marijuana for his own use
·
· Two men in
· Hustler publisher Larry Flynt
goes after private lives of Republicans in response to
Impeachment
· States' attorneys-general plan to go after gun
manufacturers with a tobacco-style lawsuit.
Psychological Libertarianism
By
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The history that we used to study for
mid-terms was always presented as a struggle among various groups of people.
Nationalities, racial minorities, religious interests, and economic classes all
compete with each other for apparently a more or less finite pie, for the
welfare of their own peoples, considered only collectively. The individual
apparently means relatively little in a tribe where people don't have stability
and foodstuffs collectively. So people used to think, until
they started to explore freedom, beyond the customary experience of family ties.
We may well slip back into that way of squabbling over enormous issues such as
global warming.
The idea that a person can deliberately set
out to better himself and his loved ones did not really start to take hold in
European civilization until the Renaissance, with the gradual development of
capital markets. Even today, many people interpret Christianity and other
religions as a call to subjugate one's will, as evidence of faith, to spiritual
external direction. In the 20th century particularly, there
developed a tension between the growing rights of the individual and welfare,
particularly security, for the society in which he lived. Moralists quickly
denounced too much preoccupation with the individual. When, in periods of less
regulation, entrepreneurs tried new schemes to create wealth, capitalism ¾ seemingly related closely to individualism ¾ would be denounced as inherently unstable and unfair to minorities or
to the disadvantaged.
Since the end of the Vietnam war there had
evolved an increased recognition that government attempts to make society
"safer" and to make it "fairer," both perhaps justified by
the constitutional mention of "promoting the General Welfare," can
have unexpected or unintended but severe consequences for individuals. Not all
regulation is bad: maybe we do need tort reform and moderate financial
regulation to make sure that people can keep the commitments they have
voluntarily contracted with others. Much more suspect, of course, is social
engineering, associated with income taxes, affirmative action
"preferences," marriage law, military policy, gun control, drug and
consensual sex laws, and zoning.
We may be prepared for a new philosophy of
history: that the relationship between an individual's rights and his
corresponding responsibilities, rather than his relationship to a peer group,
should become the focus of political and legal reform. As a baseline, we assume
that every individual, but no one else, is accountable for his own actions,
including direct harm to others or failure to honor contracts with others. The
benefit of this approach will be a new effort to build a firewall between
government and the rights of the individuals it serves.
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There are, however, subtle problems of
personal morality and ethics that go beyond the proper scope of the law.
Until about thirty years ago, personal
freedom, in psychological terms, was a relative thing. You put "family
first" and did not question it. You recognized obligations, to offer your
life in battle, for your clan. The mores of heterosexual marriage, which
encouraged women to tame and socialize men into adapting the most intimate
parts of their life experience to meeting the immediate adaptive needs of
others, were perpetuated in such a way that it did not occur to many people to
question them. You did not expect to control your own life completely, but
turned to family life and religious faith for meaning beyond yourself. Yet,
with the new prosperity after World War II, you began to sense that modernism
would give you new opportunities for self-direction.
After Civil Rights, Moonwalk, Vietnam,
Stonewall and Watergate, it did occur to younger people that the most intimate
parts of their lives ought, like financial markets, to be deregulated. Personal
growth, self-expression, and even self-transcendence, became higher priorities
than fitting in to a support network and carrying things on as a parent.
Personal priorities and, particularly, intimate partner choices, ought not to
be subject to political ratification by "the people: or subject to public soulcraft. Younger people, watching people get trapped in
relationships and marriages that had smothered their own identities, took the
attitude, "make it on your own first."
Homosexuality seemed to be associated with
this new defiant kind of psychological independence. As it came to be more
"tolerated" conservatives found a way to settle for field goals. They
would deny gays the right to perform what many people see as intrinsic social
obligations ¾ like defending the country, committing themselves in
marriage, and raising children. Then they would say, "we
don't care what you do in your private life, we just don’t want to hear about
it. If we reserve some privileges for the traditionally married, please don't
complain, because we let you spend all of your resources on pleasing
yourselves. You just don’t have to go to war or support a family like real men
do."
