A big government lie re: stopping child porn

Our idiot legislators have paswed some extremely restrictive and most likely unconstitutional restrictions on adult webmasters, of which I am one.

Very stringent records-keeping duties, publishing the identity of the person who puts an adult site up and the identity of the photographer/videographer is all packed into a law called a "Child Protection Act," and our legislators who voted for it can now go back to their districts and brag that they are tough on child pornography.

Well, let me tell you something: Aside from the very rare case of a model foisting extremely good false ID on a webmasters, most of us don't want to shoot underage girls, and we take pains to avoid doing so.

Real kiddie pornsters operate in a quasi-secret subculture. True, you can bump into underage models on the Internet, but most of those sites come from what we used to call the Eastern Bloc countries, mainly the new countries that used to comprise the USSR. They are beyond the reach of the FBI and The Justice Department, so this law does absolutely nothing to close those sites down.

Instead, this law is a sneaky way of pressing forward with an anti-porn campaign championed by the Religious Right all done under a cloak of protecting the children from child pornographers.

Not only are the documentation requirements this law requires complicated and difficult to understand, but if convicted of not meeting the provisions perfectly as interpreted by the Justice Department, an adult webmaster could face 5 years in a Federal prison.

Apparently, our Federal government thinks we don't have enough people in prison yet and as usual, the Religious Right and the Republican's solution to everything is to throw more people in jail.

Let's hope the courts have more sense than our Federal legislators and that the voters have more sense the next time we have a Presidential election.