Bob Herbert: The Thought Police

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>New York Times
>
>JUL 19, 2001
>
>The Thought Police
>
>By BOB HERBERT
>
>The 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

As far as I know, there has not been any political response to the 
Brian Dalton case by left-wingers aside from the A.C.L.U.  Moral 
panics concerning children & sexuality, especially those about "child 
pornography," are the hardest wedge to fight against on the civil 
liberties front.

Yoshie