> Leave Children Out of the Decency Debate
>
> By Jonathan Weber
>
> When the U.S. Supreme Court last week struck down the Internet
> censorship law known as the Communications Decency Act, it closed one
> chapter and opened another in the highly charged national drama that
> could be entitled " How to Save the Children."
>
> This story now weaves its way through a wide variety of social and
> political debates. Whether the discussion involves indecency on the
> Internet, or sex and violence in music and television, or the
> condition of the social safety net, or the propriety of cigarette
> advertising, or the war on drugs, or the technological threat to
> privacy, one sideor bothoften relies heavily on the assertion that
> the policy it's advocating is in the best interests of children.
>
> In theory, that' s a good thing. Who could argue against putting the
> young and vulnerable, the bearers of our hopes and dreams, at the
> center of our social agenda?
>
>
> In practice, though, children have become a proxy, a battering ram
> even for advancing political agendas that involve them only
> incidentally. Broadly speaking, the things that people think are
> good for children are the same things they think are good for
> themselves, and for others. And not admitting as much is dishonest,
> destructive to the political process and damaging to the children
> themselves.
>
> Let's start with the Communications Decency Act. The law is ostensibly
> aimed at making the Internet safe for children, but in doing so it
> imposed a set of freespeech restrictions so broad that the Supreme
> Court all but laughed it out of the courtroom.
>
> Leading the charge on the CDA was the Family Research Council and
> other conservative religious lobbies. They say they want to protect
> children. But these groups are morally opposed to pornography and sex
> chatand to homosexuality, abortion, subversive politics, illegal
> drugs and many other things that are commonly discussed on the
> Internet. They find major strains of contemporary American culture
> repugnant, and want to suppress them in any way they can. Kids
> are a convenient excuse.
>
> The same thing applies on the other end of the political spectrum. The
> Center for Media Education, for example, has been sounding the alarm
> over Internet marketing practices that manipulate children and violate
> their privacy. But the liberal advocacy group, at heart, is opposed
> not only to aggressive, intrusive marketing aimed at children, but to
> aggressive, intrusive marketing in general.
>
> It's hard to think of a political issue ostensibly involving kids
> where this principle does not apply. Does former Education Secretary
> William Bennett think violent, obscenitylaced rap music is just fine
> for anyone over 16? Or over 18? Or over 21? Would the welfare reform
> opponents who point to the damage done to children really support
> throwing all the moms and dads and single people off the rolls, if
> kids were somehow protected?
>
> This is not to say that there aren't plenty of real issues involving
> children. Many parents with no political ax to grind have legitimate
> concerns about what their kids might be doing in cyberspace.
>
> But by using child protection as an offensive weapon in a wider
> cultural war, the selfappointed defenders of youth do damage to the
> very group they're allegedly protecting. The proponents of the CDA
> knew from the start that their law was unlikely to survive a
> constitutional challenge; they didn't even bother to hold hearings.
> The whole effort was transparently aimed at winning votes from
> cultural conservatives, rather than addressing the issue of kids on
> the Net.
>
> One result of this is that development of products and services that
> might actually help solve the problemratings systems, filtering
> software, and familyoriented Internet service providers, for
> startershas been slow, because the legal and legislative climate has
> been so uncertain.
>
> Worse, the arrogant overreaching of the proCDA forces has engendered
> an enormous amount of suspicion among Netizens, many of whom now
> oppose ratings and filters and other possible childprotection tools
> as the thin edge of a censorship wedge. Help for the parents and
> children caught in the middle is more distant away than ever.
>
> It's been obvious for some time that there are in this country
> radically opposing visions of what the Internet can and should be.
> Some see a medium cleansed of speech that they consider immoral, but
> open to any and all forms of commercial exploitation. Others see a
> radically democratic forum that by its nature challenges the status
> quo, and must not be compromised in any way by government regulators
> and marketers run amok.
>
> So fine, let's fight it out. The cultural conservatives probably have
> public opinion on their sidefree speech in practice isn't nearly as
> popular as it is in principlebut the freespeech advocates have both
> constitutional protections and the inherent difficulties of regulating
> a global medium working in their favor. It really is a battle over the
> kind of society we want to have. The stakes are high. But we should
> leave the kids out of it.
>