Social conservatives, by sticking their
thumbs into the eyes of same-sex marriage, seem to be missing the chance for a
deeper moral debate. Don’t most people, considering what it took to make them
productive adults, have a moral obligation to prove that they can take care of
others besides themselves? Think of the ramifications of this argument with an
aging population, and the policy decisions around who pays for it (the state
through Medicaid, children, or the aged themselves who now are becoming seen as
"burdens" when people don't have the extended family setups to care
for them.) No, we'll just tell people, go off and do what you want, you aren't capable to taking on real responsibility.
Otherwise, this kind of moral debate will, of
course, make many people very uncomfortable with themselves. After all, male
socialization is supposed to be a pretty automatic process; since men bear the
burden of initiative in carrying out their sexuality for a lifetime, before
forced to think about it might spoil the whole thing. Traditional marriage is
defended as a matter of "morality" perceived but not often stated to
be aesthetic realism and Catholic complementarity. It condescends to the notion
that persons should not be able to exercise their artistic choices indefinitely
in matters of sexuality, because if they could, the disadvantaged would be left
out in the cold (especially in a "Darwinian" libertarian order with
no government safety nets). But the defense is really a kind of psychological
protectionism. It hides the sensible balance between self-direction or ambition
and recognizing the real needs of others.
The old-fashioned, Victorian paradigm for
heterosexuality provides a somewhat efficient mechanism for the less advantaged
to find some moral fulfillment and to take care of their own within their own
family structures if they don't have to inclination or tools to question
"the way things are." The liberal-to-Marxist left quite justifiably
shoots this moral paradigm down as a tool of oppression for the advantaged of a
white, patriarchal "Christian" establishment; but it offers a balkanization
of people into competing interest groups whose loyalties cover up not just
moral thinking but individual identity altogether. This point does not deny
that healthful individualism does start with meeting the needs of others and
some kind of obedience and loyalty to a stable set of family moral values.
For me, this is where free speech comes in.
Much of my effort has been directed at speaking out against obvious hypocrisy.
If the commitment of marriage gives some men the accountability they need to
grow, for others it just shields mediocrity. On a personal level, we need to
talk about these things. But, debate itself has tended to be run by
well-funded, adversarial groups taking polarized positions often to serve
special interests. We have a First Amendment, yet we do not have a clear social
consensus when it is appropriate to speak up and when one may believed. But behaving out of a deeper sense of morality and
fairness in one's motives may be what it takes to be believed by others.
A Perspective on Hate Crimes Laws
By Richard Sincere, GLIL President
Please see GLIL web site (archives) for this
article.
A River of Poison,
By Lee Coleman, Portland,
Ore.
There is a river of poison flowing across our
nation today. In it are currents of outright hatred, antagonism, contempt, and
disrespect.
The result has been the assassination of Dr. Slepian and the slaughter of our little brother Matthew
Shepard.
The headwaters of that river and its vile
currents are the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council,
the Traditional Values Coalition, and their component churches, organizations,
and allies.
A backlash against these poisonous influences
is not inevitable! It must be stimulated by the victims. These include gays,
lesbians, bisexuals, trans-gendered persons of course. But women who seek the
right to choose for themselves on reproductive freedom are our allies and
should also rise up to speak out against these evil sources from which hate
crimes flow.
Lee Coleman
ã Copyright 1998 by Lee Coleman. Reprinted with permission.
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Individual Liberty is an organization of classical liberals, market liberals,
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and objectivists. GLIL publishes The Quill to promote the philosophy of
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© Copyright 1998 by Gays and Lesbians for
Individual Liberty. All rights reserved.
POST PUBLICATION NOTES:
On
Also, there are efforts to develop an
effective voluntary rating system, the Platform for Internet Content Selection.
See the web page for the Recreational Software Advisory Council, http://www.rsac.org.