Avedon – there’s a fine line between “worry” and “run around in a blind panic”. Informed worrying is, IMO, a good and useful thing, inasmuch as it can be channeled into changing things.

Nick – the law is intended to cover Scotland too, yes. And if the only thing you do is to link people to Backlash, that’s a fine way to show your support, too.

LondonDave – Cheers. :) Glad to entertain.

Informed, well considered and compassionate reactions to the proposed legislation are hard to come by.

Thinker first, writer second and spanking model third?

LondonDave

oh well. i’ll just inform people of the situation. and they’ll helpwork something out.

im not even sure if this will occur in scotland too? anyone have any idea?

i think thats my whole collection under threat pretty much. fuck. why cant they bloody well stop these conflicts in the middle east instead of fucking with our home/personal lives.

right!

*in important voice that means action*

“To the anti law site!!!!!”

I look at legislation like this and I remember that the child porn laws have been misused to silence political critics of certain powerful corporations. People have had their homes raided and perfectly legal material seized because some cop managed to reinterpret the content as “child porn”. And they’ve been prosecuted for it.

Just imagine how many R-rated videos could suddenly be seen as “pornography” under laws like this. And even if a jury disagrees in the end, that’ll be after the victims’ lives have been destroyed.

I don’t think it’s foolish to worry about the effect of laws like this. What I do think is foolish is to treat it all like it’s a done deal now when there is still a possibility of preventing this legislation from being passed.

My reading of Adele’s original entry was basically “don’t panic,” but I think that’s a good thing. IMO, not panicing is itself a positive reaction in this climate. The reason I think that is that legislation like that passed in the UK and some interpritations of US laws on pornography can cause what I think of as a panic and purge reaction in some people, a self censorship that’s (for me anyway) far worse because of being so insidious than anything that the government might actually be doing.

I’ve got a rather lengthy example of that relative to child spanking stories / discussion which came up when my husband decided to take on the hosting of the usenet group soc.sexuality.spanking at the same time a number of people expressed concerns about group content being read as kiddie porn by the UK and US authorities. In reaction to that, there was originally a plan to ban a genre of child spanking stories from the group’s annual writing contest. This is not because of anything that had happened in the US, just the potential that it could.

In the end, it didn’t happen, the story contest continued without any content limits (as it has for the last 12 years). But what I realized was that choosing to censor ourselves not because we thing we’re doing anything wrong but because of how the government *might* react is a frightening example of self-imposed fascism.

The campaign has made *some* difference, though, if you compare the initial proposal and its ridiculous GBH test with the climbdown that’s the current list of offences. Now we only have to convince the government to scrap the whole thing altogether.