John McCain Can Kiss My Ass
December 18th, 2006
Oh, humanity, pity out poor beleaguered children! The Internet is nothing but one gigantic seething pit of sex-offenders, child molesters, and NAMBLA phishing sites just lying in wait for some poor, poor little tyke to log on so they may all pounce and RAPE AWAY! How can we possibly sanitize the Internet to make it a safe and wholesome place for our kids?
John McCain has an idea how to do it. Recently, he floated a bill before Congress that would–get this, folks–make blogs just like this hyar PEGRITZ(.com)! circus equivalent to ISPs and hold them responsible for all activity in their comments sections and user profiles! Think Progress, one of my alltime favorite progressive-though websites, has a nifty little breakdown of Herr McCain’s lovely little piece of patriarchal bullshit. Under the law, should it be passed:
– Commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.”
– Internet service providers (ISPs) are already required to issue such reports, but under McCain’s legislation, bloggers with comment sections may face “even stiffer penalties” than ISPs.
— Social networking sites will be forced to take “effective measures” — such as deleting user profiles — to remove any website that is “associated” with a sex offender. Sites may include not only Facebook and MySpace, but also Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists, and blogs like DailyKos, which allows users to sign up for personal diaries.
PEGRITZ(.com)! is, primarily, a personal blog–my personal blog–but I do welcome comments to any and all entries, and anyone on earth is free to leave said comments. Sooooo…let’s say one of the people registered on my site were a–dun-dun-DUNNNN!–wicked, disgusting, thoroughly evil sex offender. If that person posted in a comment a picture of a naked five-year-old being “bathed” in a thoroughly inappropriate manner, I would be legally obligated to report that person to The Government or face fines that would put me and my descendants in hock trying to pay ‘em off. Would I immediately delete such a comment and ban that person from ever posting on my blog again? You’d better damn well believe I would! Hell, I’d probably report the jackass to the Feds on principle! But Herr McCain doesn’t trust me, a responsible citizen, to report such egregious behavior on my own, so legislation must be introduced requiring me to do so under threat of crushing fines.
But, quite frankly, I’m not too worried about that eventuality coming to pass. What particularly bothers me about this legislation is Item 3 above: the responsibility it places on social-networking sites to police their boundaries for the dreaded scourge of the Internet sex offender. It is basically stating that, under Federal law, anyone registered as a sex offender would be barred from taking part in almost any form of social interaction on the Internet–including being banned from creating a user profile on a commerce site like Amazon.com.
Do I think that sex offenders’ activities shouldn’t be monitored? Of course not. But first of all, what indeed is a sex offender? Obviously, someone with a history of sexual crimes–particularly against children–matches the definition. But so does the sixteen-year-old boy convicted of statutory rape because he had 100% consensual sex with his sixteen-year-old girlfriend, whose parents found out that Daddy’s Little Girl was more than old enough to give up skins on her own accord and decided to prosecute the boy who made off with her virginity. At present, the definition of “sex offender” is far too broad and far too legally unstable in the United States to require individual websites to accept responsibility for policing themselves based on it.
And, more importantly, why require it in the first place? Republicans constantly rattle on about the evils of Big Government and the fundamental rights of American citizens to go about their lives with as little interference from Washington or state governments as possible…yet they are always the first to push such “Big Daddy” legislation that tacitly declares American citizens unable to properly monitor themselves. Oh, in many cases, American citizens can’t be trusted to govern themselves: if they were allowed to do so, in many parts of the country gay citizens would be hounded like Jews in Nazi Germany and African-Americans would probably still be suffering under Jim Crow laws. However, the aim of federal social legislation should be to protect the liberties of ALL its citizens from the prejudices and idiocy of certain others, not to restrict or otherwise oversee liberties–and such laws as McCain’s ludicrous blogosphere regulations do just that.
People…it’s simple: if you want to protect your children on the Internet, you as parents and individual citizens have to keep an eye on what your kids are doing. Of course, that won’t always work, especially if you have older kids who can easily hide their activities from you. But rather than expecting the government to do your job of providing your children with the necessary knowledge to protect themselves, why don’t you step to the plate and actually do it yourselves? Then the Senator McCain’s of the nation wouldn’t have any reason to trouble our nation with these kind of overbearing laws.
Add New Comment
Thanks. Your comment is awaiting approval by a moderator.
Do you already have an account? Log in and claim this comment.
Add New Comment