"The Knights Of The Wee Bairns"


What's the real motivation to "protect the children?"
Not surprisingly, the sex blog ErosBlog (obviously NSFW) has some fascinating things to say about "protecting the children."

What they mean by this is that if we allow adults full liberty to enjoy certain things like erotic materials, then Poor Innocent Children will also get exposed to them, and that this will be some sort of Very Bad Thing. So maybe we need to restrict the liberty of adults, at least to the extent of building high walls (real or virtual) around the Very Bad (if Poor Innocent Children will see it) Thing.

Hmm. Sounds like the putative well-being of children provides a very handy pretext for action by those who are not so much concerned to protect the well-being of children, as to extinguish the liberty of adults. And I don’t doubt that it is used exactly as such a pretext, much of the time. But let’s grant that those who would defend children — the Knights of the Wee Bairns, shall we call them? — are, in this instance, acting in good faith. Is there a harm here that merits our attention? Is Professor Landsburg’s daughter in some terrible danger from the Internet?

The Knights of the Wee Bairns, at the very least, want paywalls and adult filtering around “bad” content; some of the more maximalist among them want this content to disappear entirely, of course, and not just from the Internet.

People who fret about the danger that Internet porn supposedly represents to children most likely fear that free access to it will endanger their own ability to transmit their values and worldview to their children. This possibility is the “harm” that they fear. Perhaps their fears aren’t entirely unfounded. Maybe something children see on the Internet will affect their values or worldview in ways their parents won’t like. Too bad. In a free society, children are not robots to be programmed by their parents. You’re not entitled to demand that anyone else build a wall around anything just because of the worldview you want to transmit to your children.

For once you should read the rest of it for the article.

I'll freely admit my bias here. I do not believe that children should be shielded from sex. I do think that children should be shielded from sexual predators.

If you start shielding kids from sex today, what ideas and freedoms will you deny them tomorrow?

I also believe that in our attempts to shield kids from sex, we've gone too far overboard in labeling people sex offenders for very little reason. And we've made sex offenders today's outcasts, which in most cases they do not deserve.

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - February 23, 2009 at 01:06 PM  Tag


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