New York Times
JUL 19, 2001
The Thought Police
By BOB HERBERT
T he thought police have arrived. An Ohio man has been sentenced to
seven years in prison for thinking bad thoughts about children and
writing them down in his private journal. In Ohio, that's against the
law.
It didn't matter that the man never wanted anyone else to see the
journal, or that the children he fantasized about were entirely
fictional. What mattered to authorities in Ohio -- the only thing that
mattered -- was that the thoughts were vile. The fantasies written
down by Brian Dalton, who is 22 years old, involved the sexual abuse
and torture of children.
Mr. Dalton made up names for the children and said they were 10 and 11
years old.
This should not be an issue in the United States of America. This is a
country in which you ought to be able to write down in private
whatever you are thinking, no matter how awful the thoughts. This is
not China, or Afghanistan under the Taliban. This is a country in
which freedom is supposed to matter.
Mr. Dalton, a resident of Columbus, was charged under a state law that
prohibits the creation of obscene material involving minors. Such a
law sounds reasonable. But the local prosecutor believed (along with
others) that the statute covered not only images of real children, but
printed or written words involving fictional children. And not only
words involving fictional children, but words that were never intended
to be shown to anyone. This is as close as it's possible to get --
short of ESP -- to criminalizing thought.
Mr. Dalton had been convicted in a child pornography case in 1998. He
served a few months in jail and then was released on probation. His
probation officer discovered the journal some months ago during a
routine search of Mr. Dalton's home.
There was no question that the journal entries were grotesquely
pornographic. The prosecutor put the matter before a grand jury, which
returned a two-count felony indictment against Mr. Dalton. He pleaded
guilty to one count and was sentenced to seven years in prison. And he
received an additional 18 months for violating probation.
So here we have a fellow sentenced to prison in the United States for
merely sitting down and putting his thoughts on paper.
"While the thoughts themselves may have been reprehensible and deeply
disturbing," said Raymond Vasvari, who heads the American Civil
Liberties Union of Ohio, "it needs to be stressed that they were
arrived at and recorded in the privacy of this man's home for no one's
consumption but his own."
Seven years in prison. In America.
The fundamental idea behind the criminalization of real child
pornography -- that is, images of real children engaged in sexual
activity -- is that the images themselves are the proof that some real
child was abused. A real child. Not an imagined child.
Ann Beeson, a lawyer with the national A.C.L.U., said she and other
First Amendment scholars believed that "the constitutional limit of
child pornography laws is in criminalizing the actual exploitation of
children, which is important."
But beyond that -- if only words are involved, or drawings, or images
created by a computer with no child involved -- "then you no longer
have the rationale to suppress it under the First Amendment," said Ms.
Beeson.
The A.C.L.U.'s president, Nadine Strossen, said she was outraged by
the idea that someone could be sent to prison for something he'd
written in a private journal. "I think this is completely protected
free speech," she said. "I'm just horrified by this case."
Ohio's laws regarding minors and sexual activity are not limited to
patently obscene material. The state prohibits the creation,
reproduction and dissemination of any material that depicts a minor
engaged in sexual activity. If you apply that to written materials, as
in the Dalton case, then books like Judy Blume's "Forever," Philip
Roth's "Portnoy's Complaint" and Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged
Bird Sings" would be banned, and their writers and publishers subject
to criminal penalties, presumably prison.
Sexual hysteria has given the thought police the opening they've
craved. Politicians, afraid of being accused of favoring child
pornography, will not stand up for that most fundamental of freedoms
-- freedom of thought.
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company