by W.D. Nelson

Created on: April 15, 2008

In my opinion, pornography on the Internet is no more an issue of "Free Speech" than books selling on Amazon about how to build bombs or the "instruction" of how certain poisons can kill people without a trace. We, as a nation, do not have the right to condemn what is being shown or said either in hardcover book form or on Internet.

Child pornography will always come up in the argument by people who want to regulate Internet Pornography. I agree that there are certain lines that should not be crossed, but we better be very careful how we establish those lines. Most children have no idea what they are doing or where these pictures of them are going. We can't assume that such young women and boys are capable of making the rational decision to participate in these photos and videos that are still being made by people and bought by other people.

There are already laws on the books which prohibit the exploitation of a minor in many areas including Internet Pornography. At some point in our country's growth, the child labor laws were enacted. Children are banned from being able to do many things by establishing an arbitrary age of 18 or 21. We can't even agree on the drinking age from one State to another, who is going to have the eraser in their hand to censor Internet Content?

A lot of things that I and I'm sure you, do not agree with, are protected under the First Amendment. Internet Pornography should be no different. If a person doesn't like it, don't look at it. If we're afraid of our children seeing it, it is a form of hiding my Playboy Magazine underneath my mattress. If it's out there and a child wants to see it, they will find a way.

Internet Pornography should be left alone to fester in it's own little world, no matter how much it offends some of us, because we don't have the right to censor anything we don't happen to like.

We, as a nation, have no right to censor anything on the Internet. If it's "bad", who are the people making that decision?

The video game industry writes programs that allow you to kill policeman and each other in surprisingly graphic detail. Some people want these games censored.

Internet Pornography gives anyone trying to get onto the Pornographic site, one or two ways to allow you to leave before anything "really bad" shows up. It's working and still allowing free speech for Internet Porn. We can't legislate morality, no matter how hard we've tried over the years.

Let the person who wants to watch, have that right, just as a person who does not want to watch it, move on to something else. Regulations by a group in Washington D.C. or anywhere else in the country, is a slippery slope and could also come back and bite us in the butt.

Let people watch, read or search the Internet without a group of people who don't like what they are seeing or don't agree with some of the Content, making these choices for us.

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