Bob Herbert: The Thought Police

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Thu Jul 19 03:41:18 PDT 2001


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



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