by Lisa F. Wilson-Gee

Created on: May 27, 2008

When it is spoken of it is discussed under a cloud of palatable phrases that serves to hide the speaker's true agenda. I am, of course, referring to censorship or, more specifically, censorship of the Internet.

Hearing the word "censorship" conjures up a vast array of images, most of which are memories from our past. Times in the history of humanity that today most people claim to find appalling. We look down at those eras from a height of presumed intellectual superiority and assert that we have come too far as a people to ever let mass hysteria and mob-mentality rule again.

Yet for all of our posturing we turn a bind eye when self-appointed "moral watchdogs" turn their wrath towards the internet. These overseers of all things decent sit in judgment of not only what the general public would term "pornography," but over every type of expression; at least that is what they want to do. These people seem to feel that anything published via the Internet should meet their ideals. Ideals that find words of even a mild explicative nature offensive and references to God, religion, strong emotions, politics and passages (either in fact or fiction), no more racy than your average romance novel, are viewed as abhorrent. Their verdicts on what is and is not acceptable seem arbitrary at best and ridged to the point of being puritanical at worst.

If these "moral watchdogs" have their way the phrase "Freedom of expression" will be thrown back to the age of book banning. Back to a time in our history when even such classics as The Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath and Mark Twain's immortal Huckleberry Fin were pulled from bookstores, public libraries and schools across the country all in the name of "protecting children."

Which brings us to the most insidious aspect of these new self-appointed censors: masking their quest for censorship and control under the guise of wanting to "save" our Nation's children. They claim that the saddest element of this controversy is the "fact" that adults consider their right to write or produce "offensive material" paramount to the protection of children. I disagree. The saddest factor in regard to this issue and how it pertain to children is that parents seem to be using the Internet as simply another electronic babysitter and then they cry foul when the "babysitter" fails to keep their child on the straight and narrow.

The truth is that in order for a child to view anything of an "objectionable nature" (no matter how one may define "objectionable") on the Internet several factor must first be in place; factors that can be controlled:

-An adult, presumably a parent or other responsible party, has to buy a computer.
-An adult then has to subscribe and pay for Internet access.
-An adult then has to allow a child to log onto the Internet unsupervised and without protection.

Perhaps if more parents took an active roll in how their children use the technology the parents, themselves, provide those who shield their narrow-minded judgments and limited perspectives behind the publically appealing mantra of "protecting children" would find it more difficult to locate allies in their mission of censorship and control.

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