Re: The Child Molester Prevention and Effective Sentencing Act

[Glenn Hauman <hauman@bb.com>]

At 6:30 PM -0400 9/26/97, Declan McCullagh wrote:
>The problem with all the current bills like original SAFE and ProCODE is
>that they're too wimpy, abstract, arcane. Who cares about protecting
>business? Nobody, at least not when you'll be dubbed soft on crime. So
>what's the one thing everyone cares about and wants to protect?
>
>Yes, that's right: CHILDREN!!!! I think someone should introduce a bill
>called "The Child Molester Prevention and Effective Sentencing Act of
>1997."

I've been looking for an excuse to post this, and if someone can find me
the original article I'd be grateful:

Christopher Caldwell in the New York Press quotes an article on child porn
that appeared in the Times Literary Supplement by American University
professor Kenneth Anderson:

"The fears of the religious are real.... Still, it rarely occurs to
conservative religionists in America that in sacralizing children they have
thereby secularized their God. In order to play with power in the public
sphere, the religious Right has raised children higher than God, precisely
because in knows that children are a God for the secular and so can be
invoked in public in a way that God Himself cannot.

"But this relationship depends on the secular Left-liberals cooperating, by
also making children a transcendental category. That they have done so has
less to do with the welfare of children than with a restless search by
these elites for a source of moral legitimacy to shore up their managerial
foundations."


Best-- Glenn Hauman, BiblioBytes
       http://www.bb.com/