by Currie Jean

Created on: March 08, 2009

In order to support the conviction that censorship is needed, one must be able to show how the information in question - that which is to be censored - does harm by imposing upon the rights of others.

This is why it's so often so difficult to rationally support censorship: the sharing of information is very rarely something that imposes on other people's rights. Sharing personal information without permission, libel, hate speech, and slander are illegal because they can be shown to violate the rights of others. But does pornography do this?

Absolutely not.

Those who work in the porn industry are volunteers, working for legal, taxed pay, be they on or off screen. Those who pay for the pornography are interested in seeing it, because they enjoy it, and as adults, they are totally free to do so. In fact, they have a right to do so, and censoring pornography would violate that right.

It needs to be understood that the Internet is a worldwide endeavor, not owned by any particular country. Thus, it can not be controlled by any particular country. A nation can, to an extent, control what websites are viewed and produced by its people, and some communist nations, like China, try very hard to do this. Censorship is never done perfectly, though, and is often done shoddily, so that it merely wastes resources, rather than attaining the mass ignorance it aims for.

People are very good at getting what they want, despite censorship. If pornography were to be censored or banned by the United States government for its population - something I can guarantee will never happen without the total dissolution of freedom and democracy - people would still manage to get it when they wanted it. They might build uncensored mini-networks of computers or, more likely, they would simply buy porno in print.

Printed pornography is, by the way, another thing that the prudes of the world have tried to ban from free trade, and they have failed. Freedom of expression is freedom of expression, and if it can't be shown to do harm, it can't rightfully be stopped.

Those who are against pornography - usually monotheistic religious people who are self-centered enough to feel justified in imposing their personal preferences on the disinterested - have tried to draw causative lines between pornorgraphy and the degredation of society, much as they've tried to draw similar lines between homosexuality and the end of culture as we know it.

It seem the religious just can't stand the thought of someone else having

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