The Sexes: Child's Garden of Perversity

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To make prosecutions easier, angry legislators in several states and Congress are proposing a kind of end run around the obscenity laws—a ban on sexually explicit pictures of children, whether legally obscene or not. One bill introduced into the House of Representatives by Democrats John Murphy of New York and Dale Kildee of Michigan already has 103 cosponsors. It would make any proven involvement with the production and sale of explicit sex pictures of children a felony. Says a Kildee aide: "Our bill is clearly enough directed toward child abuse so that the First Amendment should not arise. This is why we defined child pornography as a form of abuse, rather than a form of obscenity."

Under this approach, a salesman in an adult bookstore could be prosecuted as an active participant in the crime of sexually exploiting the children pictured in the store's magazines. New York Lawyer Charles Rembar, who successfully defended Lady Chatterley's Lover and Fanny Hill against obscenity charges, thinks the seller of child porn is a suitable target: "It is totally unrealistic to say that the people who sell these magazines and films are not involved in the act themselves." Yet other lawyers consider a broad child-abuse law a form of backdoor censorship. Says Ira Glasser of the New York Civil Liberties Union: "I assume if you put your mind to it, you could come up with an acceptable statute prohibiting adults from using children in explicit sex films and photos, but controlling what people see or read is another matter. Everything published ought to be absolutely protected by the First Amendment."

Despite First Amendment problems, public pressure for some kind of law is likely to grow. Many Americans battling against child porn view their efforts as a last stand against the tide of pornography. Says California State Senator Newton Russell: "This is a reflection of the social and spiritual morality of this nation. If there is to be any reversal in the trend, the place to start is child porn."