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Politics : Right Wing Extremist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Father Terrence who wrote (13635)	8/3/2001 11:11:04 AM
From: DMaA	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 59480

Some background info on the Diary guy: A Columbus Dispatch report has new details on the case of Brian Dalton, sentenced to seven years in prison for "pandering obscenity" over a private diary of his depraved fantasies. It turns out his parents turned him in after finding the diary. "Michael and Sarah Dalton wanted his parole revoked for a year or two, long enough for him to receive intensive sex-offender treatment in prison," the paper reports. "They didn't expect he'd be charged with a new crime." It also turns out that prosecutors are threatening to charge Dalton in connection with another writing, which cops found in 1998 when he was convicted for possession of child pornography. "When first questioned by police about the 1998 writing--a description of a rape--Dalton said it was fantasy. He later told police that although he did not rape the girl, his 10-year-old cousin, he had improperly touched her more than once, his parents said." We tend to agree with Dalton's parents that their son needs psychiatric help. And if he's committed other crimes, by all means lock him up. But even dangerous perverts have rights--and the right not to be prosecuted for a thought crime is surely one of them. Not everyone agrees. Contrarian conservative columnist Ann Coulter proclaims herself "officially The Only Person in America" who thinks Dalton belongs in prison for the diary. She offers a heads-I-win-tails-you-lose argument that the diary isn't constitutionally protected precisely because it is private: If Dalton's journal was intended solely for his own individual pleasure, it's not apparent why it should have any greater constitutional significance than a blow-up doll. The whole point of the First Amendment is communication--expressive content, the marketplace of ideas, the government cannot distinguish truth from falsity, blah, blah, blah. It may seem intuitively correct that you have a right to talk to yourself, but it also seems intuitively correct that you have a right to artichokes. Unless the Constitution protects it, states can ban it. Dalton was either pandering child pornography or he was talking to himself--which isn't obviously protected by the Constitution. We'll leave it to our readers to judge the soundness of Coulter's argument. On one point, though, she is demonstrably wrong: She is not the only person in America to support Dalton's prosecution. She has a comrade-in-arms in liberal journalist Jake Tapper, who had this to say on CNN's dreadful "Take 5" chat show: I don't understand is why we are even talking about this. Who cares? . . . Get the guy off the street. He is a child pornographer, he was in prison for a couple months. The Ohio law says that child pornography materials, not images, as it is in other states, materials which this certainly includes can put somebody in prison. . . . If the people of Ohio want the law to be any materials that have to do with child pornography, and that includes this sicko's demented diary thoughts which details in explicit detail the rape and molestation of . . . He doesn't finish the thought (at least in the transcript), but there's no doubt where he's going. The Supreme Court's precedents, however, do not appear to be on Coulter and Tapper's side. In the 1969 case of Stanley v. Georgia, the court held that the First Amendment does protect the mere possession--as opposed to distribution--of obscene material. (And as our Tunku Varadarajan notes, Dalton's conviction was on obscenity, not child-pornography, charges.) Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote for the court: If the First Amendment means anything, it means that a State has no business telling a man, sitting alone in his own house, what books he may read or what films he may watch. Our whole constitutional heritage rebels at the thought of giving government the power to control men's minds. From Thurgood Marshall to Jake Tapper: What an eloquent encapsulation of American liberalism's decline.