Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Redefining Child Pornography

More hysteria over images of nude children in art. Betsy Schneider, a tenured professor at ASU's School of Art in Tempe, is creating controversy by displaying nude photos of her children at a local art gallery.
"Putting your child's naked pictures up for the world to see, for any sex predator to see, is not art," said Mesa's Debra Ward. The Ward family drove to the exhibit from Mesa in order to protest what Debra called child pornography.

Her family made signs and stood proudly on a street corner..."We have received several complaints," said Barnett Lotstein, Special Assistant County Attorney.
Lotstein called the images disturbing.

He said determining whether it is child pornography takes into account a series of things such as whether the children were posed, or if their private parts were showing and to what extent.

He also pondered what the affect may be on Schneider's children.
So where does this end? If we, as a society, are to begin categorizing all nude images of children as being pornographic, then we are criminalizing every parent who ever took a nude photo of their child in the bath, or on the bearskin rug. Where does it end? Do we force little toddler girls to cover their nipples at the beach? Do we make it a crime for a parent to change a child's diaper or swimsuit in public? This irrational and hysterical fear of predators is blinding people to even the most innocent and natural instances of nudity.

Children are natural nudists. Given the opportunity, they will strip off their clothes and run free. It's the adults who are trying to take away this innocence and sexualize even the youngest of children. To me the real pornification of children comes in the form of these twisted little beauty pageants, where girls are painted up to look like little whores, and taught to wiggle and flirt on stage like strippers. It's apparently OK to sex them up and display them as objects, but it's not OK to show them as God designed them. Something's terribly wrong here.

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